It’s gonna be a hot time in the old town tonight.
This took a lot of effort. I’ve been having a lousy couple of days — mourning the loss of a video game, of all things.
City of Heroes was my home for eight years. It was the first MMORPG I genuinely liked, since it divorced character appearance from gear, letting you look like anything and do anything. No “you’re a tank, you must wear these horrible yellow shoulder pads.” You could be a cowboy. Or a robot. Or a goth girl. Or a cowboy robot goth girl. You could make any character you want and as you can imagine, I took a particular shine to how it let me express myself creatively.
I met a swath of friends there, friends I still call friends today. This was our clubhouse. This was where we went every week to enjoy playing games together. And thanks to some shortsighted corporate bean counters at NCSoft, an ocean away, it got shut down forever because it wasn’t making fantastic amounts of money, merely amounts of money.
I took that negative energy and channeled it into my writing and you’ll see how when you read. This was always going to be the way the story went — from preplanning notes months ago, before the City of Heroes execution was announced. It’s just irony that there’s so much synchronicity, I suppose.
But, this isn’t really about Heroes, it’s about Angles, City Of. In the end, I found the place I needed to be to write, and here you have this week’s draft update. I’d love to hear your thoughts so far on it. And bonus points if you can identify the cameo character.