Drown finished somewhere around 133,054 words, which is a legit novel, and I guess that’s an accomplishment of sorts. (I am never doing that ever again though, lol! Back to little postcard snippets for my sims for a while! Ha ha, I named this blog "postcards" for a reason!)
There is still one more small piece to Drown, #15, which happens much later in one single shortish part. I suppose that would make it kind of an epilogue. But that doesn’t happen for a few sim-years from now. I won't put an exact date on it, but some time between 2088-2090.
So I just wanted to say a few quick things about where the blog will go from this point forward. If any of you have been digging around the blog pages, you might notice that I've finally, now that Drown is officially over, aged everybody down to their 2086 ages. I never expected to spend so long writing this story and remaining in the 2086 timeline. Also, now that I have, I hadn't expected that I'd want to stay in this timeline (rather than skipping 5 years ahead back to 2091, where I left off).
You can blame it all on Benji!
Even though I am very fond of all the sims I left in the future (Reid & Susie! Lauren & Jake & Delphie!), that would mean skipping over ALL of Benji’s toddler years. He will have just aged up to child in August of 2091. And soon after, the McCarthy baby, who is due to be born in the spring. And Cassie, who was born last summer. That would make me sad. We didn’t have toddlers when I first started writing this story, and we didn’t know we’d get them or that they’d be so amazing. So I absolutely was planning to just skip over these years to the point where he became a child because I didn’t expect that being a toddler would even be an option for him. Now that we have toddlers, I don’t want him to miss that. I want to take my time here. I want Benji and all of the other sims who will be babies and toddlers in this time period to have that experience.
Because the thing is, I'll get to those stories in 2091 eventually, but I'll never be in 2086 again once we move forward. And I just know that there are moments I would regret having missed. There would be a lot of little in betweens, the kids growing up, the lazy happy times. You can probably expect a wedding at some point, since I think Stephanie’s divorce proceedings have gone on for quite long enough!
Some families will be weird to age down, like Bruce and Pamela who are getting divorced in 2091, but in 2086 would still be together. (Although, I would love to get some pictures of young Jake and Susie at least!) Those families I will probably just ignore as much as possible until we get back to their time in the story. Other families hardly had an update at all, and many more families were not yet part of the blog, so those families will be easy to age down. The thing is, over the past year or so, it turns out I have WAY more families in the 2086 timeline than I left in 2091.
So I’m just going to play and follow their lives. I’m going to build and make mods and catch up with all of my other sims. I will be rotating households again. Time will move along from this point forward (only forward, not backwards again, lol!). Sims will age and have birthdays, fall in love, start families, grow. I won’t post pictures of everything, or make stories of everything—of course, I will make stories of some things because you know me! Mostly I just want to play through it and let that history happen.
I also have a lot of sims to skill up and level up. It annoys me to no end to have a full game of adult sims, who are supposed to be accomplished in their jobs, supposed to have degrees (some of them who did get degrees in previous games), but they’re totally blank and have no skills. Ugh. So I’m going to play and catch everybody up.
And I do have some gameplay details to sort out for planning Keri’s space voyage too, because they actually depart in spring of 2092, just months after where I left off in 2091. So that needs to be ready to go. Dallas hasn’t even started work on building their rocket ships yet!
It’s all because I started this blog by skipping ahead 7 years from where I left off in Lakeside Heights, then I felt bad about it and went backwards 7 years to make up what I missed, and now I’m going forward again. The future will get here when it gets here.
And so we shall begin. Onward!
I guess skipping over Benji's toddler years was a lot more appealing when there was no chance he'd actually have them! I'm glad we'll get to see all the toddler cuteness now. :) I think it'll be fun to step back a bit with the newer families too, to see how they got to where they were when we met them in 2091.
ReplyDeleteAnd randomly, is that a dollhouse in the lower right corner of the last pic? It's so cute! Wonder if there's a 4t2 conversion out there.
Yes, that's really the thing, he would have been stuck as a baby for five years otherwise! OMG I can't believe they made us wait so long for such a vital lifestage! I'm still angry, lol!
DeleteI have some really fun ideas planned for some families, since some of the backstories of 2091 would be happening about right now. Like Pamela's affair, lol! Or how Lauren became a diva. And I'm going to recreate the day that Susie and Reid first met. Or even just simple things, like couples who would have gotten married or had their first babies in this time period. I'll get to recreate a lot of weddings. :D
Yes, that's a dollhouse. The TS4 version is here, if it might help you locate or request a TS2 version.
Toddlers definitely changes things; I had altered some of my sims' ages in Simdale Valley to compensate for the ridiculous jump from the cradle to school-age child, and then changed them back again when we finally got toddlers.
ReplyDeleteI'm looking forward to seeing Keri's preparation for the voyage. And of course, Lucy and Dallas's recreated wedding.
Right! I can't even believe they thought for two years that it was an unimportant age group. It changes so much! Now we all have to sort out our families all over again, lol!
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