The Galactic Irregulars

A Monday Musing for April 14, 2025

As I continue on this journey back to my life as a writer, I think a lot about the road that got me here. I have always written, as I have mentioned before, but there was a period of time where I didn’t do it for myself. I didn't pen anything in the fiction realm, or really anything creative. It was all articles, technical, and whatnot.

In 2003, Sony Online Entertainment and LucasArts released a Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) called Star Wars Galaxies. Announced in 2000, the official website and beta testing launched in March of 2001. It included screenshots, movies, an updated frequently-asked-questions section, concept art, development team member's profiles, features about the game, and a forum. The site reached 100,001 users by December 2001. The forums were a hotbed of fans and excited future players. It developed into a community of its own. This was a place where gamers conversed, planned, plotted, and formed alliances, well in advance of ever having played the game.

One of the things about MMORPGs is the creation and importance of “clans” or “guilds”. Basically, groups of people that play on a “team” together to advance in the game and create community. The idea was that we would all get to know one another and create characters and storylines and backstories so that when the game finally launched, we could go full immersion in our favorite universe: Star Wars.

One such group was The Galactic Irregulars, better known as TGi. Players from all over the world participated. The US, Canada, Brazil, England, Denmark, and others. This was my guild. We have Imperials and Rebels and Smugglers. Rodians and Wookiees and Zabrak, as well as the requisite humans. Male, female, young, and old. Eventually, we moved to our own website and message boards. We talked about Star Wars, of course, but also other fandoms. Movies, music, books, the goings on in the world. One of the most fun things about these forums, though, was how much of it all was done “in character”. From the Zabrak smuggler Lain Runner (and his dreadnought ship Lasagna) to the human scientist Sailin’ Nox and his usually catastrophic experiments, the Trandoshan bounty hunter Tobar and his banana-yellow suit, and of course my own creation, the smuggler-turned-club owner Ronnick Blackwell, our little group of misfits created a family that went way beyond a video game. We even had several artists who would produce our likenesses in sketches and digital art.

This was my first foray into fan fiction. With this rich environment of characters and stories, I began writing a serialized story about Blackwell and his life in a galaxy far, far away, from gritty backstory to comic interactions with other TGi-ers. I danced through stories every week, moving in what felt like an endless ocean of ideas and inspirations. Words flowed from me without effort, and it was a source of great joy for me. My guild-mates seemed to enjoy it as well.

Bolstered with this confidence, and inspired by the recently released Pirates of the Caribbean film in 2003, I started another story, this one outside the gaming world. I created my first historical fiction tale which I also serialized and posted in our forums, and Portete was born. It was well received and soon my friends were clamoring for more. (In fact, the phrase “More Portete” became a running joke among the faithful whenever I was late to a weekly update.)

Time moved on, and I kept writing. The more I wrote, the more I wanted to write, and it was at that point that I once again felt the drive and call to be a writer professionally. Full transparency: I am not a full-time professional writer still to this day. I was clueless as to how the industry worked, or what it took to go from finished manuscript to published novel. I was very, very naive. I stalled out around 2007. The old TGi boards got hacked, and even though we eventually rebuilt them, the community never really recovered. Some of us stayed connected, and Facebook rose in popularity, taking the place of a lot of the connections. I finished the first draft of Portete in 2013. And then it sat.

Real life has a way of injecting itself into plans, and my own life was no exception. It would be years before I really wrote much else again. Career changes, personal challenges, and worldwide pandemics seemed to always have other plans for me. (Honestly, I really thought that I would suddenly find my creative spark again when we were locked down, but quite the opposite happened.)

Now that I have reconnected with my need to write, and now that I am churning out the words like I have not been able to do in over a decade, I find myself revisiting old pieces and realizing how much I owe to those halcyon days of TGi. In many ways, this Substack community that I am finding myself a part of reminds me a lot of the heyday of my writing on the TGi forums. Everyone is supportive, everyone has a streak of creative in them, and everyone loves to share and encourage without a need to disparage.

So to my TGi-ers, wherever you may be, thank you.