courtney summers » procrastination

Vampires Are Ridiculous

courtney — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 05:47:41 +0000

I haven’t updated my blog because I’m afraid the day after I do, I’ll get the go ahead to share my cover, and then the blog entry I wrote before that moment will be lost to my cover reveal forever. And it takes me FOREVER to write these things, you guys!

BUT THEN I was like, maybe I won’t get the go ahead to show my cover until I try that? Maybe that’s exactly how it has to happen and it’s the only thing that’s standing between me and the go ahead for my cover reveal? So maybe I should just see if that logic works? Except this type of logic fails me every time because lately I close emails to my friends with I GET TO REVEAL MY COVER TOMORROW LOL NOT REALLY BUT MAYBE IF I SAY IT HERE IT WILL BE TRUE!

Wat.

It’s not my fault I love my cover that much.

Last week, I was interviewed by the incredibly talented and very awesome author/illustrator, Realm Lovejoy! We talked about Some Girls Are and you can read it all right here. One of the neatest things ever about this particular interview is that Realm illustrated a picture of Regina Afton, who is the main character in Some Girls Are, to go along with it. I gave her a description of Regina to the best of my limited abilities and she came back with Regina, inside and out. My jaw dropped when I saw it.

Is that not amazing?! It blows me away every time I look at it. I’ve made it my desktop, I love it so much! Mine is just one of a series of interviews Realm is doing with accompanying illustrations. Visit her blog to see the rest. A favourite of mine is the one she did with the super cool Suzie Townsend, one of the many agents who make FinePrint Literary Management so darn sparkly.

I have also been hearing some really positive early feedback about Some Girls Are, which has been making me really happy and excited. It’s been called “brutal” by a family member and “gut-wrenching,” by someone who is not related to me or knows me personally! My dear friend Lori, who Cracked Up to Be is dedicated to, gave SGA its first GoodReads review (spoiler-free!).

My dear friend Kim Hutt, aka the mastermind behind What Claudia Wore and What Chuck Wore said: “Some Girls Are makes Cracked Up to Be look like My Little Pony,” (!) and, “I tried so hard not to race through it, but in the end I was like Claudia with a bag full of Hershey’s Kisses. It was doomed from the start and now there’s chocolate everywhere.”

I have no words. Just moved tears.

Anyway, I am so far away from where I last left my Sims I’m having a hard time knowing how to update from where I left off. They’ve had three kids, all girls (one adopted, one not, and an alien baby), become vampires, been cured of vampirism, become vampires again, became zombies and died a few times. I resurrected them a lot because I am having a hard time letting them go. It’s like it’s grade seven and I own a Tamagotchi all over again.

Anyway, here is a video of Shirtless Sam stalking everywhere and flying around like a bat with his crazy vampire powers:

He looks RIDICULOUS!

Then again, most vampires do.

PS:

(Pass it on!)

Some Girls Are Updates… & More Sims

courtney — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 02:32:24 +0000

I got my first pass pages today! I’m really looking forward to sitting down with them and reading Some Girls Are as it looks as a book. The last time I did this with Cracked Up to Be, it felt like something had changed in the reading, but in a positive way.

Uhm, hopefully I will have the same experience this time around.

St. Martin’s Press put their Winter 2010 catalogs online! If you check out the St. Martin’s Griffin catalog, you can see the listing for Some Girls Are! It has a non-final version of the cover and the full plot summary (which I’ve also posted on my Some Girls Are page).

And that is about all that is new over here. Which only leaves A SIMS UPDATE! So much happens when you play this game for hours at a time.

I am dedicating this sim update to Annika.

SO ANYWAY, things are going well with my sim and Shirtless Sam. Now that they are married, they are living the life. Sam got paid $20,000 to streak at a party (did I mention he only has to work on like, the weekends? I KNOW). They fill their days talking about lewd acts involving handcuffs and slow-dancing in the living room with their hands positioned in inappropriate places. My sims are so in love.

Still, my sim really wanted to have a baby. It kept popping up in her aspiration meter. But I think we have established how I feel about raising sim children. After a lot of thinking and ultimately deciding I could always NOT save my progress if it didn’t work out, I decided my sims would adopt a child and see how it went, but not a baby, even though my sim wanted a baby (you can adopt a baby, toddler or child). So I built an extension onto the house.

I thought (and still think) it is HIDEOUS. It breaks up the beautiful layout I had going. So that wasn’t very promising. I already resent this kid and I haven’t even met it yet, right? Anyway, after the day-long wait (that is how long it takes to adopt a child in Simland), the adoption agency dropped off the latest addition to my sim family. It was a girl and her name was Caryl. Within like five minutes of arriving, she was already acting like a burdensome handful, making a mess of the fish tank and playing in said mess:

Our maid was APPALLED. She has just finished cleaning.

I wasn’t sure it was going to work out, to be honest. Also it was really hard to keep Caryl’s needs levels up AND make her do well in school. In fact, when her grades really started to slip, the game threatened to call social services on me (jerks).

AND when I invited her headmaster over for dinner to influence him and boost Caryl’s grades and send her to private school, he said that my sims were no good! Even though he had a grand time in the luv-tub out on the deck. Jackass. But that all happened later. Back to where I left off. So within five minutes of arriving, Caryl is a hellion and I am not sure I want to make her a permanent addition. Even though Caryl was adjusting well and seem to really like her new family, especially her new mom.

Aww. It didn’t carry enough weight with me to save my progress, though. Meanwhile, parenthood was wearing my sim down to the point she could not even eat the turkey dinner she slaved over in the kitchen without falling asleep IN that turkey dinner, so this also had to be taken into consideration when deciding whether or not Caryl could stay.

It didn’t seem very promising for Caryl.

BUT THEN! A BURGLAR HAPPENED! I mean, a burglar tried to rob our house.

Luckily, I had an alarm installed in our house so the police came before anything was taken.

BUT THE POLICE AND THE BURGLAR GOT INTO A HUGE FIGHT. It was very exciting.

Just when I thought it couldn’t get anymore exciting, CARYL CAME OUT AND CHEERED THE FIGHT ON.

And that was so freaking fierce of her, it was the moment I decided she could stay. I saved my progress. Anyway, the burglar was apprehended. Since then, Shirtless Sam and Caryl’s aspiration meters show them wanting to see the ghost of the burglar so uhm… I’m taking that to mean the police murdered the burglar. That is sad, but the police gave us some money as a reward for having a part in the burglar’s apprehension. Or for keeping our silence. I’m not so sure anymore.

Anyway, after about 7 days, Caryl became a teenager. I didn’t throw her a party, but I did cry a little. They grow up so fast.

I am going to be sending her off to college soon, and then I have to choose between demolishing her room or maybe making my sim have an actual baby, because having a baby is STILL in her wants and I guess I care about her happiness. But then I discovered that if male sims (but not female sims!) are abducted by aliens, they can become impregnated with an alien baby so maybe I will have that happen instead.

I’LL KEEP YOU POSTED.

True Romance

courtney — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 03:22:17 +0000

I got an email from my editor saying first pass pages were on their way! Which means I get to see what the pages of Some Girls Are will look like and make any last changes for the finished copies. The cover reveal and ARCS have yet to happen, but it’s crazy to think how close January 2010 is!

I am excited and nervous to think of my mean girls out in the world, being mean.

Meanwhile, I have moved out of the achy-joint hurty stage of my plague and graduated to the I Cough So Hard I Wake Myself Up at Night stage. This is UNCOOL.

It also means lots of Sims.

Look at my house. I am so proud of my house:

My sim is enjoying life post-college:

She worked as a Tarot Card reader but she quit because she’s rich and didn’t actually need to work and those are the kind of values I like to instill in my rich sims. She is also an accomplished guitarist. I have decided she is the lead guitarist in a band that is as popular as Muse.

As you can also see, her relationship with Shirtless Sam is going well (and that he actually wears a shirt sometimes!). Once I found out Shirtless Sam’s profession is Professional Party Guest, I decided I couldn’t kill him. I mean, how cool is that? He gets PAID GOOD MONEY TO SHOW UP AT PARTIES. Which is totally understandable because he is kind of hot and I wish I had his job. Anyway, this bit of knowledge made him infinitely more marry-able to my sim.

Anyway, here are the lovebirds contemplating their future together:

Until my sim got a little bit commitment-phobic and had a freak-out on a park bench:

After she got that out of her system, my sim and Shirtless Sam decided to get married:

Yeah, I don’t know wtf my sim is wearing. That is her FORMAL wear. That is her WEDDING DRESS. That is WHAT SHE WORE TO HER WEDDING. Oh well. It could be worse. It could look like the eighties.

Anyways, after they got married, I found out that Shirtless Sam was like, ten days younger than my sim, so I bought the Elixer of Life with my aspiration points and made her drink until she was only one day older. I am kind of hoping they get old and die together, but if it looks like it will be otherwise, maybe I will just have them make a suicide pact and shuffle loose this mortal coil while they’re still young and beautiful.

This is how they spend their nights:

Married life agreed with Shirtless Sam too well and he ended up gaining a lot of poundage, so I made him exercise all that excess weight off on the treadmill until little stink rays emitted from his body (not pictured, but I thought you would like to know).

So they are pretty happy together. I worry that Shirtless Sam is a bad influence, though.

BECAUSE THEY BOTH LIKE TO WEAR THEIR UNDERWEAR AT THE DINNER TABLE!

Their mothers would be MORTIFIED.

So I am trying to save them from ever finding the truth out about their childrens’ appalling dining habits. To do this, I make sure my sims never pick up the phone when their mothers call.

Anyway, despite HATING looking after sim children, I am debating whether or not to make them have a kid because I feel like I am obligated to keep the family line going or something. Or I could adopt a fully grown kid and then I could shuttle them off to college more quickly. Either way, it is a big life decision. So while I try to figure it out, I make my sims stargaze a lot because I’ve heard they can get abducted by aliens that way and I want to see that happen.

The sad thing is, I am not actually sure if I truly enjoy this game or not. It is kind of doing wonders for my prioritizing, though. Every time I play it, I get so overwhelmed with guilt, I quit the game, work on my book frantically and try to write back to emails as penance. So maybe it doesn’t matter if I enjoy it?