a prequel to Boxes and Squares

New story coming soon!

Boxes and Squares will be completed in about 7 (huge) chapters. (Estimated around 28k words—another novella, folks! I can’t stop with these characters, I truly can’t!) 

Because the chapters are so big, I feel it would be the least frustrating to post to Tumblr first as I shoot the scenes, then compile the chapters to the blog shortly afterward. I hope not to have too much of a delay between the Tumblr postings and the completed chapters here, but you know, life happens. 🙃

The story spans from September 2088 to March 2089 in the timeline, and will have two short intermissions to visit other families. We will center around Jordan and Maria again, but with shared focus on Ingrid, Colette, and the kids. Supporting roles for Tyler and Maya, Lou (Maria’s sister), Jack Phoenix, and maybe… Charlie? Not sure yet how much trouble Ingrid might cause. You can never really know with that girl, lol!

To start, I kind of feel like taking a little walk down memory lane with Ingrid.

The thing is, writing Ingrid for the upcoming stories, a lot of her mindset and growth keeps reflecting back to the summer of 2085 and the definitive three weeks (it really was only three weeks, lol!) when she was absolutely stupid crazy in love with Charlie Roseland. And I think to understand 25-year-old Ingrid, we need to know 22-year-old Ingrid from that summer.

Those stories were posted on an obscure little side blog, The Lakeside Files, TS3 era, in 2014! Wow, a whole freaking decade ago! I don’t expect anyone to go digging for the relevant posts and scenes, so I’ve done a little flashback series on my Tumblr where you can find them all easily. Truly, it’s been very interesting to focus on Ingrid’s POV only from that story, and how it must have felt to be in her head that summer. Charlie’s story is already told, but you are always welcome to read (or re-read) Charlie & Natty’s story in its entirety on The Lakeside Files. 

Of course, you don’t have to read these flashbacks either, but they will provide perspective on Ingrid’s actions and motivations in her 25 year-old life in Boxes and Squares.

Ingrid’s POV from, “2085: a rebel yell” 

Charlie-fucking-Roseland
enjoying the quiet
science
a forgotten memory
hiding in the supply closet
last day of the summer fair
always choose dare
the ferris wheel
warm beer
thank you kiss
endings and rebounds

life off-camera: Riley & Chad

Previously with the Hathe family (time in sim-years): Chad started his first arcade (8 years ago), Riley's shelter that Chad never really liked (4 years ago), Chad's rad vest and Liza's first date (3 years ago),  that time Riley was a little bit snippy with Stephanie (3 years ago).

I have been sitting on a story for two weeks now, going back and forth, trying to decide what to do with a particular nugget of Riley and Chad's history. It's a problematic nugget because it happened three years ago, right about the time the LH blog ended, actually. It's over and done with now, but that doesn't mean it's not still part of their lives. Even so, it will only amount to about a line or two of their next chapter. So I wanted to put this out here, because I figure people might read it and be like, "What?!? When did that happen?" lol!

As sims, this is a true story. It's true for them as characters, too, because you know how we sometimes exit without saving because we don't want to commit something to their "real" story. Well, that's not what happened here. I committed this event to their story both as sims and as characters.

elections 2086

A quickie history on TS4 world building: 

In America of my imagined future, there are six districts. We are following three of them in this story—Mid-Atlantic (states bordering the Atlantic from about DC to South Carolina), Lakes (states bordering the Great Lakes, particularly Lake Superior and Lake Michigan), and Pacific (states bordering the Pacific, as you might guess). The districts we are not following are New England, Gulf, and Mountain. (You can sort of see on my map how my played towns are clustered in the south-west, north, and south-east.)

I set it up this way because of, in part, the way TS4 is designed with towns that are pre-designed and not editable. If they ship me a world that looks like South Carolina or Arizona, there is very little I can do to change that. So they are what they look like, and that's that. That was the main reason that my story was written at first between two regions—Fort Palmetto and Sierra Nova—working from the first two towns we had, Willow Creek and Oasis Springs. Then they shipped me Windenburg that looked like Europe and I had no freaking idea how to fit it into my story. I ended up knocking down some mountains and opening up the water, and now it's become Copper County, my third region. As best it can be without world editing tools, anyway.

TS4 is still being developed and they're still making new worlds for us. That's great, because we desperately need the space! But it means that my game is still constantly changing, so new areas come along all the time that I need to figure out what to do with. I have decided that three districts is well enough for me to keep track of (since each district needs its own schools, communities, leadership, and economy), while having some variety and space for my towns. The three areas that I chose are differentiated enough in climate and landscape that I think I should be able to find a good fit within for whatever kind of world they give us next. (The world from the new Pets EP will fit nicely in Wisconsin for me!)

We will imagine the other US states of 2086 are doing just fine and carrying on off-camera. Just, none of my sims will ever be allowed to move to Florida or Colorado or Maine, lol!

Anyway.

population explosion: notes on residence in my TS4 world

I have a love/hate relationships with sim townies. For as long as I have played sims games, I have had this same dilemma: who gets to be part of my neighborhood, to have their stories lived and documented, and who has to stay in the background? In a perfect world, I would be able to use all of my own sims in every available role and assign them where I want them to go, and I would have the tools to make enough space for them all to live in. But y'all know these games are not perfect.

Yet I have always fallen in love with my townie sims, the friends and ex-lovers of my born-in-game sims. Some of my very favorite sims started out as townies once. Every time someone gets dumped, I always feel so bad for them and want to follow their lives to happiness. You have to have a townie pool, but you can't play them all. It just goes on and on and on. Ex-lovers need new lovers and friends and family. I always feel like my townies need to have a family of their own. Only so many marry-in townies can be orphans before you get bored of writing the orphan story, lol!

an author's note on timelines and in betweens

So, that was just the NaNoWriMo that lasted seventeen months!

Drown #12: hand in my pocket, part 2

May 2086. Keri Riley is 25. Bryson is 64, Madison is 63. Cabe Deppiesse is 45, Orion is 53, Dallas is 21.

Soundtrack, "Hand in my Pocket," by Alanis Morissette


Back on Earth, Keri's work looked a lot like most people's jobs looked. Notebooks on long tables, cups of coffee, colleagues talking over each other. But it wasn't everyone's job to meet with Earth's only known resident alien family. It was funny that Keri had never thought to ask Cabe before why he decided to pursue a job in astronautics. She had assumed he was like everyone else who just wanted to fly rocket ships and explore space. But knowing now that his brother was half alien, the reasons became clear. There was so much he wanted to learn about our universe and how it all worked.

They had two orders of business to start. First, they needed to make sense of the engineering notes that Lampyridae had left them. Second, they had to find a way to communicate with the Cassiopeians on a more reliable basis, which would also be the way they could communicate back home once they had embarked on the mission. Although their engineering specs could make it possible to travel faster than light, only those physical things that traveled with them in their ship would come along for the ride. To send messages that way would mean to harness the power of their warp drive each and every time, and that was just not practical.

"But let's think about this another way," Cabe suggested. "How did the Cassiopeians know that we needed help here? They didn't send a message on a warp drive, and they didn't use a wormhole. They spoke with the baby. They communicated with their minds."

"You’re not using my baby," Dallas said.

who gets the cabin?

* even though this story is from a novel, these characters are also sims that will continue to live in my neighborhood when I’m done with this part of the story. Then they'll be allowed to just be sims. So I wanted to draw up actual paperwork for Stephanie and Jeremiah, even if it's just for my own record-keeping to use in the future.

** at the bottom of these divorce documents (previous divorces and future ones, of which I think Bruce and Pamela were the only ones I had so far on this blog) I've added a section of notes and amendments as they go back and forth with their lawyers. I won't be writing a story update for every single little squabble in the divorce proceedings, but I'll note what things are happening "off-camera" as they happen in case anyone is interested and for my own notes.

*** also note, in case anyone was doing the math: I'm calling Willow aged 4 years old for the story because I feel like her character is 4-5 years old maturity wise and it suits the story I wrote. Although, as a sim in my gameplay world and according to the dates, she won't be 4 for nearly eight more months. That's totally a minor detail in a game where we don't even have freaking toddlers, lol! But, in real life, there can be a world of difference in a child's maturity between the ages of 3 and 5, and so it matters to me in the writing.

And so, the divorce papers...

on pivot points of the universe

I was wondering if anybody wondered about that! :D

Drown #7.3: the caretakers

April, 2085 — Stephanie Nova and Justin Kim are 25, Keri Riley is 24. Jeremy Nova is 69, Alice is 63, Lily is 2. Willow is 3.


You could see them up there in the daytime, if you looked really hard and in just the right light. Stephanie thought they looked like a swarm of metal insects, with their patterned synchronized movements. They didn’t seem to be doing anything at all that anyone knew of. They just flew.

After a couple of weeks, people began to go outside again once it became clear that the things weren’t trying to attack us. It was springtime at the end of the world, who wouldn’t want to see the trees and flowers blossom one last time? So people went jogging and walked their children to the playground. They should have been more unnerved than they were, maybe, but the sound these things made was not unpleasant.

Stephanie thought the sound was almost lovely, almost melodious, like listening to music as she ran. The things streaked across the sky at all hours, never stopping. The noise went on and on since they'd arrived, steady and constant, not enough to overpower the wind or the rain or the waves, but lying underneath it. It became the background noise of the whole world.

Rumors were that the military shot one out of the sky and was dissecting it. They were only rumors though. People talked on the sidewalks and playgrounds. People made up their own stories about what they didn't know.

Justin and Stephanie, preface to an epic saga

This post is a recap I made, gearing up to begin this epic story, Drown, for Justin and Stephanie. You can absolutely just dive straight into chapter 1 here, but know that about a third of their story exists on the Lakeside Heights blog. Hence this recap, so you can skip reading those old stories if you’d like to begin here. 

I started writing this for NaNoWriMo 2015 and fell completely and hopelessly in love with it! Considering the outline for it, being at about 16 chapters at the moment (and not small chapters, either—full novel-sized chapters), I realized that the whole story is, in fact, about the size of a novel. Needless to say, I went back and forth and back and forth about whether it would be too big to do on the blog, much less too big for a simmed story (not even to mention that TS4 doesn’t have toddlers and there are many prominent toddler characters in this story).

This is a story I’ve wanted to share since I stopped blogging it five years ago on the LH blog. And the TS4 pictures I’ve managed to get from the game so far are just turning out so good. (Because you know, when the game cooperates and the scenes come into view, there is just something so rewarding about doing these sim-illustrated stories. So much so that I’m considering doing the book version of this as a partial graphic novel, because that’s something I’ve always wanted to do as well.) So whether it’s too big or not, the thing is that I started to blog pieces of it and now I can’t stop. So here we go.

There are essentially three parts to Drown. 1.) what happened on the old LH blog, 2.) what I’m posting here as round 2084: Drown, and 3.) the shared multi-family rotational timeline we will return to after Drown is over, which will, of course, include Justin and Stephanie and their whole crew. 

As for the first part, I don’t expect anyone to troll through an old blog full of hundreds of old stories to brush up on what happened to these guys before. So that’s why I’ve made this recap! There’s just too much to get through, and a lot of the older stories are quite sloppy, so here is a nice summary/reminder for everyone of what happened. However, I will also provide links in case anyone wishes to click over and read some of the older things (the ones that ever made it onto the blog, anyway).

Here we go!

Dallas and Lucy, a history

This is just a bit of a refresher for those who read the TS2 version of Dallas and Lucy, or a history for those who didn't, and to fill in the missing gaps between where their story left off in the year 2084. I did make Dallas and Lucy as TS3 sims, but I never added them to my 1980's version of LH, so there was nothing missed in that "era."


First, a recap:

In TS2, the last we saw of Dallas and Lucy together was July of 2083. Lucy had just turned seventeen, and Dallas was eighteen. In the coming fall, Dallas would be going off to study abroad after winning a very prestigious scholarship, and Lucy would be stuck at home finishing out her senior year of high school. They only had a few weeks left together.