One of my favorite writers is Joe Straczynski; aside from having worked in virtually every entertainment medium known to mankind, he tried something which I've not seen before or since: a constant dialogue with fans of one of his shows, Babylon 5, during its production run. Further, since B5 was conceived as a five-act novel for television -- with a beginning, middle and end, all outlined and set before production began -- it was fascinating to be able to have a dialogue with the show's creator (who also wrote the majority of the show's episodes, including 65 out of 66 episodes of the last three seasons) and learn about the art of crafting such a story.

At the time, I was a teenager, and the internet was a much smaller place back then. I'm fortunate enough to have had a fun, ongoing dialogue with James Luceno (today largely known for his Star Wars novelizations) about his Robotech novels -- to the point where I had one of them autographed and was (indirectly) mentioned in the dedication to another -- because there just weren't that many people online back then, and you could just e-mail someone like that and get a response. As someone who was struggling to learn how to become a writer myself, these were fantastic learning opportunities.

As the internet population grew, however, that door began to close. Even back then, there were internet trolls, whose rudeness was that much more incongruous with the level of proper behavior we all expected of one another. I just couldn't understand why anyone would want to publicly attack Straczynski -- for no logical reason -- when he was deliberately making a point of being accessible to his audience and answering their questions. Particularly now that I'm somewhat in his shoes (albeit on a vastly smaller scale), it really amazes me how patient he was. The Sony forum has a small but dedicated handful of people who froth at the mouth looking for any opportunity to troll me because of what I've tried to set up for others with HSM, and while I've learned to bend their wholly predictable tactics to my advantage (thanks for the extra audience numbers, boys!), it can still be a time-consuming experience.

Nevertheless, he put himself out there on the firing line, his works -- and his insights into his works, via internet Q&A sessions -- serving as a phenomenal learning tool for any who wished to better themselves as fellow storytellers, or just as students of humanity. It is largely because of Joe that I learned the cardinal rule of storytelling: "Plots almost don't matter, effects don't matter, wardrobe doesn't matter, technology doesn't matter. What matters is what William Faulkner called 'The human heart in conflict with itself.'"

It's a rule I've applied to HomeStation's brand of journalism, and through our success I've hoped to see proliferate via imitation elsewhere: stop writing about the subject being reviewed, and write more about your reaction to it. That's what people want to read.

With fiction, however, different tools need to be pulled out of the toolbox. Structuring a story is very different than structuring an article. And since, to my knowledge, only one other person has tried their hand at a Home novelette (HSM's ted2112, with Nova) I figured I'd try my hand at doing the same thing The Lurker's Guide to Babylon 5 did for me: provide insight into the work that went into the work.

Before we begin: despite holding an English degree with a specialization in creative writing, I make no claim to being a particularly good fiction writer. If you've read Death After Life and thought it was a poor story, or lacking in some way, I completely respect that. I've spent the last ten years heavily involved in resort development, which means that nearly all of my writing has revolved around budget analysis reports and marketing outreach communique -- so diving back into tools I haven't used since the turn of the millennium is a bit of an interesting gear change.

The aforementioned froth-mouth trolls will likely view this post as an exercise in self-indulgence. I can't change their mind, nor am I inclined to try. I can only say that my motive for writing this is to provide insights into how I created this story, on the theory that it might help someone reading this to create something far better. With any story, your audience should follow a bell-shaped curve: some people at the far end will understand all of it before they're done reading, some at the other end will be left scratching their heads until the very end, and most will pick up on the majority of it as they read along. So if I can help others to grow and improve their own literary voices, then perhaps I've done some good.

So let's go.

What is Death After Life about?

The premise is that our avatars are alive, and inhabit a mirror-image Home when we're not using them. They fall "asleep" and disappear into "our" Home when we as their creators log into our Home accounts and use them. But what happens if they start to realize their world is false? If Home is the only universe you've ever known, how do you wrap your head around concepts such as death, entropy, disease, and so forth? And if you discovered proof your world was false, what would you choose to do about it? Do you pretend it doesn't exist, or risk daring to discover more?

Why does this story appeal to you? Why did you have to write it?

I'm a Twilight Zone fan. So when we were preparing our Halloween issue for HSM, I started thinking about Home-related concepts which would frighten or unnerve me. What occurred to me is that Home, as a reality, is a paradise compared to our own world; our avatars never age, never die, never have to worry about any of the myriad problems we struggle with every day. For many people -- especially those who are significantly damaged in some way, either physical, emotional or mental -- Home is a second lease on life. But if you were forced to live in that world, would you actually be happy? Or is it the perfect prison?

The story appeals to me on a personal level because I live in what our world would refer to as paradise -- the island of Kauai -- and yet there is a price tag that goes with this. My heart belongs to a woman who lives, geographically, at the exact opposite end of the United States. There are other drawbacks as well, professionally as well as personally, but that's all I'll say on the matter for now.

Since it is only stretched souls that make music, I figured I might do something with that inner turmoil.

The other reason why this story appealed to me is because drama is best summed up as chasing your character up a tree and throwing rocks at him. The heart of any drama is what your character wants, how far he's willing to go to get it, and how far someone else is willing to go to stop him. But in Home, you can't die. You can't even be touched. So that means that the drama has to come from a different place -- and I like that sort of intellectual challenge.

A "your world is false" concept isn't exactly new.

So? There are only nine or ten basic story types. It's what you do with them that matters. Yes, there are numerous stories which came to mind while I was outlining and writing mine: Dark City, Inception, The Thirteenth Floor, Twilight Zone, The Animatrix, Serial Experiments Lain and Unimatrix Zero were all inspirations for this story, as well as Home itself. But those aforementioned stories, although sometimes dealing with similar themes, all do so in different ways. Frederick Pohl, Philip K. Dick, Harlan Ellison and plenty of other writers whose typewriters I'm not fit to touch have also messed around with this concept. The most overt source of inspiration is the one which is staring the audience right in the face: Welt am Draht, Rainer Fassbinder's film.

The characters seem to discover their world is false rather quickly.

Well, keep in mind that I've compressed the narrative down into novelette form. It still follows -- rather clearly -- the standard five-act arc of introduction, rising action, complication, climax and denouement. Were this a longer story -- a novella, or even a full-blown novel -- the story would have started out much earlier, with Weltamdraht making the initial discoveries over a slower timeframe, far more interaction amongst the other group members, and a nifty subplot involving Saillie and gender identity. Once I had the basic story outlined, it was a question of how much of it I wanted to flesh out, and the novelette format seemed to be the right length for delivering the meat of the story without compromising character development.

What are the differences between a novelette, a novella, a novel, etc.?

Word count. Short stories are anything under 7,500 words. Novelettes are 7,500 to 17,500 words, novellas are 17,500 to 40,000, and novels are anything above that. Death After Life clocks in, without the foreword, at a bit over ten-thousand words.

As a bit of trivia: to date, I've written 287 articles for HomeStation Magazine. HSM articles have a minimum word count of 900 words -- and mine tend to be, um...lengthier. Assuming an average word count of 2,000 words per article, and the average novel clocks in at around 80,000 words, that means I've written roughly seven novels about PlayStation Home in the last 730 days. And that's on top of all the administrative work that goes into keeping HomeStation running.

Considering that I live on an outer island in Hawaii, with beaches and scenery galore to enjoy, there is clearly something wrong with me...

You've said that some of the character names have overt symbology tied to them.

Absolutely. Granted, this tends to be abused in fanfic as a lazy form of shorthand, but I figured I had a bit more leeway since these were technically screen names to begin with. So many -- but not all -- of them have hidden meanings.

"Saillie," for instance, is the French word for "projection." Given that she revels in changing appearance, and is the one character at the end who overtly and completely rejects what the others discover, it seemed dramaturgically appropriate. There's a little bit of Susan Pevensie in her -- the only one of the four Pevensies who didn't make it to Aslan's country at the end of the Narnia universe, because she preferred all the pretty baubles of her own and rejected the world she'd explored as a child.

"Jeandarc" is, of course, a blatant reference to Joan of Arc. At the end of the story, she's gone off to explore all the various rips in the fabric of reality -- and there's a very interesting story involving what she does later with that knowledge (which parallels the story of the real Jeanne d'Arc), which is sitting around in my head and may end up being written at some point.

"Forlatt" is Bokmål for "forsaken." He's the outsider of the group, the one who feels the most abandoned by the loss of old friends such as Weltamdraht, who knows he doesn't fit in -- and even discovers things are wrong around him -- but can't figure out what the next step is, and it eventually drives him mad. If you're familiar with Alex Proyas' Dark City, Forlatt is my Eddie Walenski character: the man who's solved the puzzle but is powerless to escape it, and thus is driven to suicide. Of course, suicide isn't possible in Home, but since Forlatt ends up in the blue abyss, it's a form of suicide.

"Dr_Zeitgeist" is the intellectual of the story (if you're not familiar with the word "zeitgeist," please Google it now, as it will more or less explain the character). Zeit is loosely based on the concept of the Jal Shey, from the Star Wars expanded universe, who seek to understand the Force on an intellectual level rather than a spiritual one. Zeit tries to understand the universe of Home on a purely intellectual level, and it's interesting to see what theories he comes up with to explain the mysteries of Home, yet at the same time cannot -- like so many scientifically-bent minds -- allow himself to acknowledge anything truly metaphysical, because it cannot be quantified. There's a bit of a reference to Dante's Divine Comedy here, as the lowest circle of hell was populated by intellectuals, who were cursed to know the future, but nothing of the present. Thus, when the end of days finally arrived, all their intellectual prognostications would be moot, and their knowledge void.

"Preacher316" is therefore the antagonist of the story, who ultimately turns out to be right -- and in so doing consigns people to tremendous suffering, as religion sometimes does. The 316 reference is obvious -- John 3:16 -- and what I absolutely love is how it's been turned on its head in Home. If you were truly living within the universe of Home, you already have eternal life. And thus the truth that Preacher brings ends up asking people to turn away from eternal life and escape heaven in order to discover salvation, and the pleasures that only the gods enjoy (such as sex).

As for "CoalPhoenix" -- the name is emblematic of the character's story arc. He sheds all the things he held on to, thus rising from the ashes of his old life, but since he has nowhere to go, he's a phoenix made out of coal. Which, of course, fits with the rather Twilight Zone-ish ending: all you want to do is get out of paradise, and you can't. Your life doesn't matter, your actions don't matter, your creator doesn't know you exist, and there's nothing for you to do that matters worth a damn.

(As a trivia point, this is almost the screen name I chose for my own PSN account, only changing my mind at the very end.)

No symbology behind Jonas or Pats?

None. They're not as important to the story -- they exist more to flesh out the universe and make it feel more like a real place -- but they did provide me with a wonderful opportunity to sneak up on the audience and throw a little curveball at them towards the end.

The characters discover their universe is false via glitching! Is this an overt endorsement of glitching?

No. While I like the general idea of glitching -- and HSM holds a mildly pro-glitching position because of the sentiment behind glitching (namely, to explore outside the box), I generally have a fairly negative view towards hardcore glitchers, who seem to think it's some sort of entitlement or right for them to glitch, and hold a ridiculous persecution complex because glitching (which shouldn't be in a computer program to begin with) is slowly being patched in order to make Home more robust.

I used what we refer to as glitching because it was the right tool for the job. Imagine waking up and finding a series of platforms levitating in mid-air outside your window -- platforms which, once you crossed them, allowed you to see your house as an unfinished construct, with pieces of world missing beyond it.

Would that not freak you the bleep out?

I know that a lot of people are fond of glitching, and I respect that. But for me, personally, it shatters the illusion. On the rare occasions someone has taken me glitching, it invariably revulses me; rather than being able to enjoy the world as an immersive experience, I'm reminded it's all smoke and mirrors and polygons. I can only imagine how much worse it would feel to actually *live* in that world, with nothing else as a frame of reference, and then experience such a horrendous revelation.

What sort of message are you trying to convey to the audience with this story?

Nothing overt as such; at its core, I just wanted to write a haunting story that was set in the world of PlayStation Home. If we dig deeper, I suppose the story is a meditation on death, and what makes life genuinely worth living. We cling to life because we fear the unknown of death; what (if anything) happens after it? So if you could experience immortality, free from all the pains and struggles of this world, would you accept the trade-offs it came with?

There's a certain delicious irony in this story: that the one thing the protagonist wants to do is find a way to die. Because paradise is hollow. Given that the bulk of the audience reading the story spends a considerable amount of time in Home as an escape from the pains of our own world, it's a bit of inversion which I find thoroughly enjoyable to play with.

The story's title says it all: death after life. We spend so much time worrying about life after death, trying to figure out how to prolong it and stave off the inevitable, that in Home -- where death is irrelevant -- it's fascinating to turn the question on its head.