Read-a-thon: Chapters 2 & 3

The idea for this story came to me in January of 2015. The Sims 4 had only been out for four months, and I was knee deep in my legacy challenge. Also, SimLit was still pretty new to me, and up until that time, I hadn’t read a story driven Sim story yet. I was blissfully unaware that the Sims in my story could be actors who portrayed human characters. So, all the characters in this story are actually Sims, but their lives closely mirror that of humans. Looking back, I wish I would have made them human. Everything about these characters is human minus the fact that they speak Simlish and one or two references to Sims in the beginning. If I would have made them human, I could come out and say that Juliana’s native tongue is Spanish, and I probably could have given her a proper country of origin. You’ll notice throughout the story that I never say what her language is despite the fact that you occasionally read Spanish words. For the few of you who do not play this game, all Sims speak Simlish regardless of where they’re from, so there isn’t another Sim language I can make Juliana speak.

I live in the south. I grew up here, but I am not from here. I lack the accent most of the time, but I can talk the talk if I wanted to. I thought it would be fun to give the Humphries family southern accents. Although the southern American dialect is what I’m most familiar with, sometimes it’s hard to write without spelling things phonetically. I’ve read that only immature writers do that. Whoops. So, I looked up a bunch of southern expressions and created a list. Every now and then I pull one from there and stick it in. But, every day speech isn’t riddled with expressions, so I had to phrase their words in a way that you can tell “they ain’t from round here” lol. Harold is the most fun character to write. He doesn’t say much, but when he does…oh boy!

Fun Fact: The “where’s Juliana” game was intentional. I didn’t think you guys would forget that this story was about Juliana, but I wanted to keep her in your minds seeing as how the first 5 or 6 chapters of the story had nothing to do with her. I think it was pretty risky for me to begin this way, but it worked out fairly well.

Enjoy this teaser from season 2!