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I’m publishing these because I started out my fiction-writing journey on a game called Threshold. Here is a list of these milestones in chronological order. Your order may be different, but most of these should be familiar to you if you started out on text-based games.
10. You joined a multi-player online role-playing game and instead of combating gelatinous cubes and giant scorpions, you spent your time reading room descriptions and crafting your own written prose to share with other players who were all combating gelatinous cubes and giant scorpions.
9. You wrote dramatic speeches for your cleric character and role-played him to the point of becoming chosen by the Gods and then created conflict that pissed off the Gods and got your character thrown out of the Church of Azeroth.
8. You had mud sex on text-based role-playing games to establish a fan base of your writing.
7. You applied for a virtual job on a text-based role-playing game as a writer for the virtual local paper, which paid you a virtual salary for the real life articles and stories you submitted.
6. You saved all the stories you ever wrote for your text-base role-playing game, even the shitty ones.
5. You saved all your logs from a text-based role-playing game because you thought that one day you might want to write a novel about your character and the dialogue would come in handy when you cut and paste it into your word processor, thereby saving you the re-typing.
4. You learned how to create websites so that you would have a home for all the characters that you developed on a text-based role-playing game.
3. You offered to design websites for free to build a portfolio of designs with "designed by Your Name" and "All rights reserved - Copyright 2011" displayed at the bottom of each page, just like you envision will be in the first few pages of your published novel.
2. You built a blog to self-publish your articles and used Twitter, Facebook and other social media to broadcast links to your blog (shameless plugs) which will one day host an entry for your upcoming novel...or other works in progress that will be coming out once you have finished mass marketing and making a name for yourself.
And the most important milestone in your journey from gamer to fiction writer (the last one that needs to happen for me)....
1. You finished writing that novel you had been working on!
