Hi guys!@CathyTea and I were talking, and we thought we'd try making a thread that would be focused solely on writing, especially Sims story writing. The writers' lounge thread is great for being a lounge, but a separate space for more in-depth discussions with a slower pace and less immediate burying of posts could be good too. :)I'm not good at making lists and rules, but here are some suggestions for things to talk about here: the process of writing Sims stories the Sims story community how Sims literature fits into the greater literature community how we use the game as a medium for storytelling the imagery and themes in our work, and also possibly how they are influenced by the game what it means to be a reader of Sims literature the expectations or lack thereof that we have of Sims stories the history of Sims storytelling and all the genres and their relationships to each other and really just anything else you can think of that has to do with writing and reading and community and art and literatureI want to emphasize that this thread is open to everyone, no matter what and how you write. I've learned in the last few years that sometimes stuff like this can intimidate people, but we are definitely not trying to be elitist or pretentious or intimidating or anything here. Everyone is welcome, and everyone, from people who just read Sims stories to people who write commentary legacies to people who write hardcore Simlit, has something to contribute. I hope we have fun here! :)

This seems like the best place to mention what is happening with our story threads in the new forum. Because of how jumbled up and weird this forum is, I've been having a little trouble finding everyone again. If anyone else wants to use this thread to tell us how to find your story threads in this chaotic mess, please do.The old Seventeen & Maldusk thread actually did end up getting migrated to the new forum, even though I thought it wasn't supposed to meet the criteria without being nominated. That's okay. It doesn't have any of its pictures (not a big deal mostly since they were just teasers for the chapters, and the story is hosted on my own blog). But once most of the bugs are worked out of this new system, I may see if I can re-link them just for old times sake (and because getting some familiar images back up has the same psychological effect for me as digging through all my moving boxes and hanging up my favorite posters on the bare walls of the apartment I just moved into).Here's where the thread is: Seventeen & Maldusk: A Supernatural Soap OperaI will use that thread to post updates on Season Two progress and to let readers know when (finally) I'm planning to start posting chapters again. But when Season Two is ready to start, I will create a new thread for announcements and we'll go from there.And just because I feel so drab without my banner:Ta da!

I start with a warning, today I'm in a "cosmic pessimism" kind of mood, that today is directed against these new forums. Summarizing:The forums are hard to navigate and it's very easy to miss threads and posts I would be interested in reading. It too way to long to find again all the stories I was following, and the fact that the Creative Corner section is merging several formal sub-sections threads are getting submerged even quicker than they used toThe whole forum is slow to load and full of glitches (it just logged me out when I was trying to finish this long post, and it's just the last example of a long list)The new "load more" layout makes it very tedious and confusing to navigate long threads and is painful to apply to SimLit, as it doesn't use chronological order and it doesn't get along well with long postsThe threads in the "Questions & Feedback" section suggest that pages won't be implemented againThe "load more" feature is glitchy too, and often cause the page to reload to the first post you were reading and start opening new messages all over againWe don't have spoiler tags in replies (as far as I know), which makes it difficult both to hide long posts under a spoiler (like we used to do when posting many pictures or walls of text in stories updates), or also to hide the comments to new chapters to avoid spoiling other readersCustom avatars may be implemented on this template (if they ever decide to allow it), while I'm even less hopeful about the custom signatures we liked so much. The general mood kills the joy of any creative exploit! All this makes me wonder on the future of our hobby, which is to share and read SimLit. With this rhythm, I can imagine the activity/motivation to drop in the next few months, with less and less people continuing their stories and less and less people reading the new updates. This would really sadden me, I liked a lot the community on the old forum and I would find it very sad to notice people were quietly starting to move away.Anyway, I'm not writing this long rant-ish post because I'm surrendering, I'm here because I want to continue with my hobby and I want to find new ideas and solutions to make the situation a bit less dire than it seems now. In this respect, the main points I'd like to discuss are:What do you think it's the most effective way to adapt this messy new platform to SimLit? Should we start some new thread were to post the updates to stories and legacies, start to advertise people saying to bookmark to our threads (it sounds so desperate, but...), should we start new reading circles, other ideas?Should we push to move more of the activity to external blogs (meaning, using the forum just to "advertise" the stories, and keeping ordered chapters and comments on blogs)? It's a bit sad, a lot of the community aspect is lost this way, yet it could also be less confusing than storing everything in hereShould be consider an alternative (like another forum, AHQ (my first though about this forum was that even AHQ was better than this), discord (which I don't know at all), some social media (I used to have a sims Instagram, but I wasn't a fan of that community), or else)?I'm quite in a brain-storming phase right now and willing to discuss any idea, what's your idea on the situation and on the possible solutions?

I'm here too, and only plan to interact with this one thread 😅Snow from the original forum

have you ever turned your SimLit into audio versions? Would you listen to instead of read SimLit given the option? Any thoughts or moral support is appreciated 😅Interesting question! For my own simlit, no. My simlit is not merely picture heavy, it actively uses the pictures to do a lot of the actual storytelling. So it wouldn't work well as an audio book. Could probably be a fun animated series, but I definitely don't have the time or skills for that.For other simlit stories... depends a lot on the story. Some are more visual, like mine, and wouldn't translate well into an audio format. But there are others where the written narrative is really good and the pictures aren't such an important component, which would probably do quite well in audio format.Personally, I love listening to audio books because I love being read to. It's easier for me to get really absorbed in the story in a fully immersive way when I am listening rather than reading. But a lot depends on the way it's read. I have actually encountered readings of books I love that just fell very flat. In your case, it sounds like specific readers, perhaps people you know, are requesting this audio format. I think that if it's something you want to do, go for it. You will improve your skill in it as you do it more. If you enjoy doing it, and they are happy that you are doing it for them, it would be 100% worth it. But if you don't want to, I don't think you should feel obligated. It's your story, and your time.

LizzielilyyA slideshow of screenshots with audio narrative is a really cool idea! I haven't seen anyone take that approach with simlit. I think that could work really well.

The Art of Sims Storytelling | EA Forums

HermioneSims
New Vanguard
5 months ago
@Haneul33, I definitively agree that AHQ is much more usable than this other platform we were given. It doesn't have custom avatars nor signatures and the part of the screen dedicated to posts is a bit narrow (i.e. small pictures), but at least it has pages.
As for these forums, I have the strong impression that they will work on resolving a few bugs, maybe (in ages) give more avatar options, and maybe increase the number of posts shown at once, but I suspect that the "load more", "nested replies" and "sort by" options are hard to change without breaking everything.
I don't exclude the bugs are so many that some threads could start break on their own too, that's true.
Anyway, I don't plan to totally ditch this forum yet either. I find it particularly disastrous for SimLit, but for more casual chats and reading some funny news, comment, or seeing what happened in the other's game today, it's still manageable in small doses.

Lizzielilyy, thanks for answering too! I'm mostly keeping answering as independent replies to the original post as a little protest against the nested replies option, but it can indeed work both ways.
Anyway, discord for me is something of huge and totally unknown. Is it a chat place? A forum? Something else entirely? And why is there an option to use a microphone? I think I need to study it a bit, I'm so used to regular forum to be quite lost in there 😅

(PS: it took me half an hour to post this because of the "you've exceeded the maximum number of..:" message, I had to rewrite by hand the @s to solve it :/ )
Lizzielilyy
Rising Ace
5 months ago
HermioneSims thats totally fine! Also it took me 3 hours to post for the same reason the other day.

A discord server can be designed to fit many purposes. It will look like a forum where subforums would be “channels” where people can post messages and chat that looks similar to the forums now. There are also threads which can be created within channels that would be like our discussions. There is also the option to create forums which I’ve not experimented with but imagine would suit our needs better. In terms of customisation for users it’s completely open, choose a name, make an avatar, add a bio and links. You can join as many servers as you like and have the ability to DM friends so it’s quite extensive. The microphone is because voice chat channels (so like big phone calls) are an option but I only have one and that’s for subscribers to my twitch, I’m not a big fan of being on voice chat to strangers so wouldn’t implement that in this example 😂 It's worth looking into 🩷 this is mine: https://discord.gg/5DNA5yFg
HermioneSims
New Vanguard
5 months ago
Lizzielilyy , thanks a lot! I'll definitively try to explore the server a bit, in parallel I'll do the same with the official The Sims one (which I think has some forum-like sections as well, I think).
GlacierSnowGhost
Seasoned Hotshot
5 months ago
HermioneSims Thank you for starting this discussion. I've been pondering the same questions of how to continue, and I'm having a lot of the same frustrations and discontent with how this forum works as you are. I've already left a lot of feedback on the feedback threads started by others.
I wasn't excited about the format at AHQ, but somehow they managed to make this forum even worse. So I've been considering using AHQ for my new SAM update thread, rather than this forum. The story, of course, is safe on its own site, I just want somewhere to let readers know when new chapters are ready and where they can leave comments if they don't want to comment over on the story blog. AHQ at the very least keeps comments in chronological order and has pages, which are two things fundamentally necessary for story threads and for long group discussions. But I haven't decided yet.
LizzielilyyI am interested in the Discord idea, since some of the other writers I like have mentioned they use it. I have never used Discord, though, so I don't know really how it works. Do you need to be invited into a group to be able to interact with people?
I don't like the way this forum is designed, but I'll continue to hang around as long as people I want to talk with are still here. But I'm also up for trying something new, especially if it's more comfortable for all of us. I definitely do not want to lose the friends and fellow simlit writers I've gotten to know here.
SnuffyBucket
Seasoned Novice
5 months ago
I've been testing out the discord idea with a forum format. Although it does have some potential it could be cumbersome. If stories are hosted elsewhere it's fine. Where stories need to be hosted on the server, it's currently a mess of disordered images.
If anyone wants to go have a play, troubleshoot or just mess around on a discord channel to see what's it's about, it can be accessed here: https://discord.com/invite/gqNfQvAT

Note: this is just for testing and will probably be deleted so please don't upload your whole story here.
- SnuffyBucket
  Seasoned Novice
  5 months ago
  Alas, testing seems to be concluding that stories hosted on the server will not work as discord automatically lumps all images added in a post together at the end of it.
HermioneSims
New Vanguard
5 months ago
SnuffyBucket , thanks for the test discord forum link! Understanding how it would be visualized, what is allowed in replies, how they are sorted etc... are all things that it's quite interesting to test.
SnuffyBucket
Seasoned Novice
5 months ago
HermioneSimsfeel free to test post, add images, play with settings and post types and do whatever in it that you'd want to do on an actual forum. Same goes for anyone else reading. It'd take a lot of effort to set one up properly and manage it so there's no point anyone doing that unless it'll be fit for purpose.
EvilBnuuy
New Rookie
5 months ago
Oh, this is a cool idea. This reminds me of the first forum I started posting my Sims stories on, and it's a place to post it where I don't have to worry about my content not being suitable or whatever. I don't know if I'll join, but I certainly prefer this older, browsable style of forum to this new one.
GlacierSnowGhost
Seasoned Hotshot
5 months ago
Just adding my opinion in here too. I've also been checking out the new Sim Creatives forum SnuffyBucket and MonaSolstraale are talking about, and I really love it. It's a much better design for someone like me.
I've started a new thread for Seventeen & Maldusk over there. At the moment it just has a link to Season One. But that's here for anyone who is interested. It may become my main announcement thread.
GlacierSnowGhost
Seasoned Hotshot
5 months ago
For anyone looking for a better designed sims and simlit discussion forum, I am really excited about how the Sim Creatives forum started by SnuffyBucket has turned out. It basically is all the things we've been asking for over on the feedback threads of this forum. Much more thoughtfully designed for stories and discussions about storytelling. And we can even have our own custom avatars and signature banners there, so it doesn't feel like a faceless crowd.
I am moving both my Seventeen and Maldusk announcement thread (story is still hosted on my own site) and my blueprint builds entries slideshow thread over there, because it is just a more comfortable format for me. I encourage you all to check it out if you have not done so already. I started a thread there called "The Joys and Pains of Writing" which I hope will be a similar type of thread to this one. There are a couple of simlit writers questions in my first post to get it started. The Sim Creatives forum is still new, with only a few threads and posts so far, but I would love to see it really grow and thrive with contributions from creative simit writers like all of you.
Here is the link to the main page: https://simscreative.freeforums.net/
The link to my threads:
Seventeen & Maldusk update thread
My blueprint build slideshow
Joys and Pains of Writing