It’s my Rez Day today, the birthday of my avatar and 4 years since I created Janey Bracken in Second Life.  I can only say that the 4 years has flown by.  It’s been quite an adventure and one that I would never have dreamed of when choosing my character and landing in SL’s Help Island that first day.    I think most people who join SL remember being a newbie.  My first thoughts at the time were how worried I felt about talking to other people, suddenly I was confronted with strangers from all over the world and it seemed like they all knew how the virtual world worked.  It was a bit like walking up an icy road when you think you are going to fall over and everyone else seems to be getting along without any trouble.  Four years ago I didn’t meet any SL greeters, no friendly avatars to give me hints and tips and after leaving Help Island (where I learned such things as how to fly and pick up a torch!), I was teleported to a barren piece of virtual land where some hostile people were battling against some good guys. The hostile people thought it was fun to grief people, especially newbies.  Of course I got picked on, the griefers orbited me into virtual space time and time again and I remember being upset that these people could be so nasty.  Then I learned somewhere that if I sat on the ground I couldn’t be ejected.  So there I sat for as long as it took to show these griefers that they couldn’t get the better of me.  It was then that I started to talk to the good guys who welcomed me into their camp and my proper lessons about SL began.

I’d always been an observer more than a talker, although that has altered since being in SL, and at first I quietly joined the others, regularly meeting them at my first home, the barren piece of land I had first arrived at, a place called Murray.  Of course there were always battles with the griefers who tried to claim Murray as their own and the battles were fun to witness as the pranksters would flood the area with large objects or run scripts to try to cage or eject people.  The others taught me what to do in these situations and it was funny as well as being annoying at the time.

I hadn’t really been a writer before I joined SL, although I had prided myself on my writing skills in my real life job doing reports and similar stuff.  I’d been more of an artist however, portraits and landscapes being my favourite thing, animal pictures too.  I’ve been using computer graphics over the last few years and gradually I preferred this to oils, watercolours and gouache.  I’d loved to roam the National, Portrait, and Tate Galleries in London, particularly looking at my favourite Pre-Raphaelite paintings by the Victorian brotherhood, a group of artists who truly portrayed the romantic side of art. So art, rather than writing had been a major part of my life.  SL was to change all this, and with writing I gained the confidence to talk to everyone, both in SL and in real life, building the ability to tackle any subject, no matter how controversial.  It also fed my curiosity about how other people live all over the world, as I explored SL meeting people from many distant lands.  Basically I found that we are all the same, we all laugh, we all cry, get upset and angry and have very similar problems just coping with everyday real life.

Friend Headburro Antfarm already had a blog about SL and he talked me into starting one too, this was to be my first publication known as ‘Janey’s Place in Second Life’.  Confronted with a blank blog page, I wrote some nonsense about my first virtual house, but I was suddenly smitten with writing, and my little ‘Janey’ blog has quite a following today and I’m very grateful to people who read it and share it with me.  I had wandered around SL and after my first Christmas there I wrote about a wonderful sim owned by Wheemzel DeCuir and her husband.  Wheemzel is lovely and became a good friend.  She later told me about CNN and the fact that they wanted people to report on Second Life.  I attended the CNN meeting in SL in 2008 and it all began, the excitement of talking to real life reporters and producers.  It was there that I met Hibiscus Hastings, already an experienced and brilliant writer, we too were to become good friends.  My group of friends grew, I met Drax Ember whilst exploring the Gorean SL sims, I value Drax’s opinion about what I write and I value his friendship too, he is from America and Hibiscus is from Canada, we compared our lifestyles and still do, it’s fascinating, we are so different in some ways, but so much the same in most things.  Friend and writer Boye Jervil is in Australia so our time zones stretch to the limit, but somehow we all meet and exchange news of how our day is going.  Fellow writers and friends Ed Follet and Pixi Piers, plus my other UK friends are easier to keep track of, being in the same time zone.  Friends in Europe, like dear Eliza Janus in Poland are very close to the UK time frame, making contact that much easier.  But SL is a twenty-four hour experience, you can log on at any time and find someone to talk to and it’s nice that people need never be lonely in real life, as long as they have virtual contact with their friends.

After a few months in SL, I won a prize in an SL competition, a week in a London apartment.  I was very excited over this, coming from London in real life, I liked the idea of staying in an SL version of the capital.  The apartment was in Debs Regent’s Virtual London and I loved it.  By coincidence a real life reporter working for the Daily Mail had links to Virtual London and there was even a copy of the Daily Mail Offices in virtual Kensington .  Nikk Huet (his avatar name) advertised for reporters to write about Virtual London and I applied.  This was my first paying job, Nikk made me Assistant Editor of the London news blog ‘Virtually London (lite)’ and then I became Editor, writing about everything and everyone in the social and business community of Virtual London.  Nikk later handed the blog over to me and today I own it.  Virtually London (lite) has a world-wide audience and I now cover other London related sims as well, including New London, Little London, the HangOut Club, The New West End Club and Whitechapel 1888.  We have a spin off blog called ‘Our Virtual Trilogy’ as well, which covers all the other sims un-related to London.  So I spend a great deal of time writing and taking photographs whilst logged into SL.

I’ve really enjoyed writing for CNN and pick what I think are special stories and people for these articles.  I find it very interesting the way people use SL to enhance what they are doing in real life, be it for business, education or just for fun.  Someone I met a while ago told me that Janey Bracken has quite a presence on the internet, and I suppose I have, as my avatar does get noticed on my SL travels and my articles seem to be used in all sorts of internet web pages including some university sites and other internet based media platforms.  On the flip side though, a little SL fame has taught me that fame in real life may not be all that it’s cracked up to be.

And why did I write this today? It’s a little self-indulgent, I felt like it, and after all it’s my 4th SL birthday (Rez Day!) today.  I write this with thanks and love to all my brilliant SL friends from all around the world who have become a big part of my real life.  I hope our friendships will go on for many years to come!

http://janeysplace.wordpress.com/

http://sllondon.blogspot.com/

http://ourvirtualtrilogy.blogspot.com/