The Lightforce Rebellion is now available on Amazon’s Kindle store! If you like young adult action/adventure, take a look at it, download the sample, and if you like what you see, please buy it. Once you’ve read the story, please also leave a review. Reviews help convince others to purchase the story.

Here’s the blurb:

I’m a little depressed tonight. The two Kansas-style thunderstorms we had tonight perked me up a bit, though. But I’m still a little down. That’s because I was not able to get permission from one of my friends who helped create the SW City universe to use that universe in my novel. You see, a bunch of my friends and I created it collaboratively over the last decade, and so to use it commercially in anything requires I get a license from each one of them by having them sign a contract granting that license. Everyone but one friend agreed to do so. And I needed everyone to agree.

It came down to two reasons. The first is that he doesn’t feel comfortable with signing any contracts whatsoever. The second is the primary motivation, that he considered it a very personal collaboration between us all and he thought any adaptation of the universe would require similar collaboration or it would spoil in his mind what he considered to be the “SW City”-ness of the result.

Obviously collaboration between seven or eight people is not something reasonably accomplished in writing novels.

I’m… well I still don’t know what to say, except that, Tee Morris, if you’re reading this, man, I so totally can relate to you right now.

Oh yes, you read right. I’m going to kick this thing off. I’ve been seeing the amazing metamorphosis that self-publishing has been going through and I want a piece of the action. Therefore, I’m going to challenge myself to outline, write, revise, and publish a novel, all by Christmas 2011. Quite doable if I’m a professional. But I’m not yet. I will be, and the overarching goal is to become one. What better way to become one than to act like one?

This is going to be quite an amazing journey the goals I want to accomplish are these:

I am oddly introspective as I write this tonight. The Active Worlds community is in something of a state of flux right now. Its discussion forum is being plagued by a troll called ‘Freedomf’. If you’ve ever read the comments of a certain user by the name of syntaxgs on Digg, think of Freedomf as a malicious version of syntaxgs and you’ll have a fair approximation of the kind of uproar she causes on a monthly (and sometimes daily) basis.

Tom the moderator (who is also the primary moderator for the virtual reality of Active Worlds itself as well as the forum) does not believe that she is a troll, or at least shouldn’t be banned, because she doesn’t exhibit some of the more usual trollish behavior like calling users names, spamming threads, and so on. Rather, she deliberately incites other users to react to her feigned idiocy by starting threads about “Lynsie Lowhand” and other similar caricaturizations of peoples’ names and activities. This is a point of disagreement that has sharply divided a lot of the movers and shakers in Active Worlds into two camps; those who want her banned for the sake of peace and quiet and those who think she should just be ignored and allowed to look mean and petty.

I’m as surprised as you are. The video is my exploration demo for the Active Worlds 3D chat and building software. Comit had to talk me into making this video. I didn’t want to do it, as you can probably surmise from the production values. But somebody named Ariane in the Second Life community embedded it on their site and the silly thing took off like a rocket. The technology has improved somewhat than what is seen here, but overall it’s an accurate picture. I’ll embed it below the fold.