SimLit Celebrations and Discussions

Thank you @xJojox :blush: I'm glad you are enjoying my stories too! And thanks for following PNN, @Kittybit !

In terms of spooky stories, @Thymeless wrote an excellent short story for Halloween that was well written and had wonderfully creepy screenshots! I'm on my phone so I don't have a link handy, but Thymeless, feel free to quote my comment and link to your story :)

@CitizenErased14 after i finished dust to dust, I started ashes to ashes.

Thanks @Charliimai for the shoutout! I don't read as much as I should but I'm hoping that will change when I get a new, less physical job.

I really wanted to make MLAAZ work with SimLit but my ideas were just too big for what I could pull off in TS4, I spent so much time searching for cc and building sets and still having to compromise on the story when I couldn't find a certain thing. On a more positive MLAAZ note, with complete free-reign, I've written 24 chapters for it as part of a novel. Might spend some time this month going through what I've written and try and get some more inspiration :)

"Munterbacon;15319552" wrote:
Thanks @Charliimai for the shoutout! I don't read as much as I should but I'm hoping that will change when I get a new, less physical job.

I really wanted to make MLAAZ work with SimLit but my ideas were just too big for what I could pull off in TS4, I spent so much time searching for cc and building sets and still having to compromise on the story when I couldn't find a certain thing. On a more positive MLAAZ note, with complete free-reign, I've written 24 chapters for it as part of a novel. Might spend some time this month going through what I've written and try and get some more inspiration :)

@Munterbacon I can totally understand the feeling of compromising the story to get the perfect screenshots and still unable to capture everything you'd like. I've run into that problem multiple times and I get sucked into spending an entire day looking for cc and mods that it's almost not worth it. That's when I've written text-based chapters only. I am glad you found a way to free yourself up to really write the story. Good luck with your endeavors.

@everyone I would love to talk about this idea more - text-based chapters in the SimLit world or when you run into issues conveying your idea/story. Thoughts?

text based is fun for me. i do run in to a few issues because i'm writing about something i have no experience with. but i see that as a fun challenge.

"Munterbacon;15319552" wrote:
Thanks @Charliimai for the shoutout! I don't read as much as I should but I'm hoping that will change when I get a new, less physical job.

I really wanted to make MLAAZ work with SimLit but my ideas were just too big for what I could pull off in TS4, I spent so much time searching for cc and building sets and still having to compromise on the story when I couldn't find a certain thing. On a more positive MLAAZ note, with complete free-reign, I've written 24 chapters for it as part of a novel. Might spend some time this month going through what I've written and try and get some more inspiration :)

@Munterbacon I am a big reader when I get some time to myself which I don't often so the odd time I do I binge. My life as a zombie is the only one I've read twice. I do hope you get inspired to write more even as a pictureless novel I would love to read it. *In my best Zombie voice* "I need moooore..." :D

"AdamsEve1231;15320573" wrote:

@everyone I would love to talk about this idea more - text-based chapters in the SimLit world or when you run into issues conveying your idea/story. Thoughts?

I am currently having difficulties where this is concerned. My story The SIMplelife of Una Reign has both plot-driven and game-driven aspects where I have a pretty clear idea of where I want to take the plot driven story. The games limitations and difficulties setting up Screenshots that convey the scene have frustrated me to the point where I've just stopped.

I have spent days searching for cc and/or poses (which I am still getting used to) but it's never quite right. ( Plus I really dislike setting up poses which doesn't help things.) I have considered having a pictureless chapters but as i'm not at all confident in my writing I feel any readers may become lost or confused part way through.
I have lost all motivation to write that includes my other stories.

I would love hear others thoughts are on what they do when hitting a roadblock in their stories.

"AdamsEve1231;15320573" wrote:

@everyone I would love to talk about this idea more - text-based chapters in the SimLit world or when you run into issues conveying your idea/story. Thoughts?

I don't suppose I need to clarify on the whole text-based thing? :sweat_smile:

But in all seriousness, when I was writing R-R C, I worried over how to properly set up everything. This was especially when it came to describing the current area. ("Am I too vague? Too wordy? Am I using certain words too many times? Is the setting not described enough? Is that idea plausible?" etc.)

I agonize over it even now, when I use pictures again for Part Deux.

"AdamsEve1231;15320573" wrote:

"Munterbacon;15319552" wrote:
Thanks @Charliimai for the shoutout! I don't read as much as I should but I'm hoping that will change when I get a new, less physical job.

I really wanted to make MLAAZ work with SimLit but my ideas were just too big for what I could pull off in TS4, I spent so much time searching for cc and building sets and still having to compromise on the story when I couldn't find a certain thing. On a more positive MLAAZ note, with complete free-reign, I've written 24 chapters for it as part of a novel. Might spend some time this month going through what I've written and try and get some more inspiration :)

@Munterbacon I can totally understand the feeling of compromising the story to get the perfect screenshots and still unable to capture everything you'd like. I've run into that problem multiple times and I get plum into spending an entire day looking for cc and mods that it's almost not worth it. That's when I've written text-based chapters only. I am glad you found a way to free yourself up to really write the story. Good luck with your endeavors.

Thank you! I've thought about wordless chapters, but I decided against it as it would so quickly fall outside the realm of SimLit.

"Charliimai;15320905" wrote:

"Munterbacon;15319552" wrote:
Thanks @Charliimai for the shoutout! I don't read as much as I should but I'm hoping that will change when I get a new, less physical job.

I really wanted to make MLAAZ work with SimLit but my ideas were just too big for what I could pull off in TS4, I spent so much time searching for cc and building sets and still having to compromise on the story when I couldn't find a certain thing. On a more positive MLAAZ note, with complete free-reign, I've written 24 chapters for it as part of a novel. Might spend some time this month going through what I've written and try and get some more inspiration :)

@Munterbacon I am a big reader when I get some time to myself which I don't often so the odd time I do I binge. My life as a zombie is the only one I've read twice. I do hope you get inspired to write more even as a pictureless novel I would love to read it. *In my best Zombie voice* "I need moooore..." :D

Wow! That's awesome! :D I saw you binge Ironbound the other week and meant to say something but it completely slipped my mind, so thank you! I have been considering setting up a new blog to post my MLAAZ chapters but that will have to happen when I get more time :)

"AdamsEve1231;15320573" wrote:
@everyone I would love to talk about this idea more - text-based chapters in the SimLit world or when you run into issues conveying your idea/story. Thoughts?

It can be done really well but I tend to struggle with the idea of it.

One example would be a scene in Ironbound:

Behind a spoiler tag, but it doesn't really spoil anything major.


@Charliimai If you get an answer for your question regarding roadblocks, let me know because I feel it too!

Oh, I'm happy to have a little bit of time to chat here tonight!

My Weekly EnthusiaSims..

OHMIGOSH, guyzzzz! Have you checked out Love, Jacob? This new story by @Kittybit is absolutely gorgeous! I'll be talking more about the visuals below in response to @AdamsEve1231 's question on text-based chapters... Four chapters have been posted so far, and this story has great plot, great characters, great writing, and gorgeous screenshots. I really recommend it... and I'm thinking of a Romance Stories theme for Book Club in February with this and maybe Gage's Riverview story, @AdamsEve1231 ! (Plus a few more romances...)

My other two enthusiasms this week are the readings for Book Club this week and next, @Jes2G 's Delicious Dishes and Dreams and @VIRTUALEE 's Dining Drama. These two are cross-over stories, and so that makes it even more fun to read them in close succession. With Jes's, I loved catching up with the family, the gen 9 Pruetts and their kids. It's great to know that there is life after legacy! And I really love watching Julian and Sky's children grow, plus it was so much fun to catch up with Julian's siblings! :) The restaurant story provides the container, and the Pruetts provide the yummy pasta salad! (Ugh... cannibalistic? Naw! Just digit-eating! Gross! Ok... I will try again...) The restaurant story provides the structure and the Pruetts provide the life!

I read all of VirtuaLEE's story this morning--I couldn't stop! And then I couldn't stop laughing! So wonderful! It's Sims 4 at its best! Even filled with crazy clowns! I can't wait for us to talk about this next week at Coffee Hour, which Jes is hosting! So much fun!

Spooky Scary

Oh, man. Did you guys read @Thymeless 's contribution to Rory's Spooky Collab? So chilling! You've Got Me Under Your Skin If you read it, I'd love to talk with you about it here. It seems really deep and meaningful to me, in addition to the spookiness...

Probably the scariest story I've ever read (and also up there on my short list of all-time favorites of any literature at all) is @rednenemon 's Racket-Rotter Chronicles. Curiously, or not... both of these scary stories have clones in them... hmmmm.....

And talking about Racket-Rotter brings us right into @AdamsEve1231 's question about text-based...


Text-Based Stories/Chapters/Sections...

So! I love this question! This ties in with two of the stories I mentioned above, and it's also something I'm thinking about with some of my current writing...

So, Racket-Rotter, my short-list fav, is all text. It's also very much SimLit, as the characters are TS3 Sims some of us know and love well (some through playing and writing about; with me, it's through reading these others' work). And one of the dominant themes of the work deals with the multiplicity that Sims (especially premades) experience.

Reading Racket-Rotter was an amazing experience for me--you know how you sometimes have a reading experience that both sort of consumes you and also changes you? One that defines an epoch? One summer I read this great translation of War and Peace, and it was the first time I'd read Tolstoy! And really, that summer changed my life. This summer, I read Racket-Rotter, and it brought me through a tough time psychologically and interpersonally. It helped me to learn an important lesson that I needed to learn in order to love others fully and well. Whew!

Part of why it was so immersive was because it was text-based. I would only read it at night, late, after Jim had gone to bed, when the house was silent, and only the room where I sat was light, and it was dark outside and the geckos on the window chirped and (yes) the cicadas still buzzed. In that special setting, I was able to completely enter into the story. Pictures would've ruined it for me--The Builder was far more frightening in my imagination than any screenshot could accomplish. And my imagination was able to provide fluidity--Senna's writing is fluid. Reality shifts and moves, and the Sims themselves transform in and out of iterations of themselves. At the same time, certain parts were incredibly concrete. I have memories of some parts



as vividly as if these events had been part of my childhood or youth...

And now, in Part Deux, we're getting screenshots and... my experience is just as good! Something shifts. The Sims (as actors) carry more weight. My visual part of my imagination takes a breather, for I rely on the screenshots to convey the events and interactions, and what becomes engaged is that part of my brain that reads others' faces to see how they're feeling.



There's a lot of similarity in the writing in both parts--the difference in my experience as a reader lies in which parts of my brain are activated while I read...

Another example: When I read @RipuAncestor 's Chrysanthemum Tango (another short-list fav of mine) I sometimes forget that the pictures don't show up when I'm reading it in Pale Moon for my browser. I'll get half-way through, and then I'll realize I'm missing Tad's cute face. So I'll pop into Chrome to catch the the pictures. It's a similar thing: when I'm reading without screenies, my visual imagination ramps up and I am playing out the movie in my head with my own images. When I see the screenshots, then that part of my brain that interprets visual information--including reading others' faces--ramps up. It's pretty cool!

Another example: You know how I was raving on earlier about how much I love Love, Jacob? Well.... Kitty let me read the first chapter before it had screenshots! OH! That was a treat! The language is so rich, especially in sense detail. So I had all these scents and sights and tactile sensations--even tastes--going on. It was really fun. Kitty and I talked about what kinds of screenshots to add, and I was describing how rich all the sense details were for me as a reader, and then, when I reread the chapter WITH the screenshots, it was so much fun! All the sense details--and more--were there! Now, when I'm reading, I'm relying on the screenshots to fill me up sensually. It's really neat.

In my own writing... I started a text-only story a while back. It was because I wanted the story to be about Geoffrey and Nancy split up--but due to my personal Sim-playing ethics, I won't break up a Sim couple myself. They've got to want to split up. But I really wanted to explore this. So I just wrote it as a fanfic, no pics. I still imagine the characters as their Simselves, only not cartoon--real people. Maybe I'll come back to this in about six or seven months.

I've also recently been thinking about using text-based interludes. In an upcoming chapter of Shift, a conversation needs to happen that didn't happen in game and that I don't have any screenshots for. So, I'll just write it out and not worry about pictures. Sometimes, I do back-story this way, too. Often (and this kind of feels like cheating to me), I'll have a Sim think about a memory, and as I write it, I illustrate it with closeups of that Sim's face, rather than of what happened. It feels cheaty because I'm lazy and don't want to stage what she's thinking about--as a reader, I like it, though, because I love how expressive Sim faces can be and the ways they can reveal what's happening...

@Charliimai 's Question...

So! I think my wild rambles above show that, for me as a reader, I get SO much from text-based portions.

Here's a very important key: Gaps are just as important--if not more so--to readers than what is said or shown.

Here's what I mean: In Racket-Rotter, there were no pictures, so my imagination had to step up to fill in what wasn't shown for me. This engaged me and allowed me to be wholly immersed in the reading process.

Sometimes, if something happens in a story and we don't want to recreate it in game, we can just tell it.

Or we can refer to it.

Here are a few ways to get through these types of things that happen storywise, but not game-wise:

1) write it descriptively and don't worry about not having pictures for it. Have pictures for what you can illustrate (like what happens before the event or after) but don't worry about illustrating every single thing that happens.

2) don't bother writing all the details of what happened, but just refer to it as needed. For example, suppose a character got robbed on the underground. Rather than going to great pains to build a subway, find poses and cc for a robbery, and so on, you could present it in the story in many ways that CAN be easily represented:
a) You can have it as a gap, by writing something like "After Jake got robbed on the subway that afternoon, his love for the city faded."

That one clause lets our imaginations fill in the details.

b) You can present it through dialogue. Jake could tell somebody about it, and you show and write the conversation. The readers can imagine the events...

c) You can use my lazy way of having the character reflect on it or write about it, and show expressive pictures of the Sim's face. Again, the reader will fill in the blanks.

d) You can write bits and pieces.

You shared with me a bit of your prologue for your city story, and I absolutely loved it! In that prologue, you're using gaps brilliantly! You provide just enough for the reader to figure out what's going on and to get to know the characters, but you leave out enough that we become engaged as readers in filling in the gaps.

It's way more important, in my experience as a reader, for the writer to leave these gaps than to fill in every little space. The gaps let me act as co-creator. My mind jumps in and fills in the entire sequence of events, imagining every little detail of the backstory, when I read just this phrase, "After Jake got robbed on the subway..."


(Wow. This is long. This is what happens when I don't write ten posts during the day and instead practice discipline, telling myself I'll write them all in the evening AFTER work!)

i forgot i have one more challenge with text based. since my screenshots are mostly gone i have no pics of the first generation at all. so i guess i have to rewrite them.