EQ1 - Mernac Creative Writing Site Offers Contest : EQ1 EverQuest 1 News

Rick Merriman, the founder of The Legends of Mernac, is an Australian writer and artist now living in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He is an avid fantasy fan and Gamer who sometimes gets lost in his creations but still finds time to spend with his 16 nubile virgin brides, two Hell Hounds, and his pet Dragon, Skippie.

What is the connection between The Legends of Mernac and Gaming?

Gaming is an integral part of The Legends of Mernac and always will be. Originally the site was intended to be a 3D MMORPG game and quite a bit of work was done programming that. We have decided to take a step back first and build a solid world creating a large volume of content before we go back to the actual game creation stage. We do not, however, want to lose touch with our strong fantasy gaming roots so we, the Gods (editors) of Mernac, have decided to tightly integrate some current gaming aspects. The first of these is to have some existing Guilds and characters (playable characters) written into the stories. We currently have a contest, EQ Vs WOW in Guild War for this purpose. The winning Guild (from any multi-player RPG) will be awarded $500.00 to be put in that guild’s coffers. [editors note: please contact him directly for more information on this prize. EQVault or IGN entertainement are not associated with Mernac or the prize.]

Here the Guild will be able to fictionalize (write) their Guild as well as a specific player’s character (toon) in that Guild to be used in the novel, The Battle for Traddlebow. The character (and likely Guild) will be one of the heroes that “save the day” in the climactic ending of the first book of the fore coming The Sap Wars series. The Battle for Traddlebow is being written collectively by half a dozen experienced writers and is scheduled to be submitted to agents and publishers later this summer. The Battle For Traddlebow is but one of several fantasy books being written on the site. These are all freely available to the public to read.

Tell us a little about what Mernac is?

Mernac, an Open Source Creativity (OSC) project, is a new form of art and entertainment designed to facilitate ever growing content and audience appeal, and is expected to spread attracting contributions from hundreds, even thousands, of talented writers, artists, animators, gamers, programmers and musicians from around the world. We currently have over 1,000 registered users, mostly writers and artists, and receive hundreds of thousands of hits each month. The majority of our traffic comes from fantasy buffs that just want to read a good story.

Mernac will eventually have aspects of written prose (fiction), 2D art, 3D art, world building, animation, music, interactive story telling, MMORPG text gaming (in the MUD tradition), MMORPG 3D (in the EQ/WOW tradition) and eventually the ability to create 3D animation stories. The one unifying thread is the genre of fantasy, more specifically High Fantasy (Tolkien, Brooks, Bradley, Goodkind).

The Legends of Mernac is currently a series of interrelated high fantasy stories that all occur in the same setting, or world. Most of the stories (350+) are illustrated by digital art (500+). Though any art medium is welcome, the majority is 3D renderings such as those created by Poser, DAZ Studio, Bryce, Vue, 3DMAX, Maya and the like. All art must be submitted to a specific story and will be required to "match" or "fit" the story. An example of this would the art, “In The Morning Mist”, submitted to a story called “An Archers Tale”. Mernac will accept submissions from anyone with an internet connection (who is a member). With the advent of better graphics in 3D gaming we are now experimenting with adding in game “screen shots” to the illustrations used for the stories. We feel that a creative gamer could have some fun with online friends from their Guild by staging a “scene” for one of the stories on Mernac and then submitting a screenshot of this to one of our stories. At this point, we would welcome gamers to start submitting their screen shots so we can flesh out this aspect of the project.

You mentioned OCS, Tell us a little about that?

Open Source Creativity (OSC) is designed to be a system where talented individuals can work together in a fostering environment, all towards the same collective goal. If there were three words that described it, it would be: Make it better!

In OCS we submit our work, be it art, writing, programming, and a community of like minded talents make suggestions of how to “make it better” or in some cases (with approval) take the work and “make it better” themselves. An example of this is our Scribe to Scribe forum where writers take their work to be polished and critiqued before publication, or our Art Lore forum which does the same thing and offers tips and suggestions on making better art. Almost everything (now) uses the “make if better” approach. In fact, these answers to your questions went through a panel of “Gods” (editors) to make it better! This, however, is just the tip of the iceberg, as there is much more in store for OSC.

The last part of OSC is devising ways that these talented individuals can make money from their talents. The pending book deal for Traddlebow is one of the methods; the constant cash prize contests is another, and I have half a dozen others that we will unveil one by one over the course of this year.

It sounds expensive, how is the project funded?

Me! LOL. I have been personally funding the project from the beginning. Now that we finally have some good content and something tangible to show, I will be soliciting others to help the project grow.

http://www.mernac.com/modules/mernac/%22