time in a bottle, revisited

* Sorry, this is going to be unbelievably long and rambly! *

not really a prosperity blog, or anything like it, anymore...

It's been a long time since I wrote that post on time and aging, and a lot of things have changed in the almost-three years I've been writing this story. So if this opens a new era in the keeping of LH time, then it's something that actually happened quite a while ago. If you compare my rounds 2076/78 to rounds 2080 and especially 2082, I'm sure you'll see the huge difference ;)

I don't play/write my families in anything resembling equal turns. In fact, I rarely get the chance to really and truly "play" my families at all anymore. I'm fine with that, by the way. I have just as much fun using the game to tell my story as I do playing it for fun. And in the midst of posing, I do try to steal a couple minutes to just "play" them like the little pixel dollies they are. If I do manage to take any cues from gameplay anymore, it'll be found in these little 5-minute play sessions.

This story (and all of its story parts) has plenty of momentum, for the next two rounds, and into the spin-off even after the Lakeside Heights portion of the story is finished. So I thought we could talk about the way things started here, and what things have become. And I'll go ahead and finally say out loud that we're leaving that "prosperity blog" structure, which in honesty, we left quite a while ago.

You won't notice any difference as you read, of course, because we haven't been following that prosperity structure for at least the whole of round 2082. And the way I'll likely continue to do things is the way I've been writing this current round - five or six seasons to a round, and focusing on the development of a few prominent storylines each season.

First, I blame it on Piper and Hayden. And Dallas too. These were my first real mini-updates of actual substance, and the first times I needed to tell a story outside the structure of everyone's slotted "turn". Then I blame it on Micah and Mariah. Theirs was the first time I had so much story to tell that I had to split an update into parts. And I loved it! It gave me so much more room to really dig into the characters and situations. Being a storyteller before I was a prosperity hood blogger, you can guess that I found this new balance particularly appealing. And, if I might say so, it made the story much richer.

So that's when things changed around here, through the early parts of round 2080, which was nearly two years ago. So while we aren't changing much more right now, there are a few things we are changing.

First, I'm thinking that some of my quieter families will no longer get a once-a-round update. This is really the biggest difference between what I was doing before (gameplay-focused prosperity blog) and what I'm doing now (story-focused neighborhood drama). I have so many families with actual stories to write about that there's no point really trying hard to make up stories for families that don't already have one. If they decide to take part in the story again later, then so be it. But I've just got plenty to write about as it is, you know? I'll be following the stories and characters that inspire me, and not really worrying about who gets equal screentime or not.

Also, a couple of my families are going to live in short stories this round (if I get around to revising them...), rather than take their turn in the round. But they're not part of any of our major storylines, so I doubt you'll even know they were missing. And just a couple of the other quieter ones will fall to the background, still make appearances as family and friends, and they'll still grow up, go to school, etc. They'll basically become something like semi-playables.

Downgrade, lol!

the unbearable slowness of time...

With the addition of more and more mini-updates (which are often not so mini at all!), and large story sets broken into many parts, you've likely noticed that time has slowed way down. Note that the first twelve story pieces of this season all took place in the same story-week... and that they took me over two months to write. This season is a bit top-heavy, being that half of the stories take place in the month of December. But time will not always move so slowly (or we'd never get through it all!). The second half of this current season will cover the months of January, February, and March, all in about the same number of stories. Sometimes, like real life, there's just a lot more going on.

Given the slowness, and the close proximity of time between one story and the next, I've started to put exact dates in the date headings. This is something that's probably more helpful for me than it will be for you, and I'm not sure you'll even notice, really. But I usually work them out for myself anyway, and in the past few stories, I've found myself wanting to count back weeks for a real space of time, or needing to know that the past eight stories all occurred in the same space of a week or something.

Have you ever seen a calendar for the year 2083?

Well now you have! A real and actual calendar of the real and actual month of December, 2083! I had no idea that Liquid Story Binder could actually do this, lol! But it can! And I find this very helpful to me, since I have all these stories going on, running into each other and clashing and intersecting.

The screen above is from "forget what we're told, part 2". I've listed the primary happenings of each scene in the update, but also, at the bottom, you'll notice that I listed the happenings of things going on in the background outside the story as well. I'll use this as a reference point if I ever need to know that a particular character couldn't have been in two different places at the same time. Also, some days have two or three different stories listed (like Jodie's story, ambitions of teamwork, broken into three parts which all took place in about the space of an hour, lol!).

So you can notice the dates, if you want. Or you can ignore them. It's just a nerdy fascination of mine, having my characters and stories exist in a real and concrete world with painfully intricate time, lol! :p

And since we have real and actual dates...

birthdays, real and actual birthdays!!!

I went ahead and gave all my sims/characters real and actual birthdates!!! This is probably the biggest current change you'll notice around here. I did this a few weeks ago, and it was surprisingly a lot less time-consuming that I thought it would be. So now all of your favorite LH residents have a real birth date, month, and year, and their actual birthdates are all listed in the profiles.

This is another product of the slowing time, that it actually makes sense to have birthdays. If I were bombing through this story as fast as I used to, it probably wouldn't make sense.

I'll do a birthdays post each story-month for those Sims having a birthday, and like the New Year's updates, they will be actual stories too. You'll get to see this in action with tonight's update, and the first birthday post is from Stephanie. The rest of my December birthdays will be listed at the bottom of her story.

Then each story month, I'll go through and update the ages of those who have birthdays that month, and feature one of them in a story.

I haven't had the chance to work out how I'll do physical age-ups yet, but I imagine the way I'll do it is this: toddlers (8 months), children (4 years), teens (12 years), and elders (60 years), will age up on their actual birthday. Young adults and adults will transition on their graduation/drop-out day, so their ages will vary at the time of transition, but will likely still be around 18 for YA and around 22 for adults.

and something on tense...

I promised some people I would talk about my choice of POV and tense in Lakeside Heights. (That was weeks ago I promised that, sorry!)

POV:
I use several narrators, third person - because hell, there's like 23 main characters or something! I don't have the luxury of developing 23-or-so distinct first-person narrative voices (though I do try to give them their own voice for dialogue), so I use an authorial voice for the whole.

I love writing stories from several points of view though, and if I ever write a substantially-sized story with just one narrator, I think it'll be cause for alarm. Seriously, I am fascinated by telling stories from different angles. I write single narrators for short stories sometimes, but that's just because of the space constraints.

(Hmmm... *wonders if I could write a short story with two narrators?*)

Tense:
Lakeside Heights is written in present tense for its immediacy. Each entry is its own precise moment in a long chronology of time. Each entry takes place in a very precise day, month, and year, different from the one before it and the one after it. Each entry is rather short (compared to the big picture) and is precisely in the present, and thus, I use present tense.

Of course, I'm not really sure I was so aware of that choice when I started this story. I was just kind of winging it, and figured out how it made sense after ;)

ETA: further notes on birthdays and school kids...

I had to move some of my kids around in their school grades. A lot of this has to do with whether they've had their birthday or not at the time of this change. For those with winter and spring birthdays, it became an issue of either pushing them forward in age, or holding them back. Some of them would essentially then get two birthdays in a row, or no birthday at all for a full year, and that messes up all my friendships and planned romances, lol! We can't have that ;)

The ones held back have more to do with their emotional maturity than their intelligence. So it's not like they failed a grade or anything, lol!

For future children, I'll have them start kindergarten when they're 5, and I'll divide the summer birthdays around how many I have in each grade.

moving ahead:
Raine, Zach, and Felicity move to Kindergarten.
Bianca, Elliot, Connor, and Shaun move to 1st grade.
Devon moves to 2nd grade.
Sam moves to 7th grade.
Delphie, Dakota, and Robbie to 8th grade.
Hazel, Natty, and Charlie move to 9th grade.
Isaiah to 10th grade.
Melissa to 11th grade.
Lucy to 12th grade.

held in same grade:
Elijah, Amy, Blair, Fiona, Melody, Liza, Sarah, Cecilia, Ryanne, Angelo, Abby, Julia, Laney, Gabby