Nocturne Alley

[pegkerr]

*Sob* So nocturne_alley is over. What will we do without it?

I originally wasn't going to do this. Then I decided, what the hell. Then I got cold feet again. Now I'm back to blurting it out. So here I go before I change my mind again.

For the past fifteen months, I have been playing Neville Longbottom, wheresmytoad on nocturne_alley.

I like mentoring writers. Upon occasion when I've read something fictional on the internet that I really like, and I think the writer(s) might have talent, I'll contact them and say, "You know, you should think about trying to do this professionally." I ran across nocturne_alley about eighteen months--good lord, I could hardly avoid it. Practically all my friends talked about it in their journals and had it on their friends list. I read this post where Harry was outed, and I thought, geez, some of this stuff has potential. Although I knew players in the game were anonymous, I e-mailed a friend who I had a pretty good hunch was involved, and said, if you know any of the players, please pass on from me that I think some of them are doing excellent work, maybe professional-caliber work, and they should know that.

And I added casually as a P.S. to the end of message, wow, this game sure looks like fun. Wish I'd been in on it at the beginning, I might have liked to have given it a try.

She wrote back and said, are you serious? Because we could find an opening for you.

Wow. Um, yeah, sure. Why not?

They offered me a couple parts, and I chose Neville. And I'm glad that I did, because I have come to love him even more dearly. I made him (I hope) endearingly clumsy, and perfectly capable of sticking his foot in his mouth and getting everyone hacked off at him just when he's trying to do or say the right thing. I gave him a summer job and a muggle girlfriend and a hobby designing bonsai trees. And I hope I gave him a little bit of truth, and made him fun (if occasionally maddening) to read.

This was my first post.

Shortly after I started with the game, Sirius and Remus got married (yeah, yeah, we're talking fantasy here), and of course, this was the occasion of the famous incident where the veritaserum got into the punchbowl at the reception. See Neville's participation here, here (where I finally got to tell off Snape) and here.

(Discerning people might notice, by the way, that while under the influence of the veritaserum, Sirius Black revealed that one of the people that he slept with was Sean Donnelly, one of my characters from The Wild Swans. That chuffed me very much.)

I was hooked.

Another fond memory involved Neville managing to blow up the Hogwarts library. See here here and here.

Here is the post where the fan community nraged interviewed Neville. That was fun, too.

I had never ever been involved in anything as frivolous as a role-playing game before and it's been delightful. It has been unbelievably fun. And I found, when done really really well, role-playing can be more than frivolous. It can get at the core of the human condition in ways that can break your heart. nocturne_alley was all about choosing a heart of flesh over a heart of stone (think Lucius Malfoy), which is why it was exactly suited for me.

It wasn't too much of a time commitment, although it was occasionally, but whenever I started feeling guilty, I would ask myself, what else are you doing in your life just for the sheer fun of it?

I do wish I had been in on that game from the beginning, as I think it would have changed my interactions a bit with the other players if I had started with the rest. But I'm so grateful that they let me come to play with them in their sandbox. I hope that, in my own small way, my additions to the group sand castle were good ones. Thanks for all the memories, nocturne_alley.

(So . . . are you surprised?)

If you've written a post about what nocturne_alley meant to you in your Livejournal and are so inclined, leave me the link in a comment to the entry. Thanks!

(Ok . . my finger's hovering over the "post" button. Okay, I'll do it. Posting.)

(Eeeek.)