Thanks for visiting my site. My name is Robert M Durden and I am a writer of science fiction, fantasy, collaborative fiction, and a creator of worlds. I don’t have a lot of published work but I have written in various forms all my life.
My interest in writing and fiction started when I was young and read The Lion, The With and The Wardrobe. The thought of being transported to a fantasy world stuck with me and was made better when my Mom gave me all the books in the series one Christmas. This began my thirst for fantasy settings, which led to The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings books. In high school anytime I could write a story for my classes I did so with gusto, even starting the basis for my own world then.
After high school I went to Northern Kentucky University in 1995 and I went in with the idea of becoming a writer. I did take all the English courses I could, favorites being a class on Edgar Allan Poe, Steampunk, and Post Modern writing. During this time I was really involved in, what was at the time called, Interactive Stories. Nintendo had their website host a message board and every year would set up a story based on one of their properties. When I joined it was based on Star Fox. There I worked with other Nintendo fans and we created our own characters and basically roleplayed them in this universe through fun narratives. Later Nintendo slowly shutdown their message boards and the group gathered together to split off and make a new website called Vivid Imagination (usually written as VI). There we started to come up with our own worlds, our own stories. The more popular one was something we simply called Casino IS which was based on a Space Station Casino that was in the Vega Star System, and a star about to collapse. My story there was a noir-esque murder mystery that I based around, of all things, Chess and Sailor Moon.
After this one finished up we began coming up with another one. This time they chose my idea which was a steampunk western called Clockwork Flats. I wanted to set up another mystery based of Caesar, my main character being the sheriff named Alexandra Caesar and her having a brother named Jules, but as with a lot of collaborative work, what I really liked more with this one this time was a haunted forest nearby. Sadly this community slowly petered off as we grew older but we tried to capture that feeling one more time with a new IS called Galaxy IS. This was based in a Galaxy that was being set up that a giant war was about to start off. I started writing the first story in this collaborative fiction and honestly I feel it became the best thing I had written to date. This was at the time I was taking PostModern writing and right after I just mentally devoured the book “Mao II” by Don DeLillo, so my head was in the right place for it. It was slightly altered for it to fit better as a story setup but I honestly kept the original as I felt it was better. This later became one of my first published works through Alwaysi.com.
During this time I was also coming up and writing for my own world that I had been building since highschool. I never fully gave it a name, mostly calling it Blue Phoenix, but with every time I looked or wrote something for it it evolved into itself more and more. I wrote two stories in this world as well and tried to get them both published with Alwaysi.com but only one of those were accepted. Sadly the website was bought up by another site, switched mostly to video and all the verbal stories that they held disappeared, but I would still love to find the audio for those two stories.
I graduated in 2000 after trying to find something to use my English degree in that I would enjoy, but with the economy at the time heading downward and my only experience being in retail, the job market wasn’t looking for someone with an English degree.
I did continue working on collaborative writing though after VI disappeared. There was a website that was based off the stories from the Nintendo ISes that I joined and wrote with for a bit and also wrote on basically fan fiction for a Pokemon concept of Pokemorphs (human, pokemon hybrids). There was also a comic series I wrote in their message board for which was basically what if the X-men had really bad powers. I still really enjoyed coming up with The Whizzer, which was a character who could spraw out and control cheese whiz.
Another place where I expressed my creativity was in Second Life. Once I moved to Chicago there seemed to be less places to express my creativity, until I found Second Life. What I found there was a community of like minded people a a collection of “sims” called The City of New Babbage. This community had events online and had roleplay in and outside of Second Life. Mainly it was through the website which I used to admin and now fully maintain. We used to have cityofnewbabbage.com and originally it linked to an ning forum website. We stayed there until ning decided to start charging for their site and we figured if we had to pay we might as well make our own. Along with a few others we started working on a replacement to the site, using drupal at the time as it seemed the best alternative. I was the main one pulling together part to keep the site together, but didn’t know the higher programming that required some of the best features of the site. In the end we got it together and it was great. It wasn’t an exact copy of the ning site but it was close enough and we improved things where we could. Sadly things slowly started to deteriorate when the owner of the domain pulled away and the website started to fall apart cause we couldn’t really update it properly without breaking our code. So I took it upon myself to recreate the site under cityofnewbabbage.net and hoped we could get the .com at a later date. This time we decided to use wordpress as it seemed easier to manage and maintain. The site is currently still set up with wordpress and has gone through a face lift since I originally transferred it over but it still houses all of our stories and history.
Also speaking of New Babbage this was where I had my third story published. In 2013 we published a second book in the Tales of New Babbage collection of books in which I wrote a story. There were three collections of the Tales of New Babbage. New Babbage has been a great inspiration in most of my recent writing but it has, sadly, declined in popularity as well.
I went back to school in 2013 as well, trying to use my love for writing and creating to become a game designer at Columbia College Chicago. There I fine tuned stories, worked with others to make awesome games, or demos, and absolutely loved every second of it. There’s something about going back to school as an adult when you go there cause you want to learn rather than are expected to go to college. My favorite things to do there were generally all writing based of course. I loved making pitches, especially when it came to designing them through Powerpoint/Google Slides. But mostly I loved coming up with new ideas. It was fun to even come up with the idea that I worked on for the Senior project at the school called Read Em and Reap, a story where Death loses his scythe and has to go through hell trying to find it. I had so much fun there that I never realized until after I graduated that I graduated manga cum laude.
Most recently I have been playing D&D with friends from New Babbage, in an alternate version of Exandria, where we are telling our own story post season one of Critical Role and per season two. It’s been great fun as I never really had many people to play D&D with and can actually role play these characters who have been really fun to create and play.