My First Published Words

A couple of weeks ago, I announced my debut on Thaumatrope. Multiple people informed me that this makes me a professional writer, but I just remembered that a small piece of my writing has already been published for payment long ago.

In a past life, I was a scripter for the role-playing game, Planescape: Torment. A scripter is like a programmer, except instead of writing complicated graphical algorithms, I wrote simple scripts that told each character and creature what to do. Perhaps the simplest example being:

IF See( PC )
THEN
Attack( PC )
END

I was also responsible for putting the levels together. Designers designed them and wrote the dialogue, artists drew everything, and I put the pieces together so it worked. On one level, I required a piece of dialogue to inform the player that he'd have to leave his party behind before entering the Immortal's Tomb. The designer told me to write it myself. I present to you the first 72 words of my publishing career (click to enlarge):

It's wordy, I know. I mean, I wrote it ten years ago. And anyway, in a game that contains an estimated 800,000 words, seventy-two is negligible. But these are my first words written and published for money.

So I guess I've been professional for a decade now and didn't know it.