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Maybe it’s a dream

So while I was half-sleeping away my Sunday afternoon, I had a breakthrough.  A breakthrough in regards to I Woke Up LA.

INCONCEIVABLE! I know.  For so long now, I haven’t been very motivated to work through some plot developments, mostly because I haven’t been able to get beyond Mat and Jill MATJILLMATJILL obsession.

But somehow, in a half-dreamy-sleepy state, I figured it out.  I figured out the difficult details with the rest of Charlotte’s story, and how to tie it in to everything else going on.  UGH, FINALLY!  I’ve always had the broad outline of the story figured out, but not the meat in between.  I think now I’m at a point where I could actually finish this thing.

Of course, work is keeping me too busy at the moment to start writing or making pictures.  But hopefully things will at least cool down this summer and I can finally get it rolling again.

So yeah, not much is said here, and I won’t give away any real details, lol, but up until now this story has pretty much been on unofficial hiatus.

Now I’ve got something to work with.

Back to monotony.

So the wonderful Thanksgiving holidays are over and the count down to Christmas holidays begins. I want Christmas to be here quite badly because the thought of working all day right now makes me want to gouge out my eyes; however, I also don’t want Christmas to be here yet because I’m in no mood to go Christmas shopping. Just ugh.

Anyway, Thanksgiving was fun; I went to Dallas/Fort Worth to visit my parents, and spent most of the time there reading Harry Potter. Obsessed much? Oh yes. I’m now almost halfway through the last book, and I’m still pissed about what happened to Sirius in the fifth book. The only other thing I really did over the break was go to a Tori Amos concert! The weather was cold and rainy and we had to pay $15 to park and then walk in the miserable weather, but Tori was nothing short of completely awesome. And she performed Cornflake Girl. Which completely made my night right there.

This was my second time seeing her in concert, and I think I liked this time a bit better because one, our seats were a bit closer, and two, she played with her band, which I think makes it more interesting for some songs. She still did a solo section with just her and the piano, but it was nice hearing her with the band as well this time.

Moving on, I just want to say THANK YOU again to those of you who read the new chapters of I Woke Up LA. I’m happy that it was well-received and your comments make me excited to start the next part. Though, however excited I may be, I do think it will be quite some time before the next chapters are released. I do not know if I will have much time to even start working on it before Christmas. Of course, you never know, maybe me saying that will make the opposite happen.

I will say this about what to expect in the future chapters: Read the rest of this entry »

Sleep is pretty awesome.

I don’t feel like working on the two things I need to be working on right now. Oh, I do believe I’d just rather get run over by a truck. The effects of Daylight Saving Time ending are already fading, and this is only the second work morning. Bloody hell, I hate mornings. If only I lived in a world where I could always sleep through them.

I’m currently on a roll with I Woke Up LA progress. I’m up to 47 pictures now, 13 of which I did last night. That’s huge for a weeknight. Especially considering most of the shots are pretty hack-intensive. I realized last night that nearly 50% of the pictures I’ve done so far have been on Sim beds. Ridiculous much? Oh yes. I’m not sure why exactly I wrote so many conversations on beds this time, but I wouldn’t have been able to do any of the pictures without that wonderful “posing on objects” hack at Mod. How did I live without that thing before now?

Writing is nearly complete, with the exception of Charlotte and Geoffrey flashbacks and another flashback I have planned for some other characters. I’m so ready to get this chapter out there. So much of it has been sitting in my Google Docs for far too long! Currently, it’s almost 19,000 words. Massive! I hope I didn’t drag some parts on for too long. I’ve also decided to break from my current chapter structure a little bit with chapters 7 and 8. So, neither will follow the exact formula of the past: present day, New York, Charlotte’s flashback, New York, present day, LA. Woohoo for change! I’m actually ending chapter 8 with the present day scene and that will be the only present day scene in chapter 7 or 8. Can you guess why? XD

(By the way, in case you haven’t been keeping up, chapters 7 and 8 will be released at the same time, so when I say I have 130+ slides, that’s for both chapters!)

A Case of the Mondays.

Believe it or not, I actually made some progress on I Woke Up LA this weekend.  And by this weekend, I mean last night mostly.  I now have 26 pictures completed.  It’s amazing how long those 26 took, and while granted–they were probably some of the more difficult of the bunch, I’m not looking forward to the remaining 100+.  Picture taking used to be the best part of making the story for me, but now…it’s just too much of a pain in the ass.  I think the standards are too high for my lazy butt now, and my lots are just disgusting now after 6 chapters and nearly 2 years.

Just plain barf, really.  I have at least 800 Jills running around in that neighborhood, and as hot as that may sound to some of you, I just want to get a shotgun and start killing some of them off.  Of course, I do that, and something will screw up the neighborhood, so I’m just dealing with the mess to avoid complications at the moment.

Anyway, on a plus side, I think I’m done with ridiculous blanket editing.  I gave up and took an easy way out on one picture, but I don’t care anymore, and hopefully most of the pictures from the scene turned out alright.

Okay, new topic: it’s Monday afternoon and I’m taking a break at work right now because I just found the solution to something that was looming over my head for a while then causing me massive amounts of grief this morning with its lack of an ability to work at all.  But now it’s working and I’m super excited and rewarding myself with the treat of coming on here and blabbing away about nothing.

Today’s nothing topic will be a follow-up to my gushing on about Tool in the last post.  Today I will mention the coolest cover-mix I have ever heard.  A cover so awesome, I’m willing to listen to it at major McPoo quality because no higher quality is available that I know of.  It’s entirely possible I’ve blabbed about this song before.  It’s A Perfect Circle’s live cover combination of The Cure’s Love Song and Ozzy’s Diary of a Madman.

It amazes me how APC put these two songs together.  Completely seamless as if they were meant to be that way.  Mentions of diarrhea and all.  Listen to it; it’s all kinds of coolness.  And if you’ve been living under a rock covered in a hundred other rocks, here are the originals: Love Song and Diary of a Madman.

Taking off…

I started taking pictures for Chapter 7 tonight. No, I’m not done writing. But I didn’t feel like writing tonight, I felt like starting pictures. So here we are.

Remember that post from July where I griped about how difficult pictures were going to be for this chapter? Well, mostly difficult because I am the suck at drawing things like blankets. I think the one here kind of looks like a swirly slug shake. Oh well.

On the upside, those magic display tray objects or whatever they’re called that let you pose sims on objects are fantastic! Definitely making things easier on that front.

I got ten slides done tonight; let’s see if this keeps up. The entire time I was taking pictures, I was listening to the new Radiohead album. Obsessed much? Oh yes. It’s good to be obsessed with something new because I was entirely bored of my music before this came out. And I love the “pay what you want for it” thing Radiohead is trying out with this album. Only they would do something like this. So if they’re only going to release it online (not counting crazy ass box set), then I’m glad it’s like this. I don’t particularly care for paying a great deal for digitally downloaded music. If I pay for it, I typically want something tangible (a CD). 99 cents for one song on iTunes is positively ridiculous to me, and would be a last resort for me to obtain a song.

So yeah. I highly recommend buying the album. My favorites at the moment are 15 Step, Reckoner and Jigsaw Falling into Place.

Sim Picture Challenge of the Century!

I am setting myself up for disaster with pictures for chapter 7.  As I’m writing (several scenes now!), I find myself thinking what a bitch this is going to be to capture in the game.  Massive editing or major trickery will definitely need to be involved.

I wish I could describe what it is exactly that I want to accomplish, but that would be revealing too much information.  But I will leave you with this much:

1. I wish sims could sit on beds.  I noticed in chapter 6, I was all about the bed-sitting, and was able to accomplish sitting on the edge of the bed quite easily by moving them from a bar-stool.  However, I want them to be able to sit cross-legged in the middle of the bed.  I’ve never understood that “constrainfloorelevation” cheat to get Sims on objects, and I don’t think I have the patience for it either.  So I’m going to have to result to editing for that.
2. On a similar note, I wish Sims had blankets. Blankets are such a necessary part of life and it drives me bonkers sometimes that Sims don’t have them unless they’re sleeping on the bed–which is so insanely limited in that you really can’t get any decent shots of Sims in beds at all.
3. I wish sims could appear wet.  Or perhaps bubbly like after you wash the dogs in the Pets EP.  *Snickers*

I suppose I could just alter my setting in these scenes to not including blankets or sitting on beds, and for some circumstances, that might work.  But not these!  I absolutely will not change what I have planned.

So somehow I’m going to have to figure out how to make blankets of the non-shitty variety in Photoshop. Oh, dear me.

By the way, I very much all the comments everyone has given me in regards to chapter 6—on my forum, on the blog, on my Flickr, at the Hangout and on my simpage.  I am often terrible at responding to people’s comments they graciously hand out, but in my quiet and rather anti-sociable nature, I often just don’t have much worthwhile to add.  But know that I love your comments more than anything, and probably would have given this up long ago if it wasn’t for them.