Blogging is time consuming, and over the years we’ve had a number of contributors who’ve not lasted the pace because, by and large, they wished to play Second Life rather than research and report. Others found the process boring, and we lost one (lost to SL completely as far as I’m aware) due to griefers. Others have said they’d contribute, only to fall by the wayside when it came to working to (fairly lax) deadlines. My own ‘inworld’ time is very often curtailed due to me having to do some research, edit photos, source RL photos, etc, etc… That’s OK, it’s how I want it, but it’s not for everyone. People will promise to be able to contribute, then fade away, and we’ve never had much luck with male contributors. SL blogging appears to be an overwhelmingly female pursuit.

I have however, great hopes for our newest contributor, Jem.

Jem (his Mummy probably calls him ‘James’, though) is our newest contributor and, as I have in the past, hope he will be able to provide a male perspective on naturism in and out of SL. As is often the case, when I’m in SL I’m usually chatting with people in roughly the same time zones, and they’ll be the ones who end up as SL friends. A recent arrival in SL (By way of introduction, I asked him to provide a brief paragraph about himself.

‘Hi, I’m Jem, christened James, and that’s the name I took on joining SL, but as I prefer Jem in RL over James, that’s the name I’ll be utilising in SL and for this blog. What can I tell you about myself? I’m in my 30s, married, I’m Irish, and I’m a RL naturist mainly on holidays as Ireland isn’t exactly the friendliest naturist climate in the world. My wife and I, and our two children, generally take the ferry from Cork to France for our summer holidays, and we drive a motorhome around various naturist campsites. But yes, we’ve also practiced naturism in Ireland, as we’ll set off in the motorhome for weekends, find a deserted beach and live life as naturally as we can for the weekend. Ireland’s blessed with long, golden strands of beach which are vastly underpopulated, but it can be a bit hit and miss with the weather. I’m sure more details about my background will emerge as I blog. I’m rather looking forward to the new challenge of blogging, and despite being newish to SL I’m enjoying it greatly. I discovered the game when my wife joined it a couple of months before me, and I look forward to introducing you to her on SLN in the future.’

Jem

Jem (and Mary) already have two articles on the holiday phenomenon of ‘glamping’ written and ready to go, and I’ll be publishing these during the course of next week. This will hopefully lead on to various articles in the coming weeks and months about naturist camping, something of a phenomenon in France, in particular, and we’ll be doing some reports from some of those RL locations and, if things go according to plan, live blogging from one or two of them during the summer months.

Ella