[Warning! This page is getting a Major Overhaul!]
Hi! I’m Ian. By day, I’m an online marketing specialist with Modern Earth Web Design, Winnipeg’s biggest and best new media development company – I write copy, develop and track online marketing campaigns, and do SEO. The number of hats never stops growing.
Whenever I’ve got the free time, I’m a fiction writer and technology enthusiast, located in Winnipeg Manitoba Canada. My audience usually includes my wife and two-year-old son, with our two cats playing disgruntled occasional spectators.
The blog is a hobby, for now. Recently, I’ve been writing about digital manners and the etiquette the new, connected world will require – as well as relating the world to the web, dealing with life on the scale of the net, and occasionally ripping into our perceived needs for privacy and what we see as good decisions.
Naturally, like any good digital native, I’m everywhere. Feel free to follow me on Twitter (@IanMRountree), find me on LinkedIn, Facebook, or FriendFeed (though I’m almost never there).
When I’m not working, parenting, blogging or writing (in that order) I’m usually on one of two pure text-based roleplay-oriented chat sites. Swordsman is the most commonly used pseudonym I’ve used over the years I’ve been gaming online, though the default lately is either that or “Orb”. I’m one of two major contributors to the Chronologica Aragos, having begun my gaming in this setting in the fall of 1996 shortly before play ended in the “Forest” segment of the Alamak chat community. I returned at the end of 1998, during play in the “Cellar”, as Riven Darkangel, and from there continued on under a host of other nicknames – TheUnknownMe, Swordsman, Spektur, TrueSimulacrum – some of which are continuing characters listed here in my section of the Chronologica, while others have been repurposed and moved from their concurrent timeline to the Maredran worldsetting.
I’ve been writing and gaming much of my life, beginning with Dungeons & Dragons 2nd edition in my early teens, as well as a game system I developed with a community of friends as an alternative to AD&D, to compensate for a number of its shortcomings. My experience ranges from AD&D through GURPS and WhiteWolf’s games Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse and Changeling: The Dreaming, nothing said of countless console games and a number of freeform arenas such as Alamak, Winds of Change, Rondak’s Portal, numerous communites in LiveJournal and other open blogging platforms, The Keep RolePlaying chat, and The Spire.
Currently, the majority of my creative focus goes into converting Aragos and its sister setting, Maredran, into usable literary settings. Major writing for Maredran began in November of 2008, with the first section of The Dowager Shadow being written during the National Novel Writing Month event. Aragos has, as yet, not seen such effort, nor have any of the other settings derived from online freeform gaming. However, in May of 2009, I began restructuring the histories and personal stories of some representative Aragos historical figures as part of the work of revamping the setting to allow for further writing and gaming in the future.
Further, of course, the novel written in the Maredran universe is launched on February 2nd, 2010, entitled The Dowager Shadow, as a freely distributed online novel.
On a personal achievement note, Swordsman (pictured right) was originally played on June 16th, 1990. This character has 20 years of history behind him, so needless to say I’m fairly stoked about the milestone.
