An interesting thing happened at the Commodore LA Super Show last month in Burbank. I went to the show with three main objectives. Of course, one of them was to sell books (and I sold a few). The second was to demonstrate word processing on the Amiga with WordPerfect (a follow-up to the presentation I did about PaperClip on the Commodore 64 from last year). But mostly, I wanted to tell the group about Escape from Arzack’s Castle, my new Amiga-inspired novel based on feedback I got from last year’s show.

I hoped to encourage a few of the attendees to sign up to be beta readers as I prepared for a second round of public feedback. I even transferred a chapter of my novel to WordPerfect to include in my presentation.

Then the unexpected happened. A group of the audience volunteered to create a demo based on the novel.

The demoscene is a big part of the Commodore community. Creators produce self-contained video and music programs on original hardware. What they can produce with a stock Commodore 64 or 1-MB Amiga is nothing short of amazing. We saw examples of this at a demo contest held at the Commodore LA Super Show. Since Escape from Arzack’s Castle is centered around a vintage video game produced on the Amiga, the audience saw it as a perfect source of a demo.

And as an author, I was floored by their generosity.

Writing is a lonely profession. We sit alone at our laptops, creating. We spend years sending out queries, only to get rejections. When we get published, we go to events without selling a single book. But when you share your stories and others not just see your vision, it excites them; magic happens. This is the power of connection. This is the reason I got into writing in the first place.

This also speaks of the power of community. We are united by a love of 40-year-old computers, keeping them functional, rediscovering programs we loved, and finding new ways to enjoy them. We also want to keep alive what those devices represented: when technology was a source of wonder and possibility—and not an open sewer drain of incessant notifications, disinformation, and malware. It’s a theme depicted in the revived Commodore’s ads for the new Commodore 64C Ultimate.

We can only build community when we give as much as we gain from it. When we offer support and build each other up. I hope that my writing introduces people to those wonderful computers and the possibilities they offer. We can remind everyone how technology can liberate, and not surveil and extract from us. That was why I closed out my presentation this way:

One of the challenges we have as we’re getting older is how do we preserve this love of vintage computers and bring it to the next generation? And it’s telling stories like this about introducing new young people to this technology and…teaching them about the history because the phones and tablets they use today…came from these desktop computers.

Community gives us the power to do more than any of us can do alone. We can create together, preserve history together, and educate the next generation together. Community will get us through the gauntlet of challenges that have been thrown at us. What happened at the Commodore LA Super Show wasn’t about a computer or a novel. It’s about how people can come together and do more than we could possibly imagine.

You can watch my presentation in its entirety on YouTube.

Related topics:

An Amiga of my own The day Commodore died 40 things I learned in 40 years about technology NaNoWriMo 2016: Why Amiga?

Powered by YARPP.