Hello all,
I've really enjoyed meeting and getting to know many of you while playing Portia intermittently over the past 18 months. As you may already know, I'm not only a reporter in-game, I'm also a reporter out of game, and I've been attending KR as research for my book, tentatively titled, "Leaving Mundania: A year of grown-up make believe." I'm pleased to announce that I have received a book contract from Chicago Review Press with a tentative publication date of 2012.
Under my current plan, the time I've spent in KR will constitute about a third of the finished book and will be written in as memoir from my point of view. The point of this experience, for me, has been to try to understand, on a personal level, what players get out of LARPs, and so far KR has fulfilled that in spades.
I have waited to post about this publicly because I wanted to be certain that I had a book contract, before raising the issue and because I want(ed) to be treated like any other new player. As a writer and reporter, I believe in transparency, so now that my contract is settled I wanted to say something "official."
If I am planning on using you in the book, you probably already know, but it's all a little up in the air until I write those chapters. My guess, since I've interacted with so many of you, is that many of your characters will appear in the background of scenes. I will not put your real life name in the book without permission; if I want to do that, you'll hear from me later. Of course, real names endow any nonfiction account with greater legitimacy, and I prefer to use them when at all possible.
Finally, I know that most folks have a great grasp of the difference between IG and OOG, but for the record I wanted to say: I'm not Portia! As Portia, I don't fact check stuff extensively, in part because I don't have the time, and that's made some people IG irritated at me. As a book reporter, I have plenty of time, a slavish devotion to details and I will be extensively fact-checking my work. Unlike my previous newspaper article, which embarrassingly referred to a person as a "boffer" in a photo caption that I did not write, I will be responsible for all content in the final book and will have a single editor who should become familiar with LARP culture.
If you have questions about any of this, please feel free to PM me, talk to me at the next event, or send me an email at Lizzie(dot)Stark(at)gmail.
Best,
Lizzie
Portia "Nosy McGee" Rom, Chroniclerite
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Lizzie S.
