I’ve been thinking a lot about Second Life lately. No, not the post-Rapture existence promised to believers in the Left Behind series. But the virtual world where in reality you might be an overweight, balding, middle-aged, car repossessed shlub and in the digital confines of SL, your avatar can be a brawny, squint-eyed stud modeled on Daniel Craig. Man can be woman, old can be young. Created by video game maker Linden Lab, Second Life, a social networking site, is reported to have some 25 to 30,000 participant-players worldwide dropping in per day, with an estimate of some four million members.

Presidential hopeful John Edwards set up a virtual campaign headquarters on Second Life as a way to tap potential volunteers and contributors. The headquarters was hacked into and vandalized via PhotoShop seemingly by some GOPers (or so Edwards’ site claims) not too long afterward. This burglary got attention in the real word, and given things are particularly not what they seem in the virtual realm, could it be that the break-in was staged to get publicity?

Maybe Dixon Hill, the retro private eye Star Trek’s Captain Jean-Luc Picard occasionally portrays on the Enterprise-D’s holodeck can get to the bottom of this. He can be paid in Linden dollars which have currency in that world and ours. Linden Lab CEO Philip Rosedale estimated that in 2006, $5 million of those pretty little green ones, or about $38 per person, was exchanged between SL players. You can buy land, clothes and other items in Second Life. As reported in Wired magazine, one young lady who was a furniture delivery dispatcher was able to make more money as a cyber clothes designer –- some avatars change clothes as much as Paris Hilton does -- with her shop in Second Life, and quit her day job.

Given that companies and individuals pay to advertise on Second Life, and figuring computer users to be more on the literate side, it was only a matter of time until book publishers got hip. John Wiley and Sons hosted a virtual book party for the unveiling of Michael Rymaszewski’s Second Life: The Official Guide. Then Bantam opened a virtual store wherein heavy hitter Dean Koontz, via his avatar, did a reading (live audio broadcast) from his new book, the Good Guy, and fielding questions with the help of avatar staff.

As Russ Lawrence on kotaku.com, president of the American Booksellers Association mused about this, "Second Life is itself a fictional environment. Who knows, selling fiction there might be a pretty good match." SL might not be the holodeck, but it could be where mystery and crime writers boldly go to play and promote – or so I’m speculating.

For example my buddy Jerry Rodriguez has shot a mini-movie on digital video to help promote his upcoming mystery novel, The Devil’s Mambo (in the interest of full disclosure, I’ve blurbed his book). The promo runs on Jerry’s website. Other writers, Michael Connelly for instance, have also done mini-movies premiering them on sites like YouTube to create interest and buzz. Now what if on SL you had an advertisement, say some pixel vixen or digital beefcake stroll by and holds up your book (or prim for primitive object as the slang goes on SL). The viewer clicks on your book and this takes you to a url where your mini-movie plays.

Or what if you created avatars that were the characters from your book? And what if you and a couple of friends put together a scene from your upcoming book using your avatars to "act out" an excerpt like it was a live play? Linden Lab has announced what they’re calling integrated audio coming to SL, in what it seems will be the ability for your avatars to talk with this being distinct from audio streaming.

Now I suppose SL won’t be the savior for the indie bookstore. Though it certainly could be that bookstores could sponsor chats and readings with your avatar in their SL store. Your avatar could be you incarnated in digital form, or you as your character. You’d answer questions about the book, your work and so on in a virtual room -- or strip club, dive bar, or even tea room as mystery and crime novel range from hardboiled to cozy -- where other avatars have come to see you by invitation only.

The bookstore could gather these people in the bricks and mortar store, or connected via computers, have pre-designed avatars ready to go, and the writer, sitting a thousand miles away, would enjoin the discussion. Hook that up with Margaret Atwood’s LongPen, the robot device she employs for long distance book signing, and you got yourself a virtual hog heaven of a book signing.

Reuters has set up a news bureau on Second Life where they feed news from the real world as well as interview avatars and tech folk. The movie "300," based on Frank Miller’s graphic novel, held a virtual press conference when the movie opened with avatars of Millar, the director and cast members answering questions via audio stream. There have also been comic books in our world done with 3D programs. Given too there’s been a virtual porn magazine called Sluster with "pages," and PowerPoint slides can be uploaded for viewing in SL. With this manipulation of images and text in mind, an enterprising sort could convert a short story into visuals and text on Second Life.

But why stop with mere computers and software as the middlemen of our expression?

In the Philip K. Dicksian near future with its Hammettesque underpinnings, wheezing our last gasps on floating death beds, we fork over enough in Linden dollars to transport our consciousness into our flawed but rugged avatar operative, to deal a rough brand of justice in the Poisonvilles of our own making.

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