What’s in a Name?
The Doom Lounge was a creative writing group that lasted over a decade and gave me my creative outlet and story-writing practice. Its origin was a Star Trek themed play-by-email simulation in the 1990’s. Writers from the Kal Dixas Spaceport group decided to set out and try something different, and changed genres to the Doom Lounge Creative Wiring Project. The new setting was Colonial America meets Dungeons & Dragons. The posts were often a love letter to the melancholy yet majestic settings of coastal South Carolina. The focus moved from playing a game to honing writing skills. Since we had several writers, sometimes in the same post, the shifts between character perspectives were probably vertigo-producing at times. Our proudest accomplishment is that the incredible absurdist writer Jason Rolfe cut his teeth here. The group started on now defunct Yahoo! Group mailing lists. AngelFire website hosting had the Doom Lounge’s first website. You can still find an introduction to the Doom Lounge there, which is too polished to be my musings, so must have been penned by Jason Rolfe: “The Doom Lounge Project is a collaborative creative writing endeavor—a strange and mythical world brought to life by the imagination of a certain Mr. Miley. Within this world, characters both foreign and familiar come to life, weaving tales that captivate and inspire.”
Doomlounge.com was a Thing for a Moment, but slipped into the Ancient Archives of the Internet, to be fondly remembered (well, by me at least.)
I also used this world as a setting when I was Dungeon Master in our Dungeons & Dragons games, and added summaries of each gaming sessions, which served as the “current events” of the writing group, usually written by halfling bard Jot Savage, or Grundy Manian, grumpy dwarf scribe. The last setting of this world was a place called “Mage’s End,” which focused on the forgotten henchmen, the conquered bandits, the occasional unsheltered kobold, the well-intentioned necromancer, and the other refugees from the typical Dungeons & Dragons adventurer group.
