Before you begin reading this article and if you are in the process of reading any of the three stories on this blog please note there are spoilers for all the stories in this article.
Some of the reasons as to why I wrote Laurie’s Wonderful Life can be found in this preview. But those weren’t the only reasons.
In both The Kid & Me and in Laurie & Dag I had copped out in a small way. Originally in The Kid & Me, Bettie was to be killed when she was hit by that car near the end of the story until I gave her a last minute reprieve. Likewise, I originally thought I might end Laurie & Dag differently.
My idea for Laurie and Dag was to end the story with Laurie and Angela being reunited as part of the last Chapter, and then the ending epilogue would take place years later. It would have had Laurie and Angela living together as they are at the beginning of Laurie’s Wonderful Life, and they would go to that bar once again and the crazy guy would enter as he did before. Only it would have been Angela to have been shot and killed.
The reason I almost used that ending is not only because an event like that actually did happen, but because I wanted to give the reader some idea that Lesbians and Gays not only face a great deal of discrimination, but that there is always the thought that some crazy is out there wanting to take them out for whatever reason. You could ask Matthew Shepherd and Scotty Joe Weaver about that, that is if they were alive for you to do so.
But in the end I felt that after everything Laurie had went through in Laurie and Dag, that I needed to leave the reader with at least some sense of hope for the future. Maybe it is just my own wishful thinking also that things can be better. Of course, when I wake up to the news every day and see the shambles that Bush and his co-horts have made of this country, when I read stories such as this one I read last week, you really begin to wonder if there is any hope for anything and whether or not the damage they have done can ever be corrected. I mean when this country worries more about keeping a couple of the same sex from exchanging vows at the alter, or worse than that how many days Paris Hilton will spend in jail then the fact that there are over 3,000 dead in Iraq and that the President and his cohorts has made a shambles of the constitution, then they might as well start calling us The United States of Looney Tunes.
Still, I had the scene in my mind of Laurie and Angela going into that bar in my mind and it just kind of stayed there as if I needed to write it. So eventually that scene became the most important scene in Laurie’s Wonderful Life, as it was the driving force behind the whole story.
Another reason I wrote Laurie’s Wonderful Life is that I felt I owed closure to those who had been loyal followers of the story on the official Sims 2 web site. Even when I originally wrote it I didn’t expect Wonderful Life to do well on that site. Most of my regular readers had moved on after having became quite disgusted with the way the official site was being ran back then and is still being run now. I seldom use it and when I do it is to find an answer for somebody else. And as I suspected, it didn’t do well at all and was pretty much buried after being attacked by those who still held silly grudges for one reason or another including the fact that I had dared to write a story about gays and a girl having an abortion.
The thing of it is, I will probably always regret in some way that I didn’t pick up Laurie’s and Angela’s story right after the original story ended. There were several reasons for it, the main one being that because I had lost so much readership at The Sims 2 site, there would not be anybody to bother with reading it. I’m sure some of you will say that it shouldn’t matter and perhaps you are right. But writing a Sims story that is worthwhile with the pictures and everything else involved requires an enormous amount of time and effort, and you would want to think that the effort was rewarded at least in some readership. I really don’t care if someone likes or dislikes the story, but I would at least like them read. And at that time since The Sims 2 was the only outlet for those stories, it was not something I cared to pursue for that site as I knew any thing I wrote would be forever buried by those silly people with their silly grudges and narrow mindedness.
Another reason I didn’t pick up Laurie and Dag’s story right after high school is because I didn’t think I could ever do it justice. For one thing, I was clueless as to what it would be like for Laurie to struggle through College and Medical School even if I do watch Grey’s Anatomy every week. But most of all, I honestly didn’t think I could write about the Gay & Lesbian lifestyle and get it right. And if I was going to write about it, getting it right was extremely important. I had made it through Laurie & Dag by doing hours and hours of research on the internet. To go through the years with Laurie and Angela would have required researching not only what studying to be a surgeon would be like, but even more hours of research into the gay life style. And it is not that I was unwilling to do that, but to make that much of a commitment I would have to know that there were enough people out there reading it to make it worth my while.
And of course as I have mentioned time and time again, if I were to write such a story for The Sims 2 web site, I would have to constantly change what I wanted to write to fit their criteria as I did with both Laurie and Dag and Laurie’s Wonderful Life.
The graphic scene in the bar when Joe is killed was not even close to being what I wrote for this story blog. Here is the original text as Angela remembered that night. You can compare it to the rewrite I uploaded in Act One.
She had been on the dance floor with Margie. Unlike Laurie, she had not noticed the stranger entering the bar. Margie and she were just about to leave the floor when the slow dance started and Joe and Laurie had come to join them. Margie and she had decided to dance the slow dance together also. Angela had been looking at Joe, thinking that he wasn’t a bad dancer at all, when she heard the first shot, not really knowing what it was. Everything else was almost a blur of events that happened in a matter of seconds, but played over and over in slow motion in her head. She had looked over at the bar, but Jerome was no longer standing there. People stood up and began screaming. She saw a bald headed man walking towards them. It was then that she saw Joe throw Laurie to the floor, just as another shot rang out and ricocheted off the concrete walls. Both her and Margie had stood there stunned, not sure what was going on or what to do. “Get on the floor,” Joe had yelled at them again. Angela grabbed Margie's belt and started to pull her downwards. She was too late. Another shot, and blood spurted out of the back of Margie's shirt. She had been critically wounded. From the floor, Angela could see Joe headed towards the baldheaded man, and some of the other guys in the bar moved towa
rds him also. Everybody else had ducked under tables. Laurie hadn't moved, the violent force of the throw to the floor had momentarily stunned her. If Joe had been twenty years younger, or perhaps even ten, he may have reached the gunman. But just as Joe was about to reach the bald headed man, the gun fired again, one more time, more blood, and Joe fell to the floor. It had been a direct hit, the bullet piercing his heart, and he was dead. Moments later he was lying lifeless in a pool of blood, Laurie and Angela both kneeling over his lifeless body, as Laurie used every skill she had to try and bring him back. It was to no avail. Several of the guys in the bar managed to tackle the bald headed man with the gun just a second later. But it was too late for Joe, and for Jerome who would die of his wounds an hour later, and for Margie who would never walk again.
As you can see it is quite a bit different if you go back and compare it to the rewrite. Is there any doubt in your mind which is more effective? And in the original pictures there was no blood. For this blog, I photoshopped it into the pictures. It was the same problem I ran across in Laurie & Dag. I had to somehow hint at Laurie having physical desires as well as her emotional ones, yet to even suggest that she might even have had such thoughts on The Sims 2 would have had the story yanked before you can say pomegranate.
Now there will be those who probably absolutely hate the epilogue in Laurie’s Wonderful Life. It is certainly filled with quite a bit of what I call the fantasy element. But let’s not forget that at it’s heart, it is not only a story about redemption it is first and foremost still a Christmas story. It’s not that you can’t write a Christmas story without some kind of fantasy elements, but I think the best ones do include it in one form or another. Certainly the original It’s A Wonderful Life movie did, and definitely the same goes for Charles Dicken’s Christmas Carol so how can you argue with success? The only thing I can say is that if it wasn’t your cup of tea pretend that the epilogue doesn’t exist and that Laurie wakes up and everything that happened to her was just her dreams just as I guess Oz was supposed to be when Dorothy woke up (movie version). Still, when I wrote those last few lines added to the picture of Joe standing next to Laurie and Bettie, even I got choked up a bit. I had brought all of these characters to life, and at that point it was over.
So where does that leave me and where does that leave this blog. I have a couple of stories in mind that I could write. But it would take a lot of time and effort. I’m perfectly willing to give it that if I feel there will be at least a few people out there not only wanting to read it but with the patience to wait in between story chapters which because of other things I have going on. It could take several weeks to complete each one. Remember, unlike these stories that were already written, I would be writing anything new from scratch including setting up the Sims game for the story and shooting new pictures. The one advantage I would have in posting to this blog is that I wouldn't have to take so many repetitious pictures. For instance, because of the way the Sims story telling interface is designed, you have to have a picture for every single very short page. So when there is something like a conversation between two characters, you may have to have five or six different pictures of that conversation whereas for this blog you would probably only need one.
I guess that’s where that little survey comes in that I have posted in the right hand column. A lot depends on it, not so much as to what the answers are but as a way to gage how many are actually reading these stories or have read them. I can post stuff on Clyde’s Place and it doesn’t matter as much that there may not be anybody reading if at all. I can write for it at my leisure when I want and when I feel like it. But writing these stories is a bit different and to put the kind of effort into it that it would take to get going again, I have to know that there are enough people reading to encourage me to do so. So the only thing I can say is we’ll see, but it doesn’t look hopeful. In all the stories I have received comments from two people in the comments section (three if you count someone promoting a porn site) and one of them was related. I have received exactly three emails in regards to the stories and that’s it whereas when Laurie & Dag were at the height of their popularity on Sims 2, I was receiving several emails a day and hundreds of comments on my Sims page. Those are not good numbers especially when you consider that I can write a five paragraph story about American Idol for Clyde's Place and get my Inbox flooded. So if you have read or are in the process of reading, please take the survey or write to me at Clydesplace@gmail.com.
And finally, I want to thank each and every one of you who have read these stories or are in the process of doing so. I do hope that you enjoyed them and I hope that in some small way they may have touched you because in the end, that’s all that really matters to me. Whatever happens in the future, at least I have once again given these three stories a home, one I hope they can have for a long long time. Thanks again.
Clyde
Some of the reasons as to why I wrote Laurie’s Wonderful Life can be found in this preview. But those weren’t the only reasons.
In both The Kid & Me and in Laurie & Dag I had copped out in a small way. Originally in The Kid & Me, Bettie was to be killed when she was hit by that car near the end of the story until I gave her a last minute reprieve. Likewise, I originally thought I might end Laurie & Dag differently.
My idea for Laurie and Dag was to end the story with Laurie and Angela being reunited as part of the last Chapter, and then the ending epilogue would take place years later. It would have had Laurie and Angela living together as they are at the beginning of Laurie’s Wonderful Life, and they would go to that bar once again and the crazy guy would enter as he did before. Only it would have been Angela to have been shot and killed.
The reason I almost used that ending is not only because an event like that actually did happen, but because I wanted to give the reader some idea that Lesbians and Gays not only face a great deal of discrimination, but that there is always the thought that some crazy is out there wanting to take them out for whatever reason. You could ask Matthew Shepherd and Scotty Joe Weaver about that, that is if they were alive for you to do so.But in the end I felt that after everything Laurie had went through in Laurie and Dag, that I needed to leave the reader with at least some sense of hope for the future. Maybe it is just my own wishful thinking also that things can be better. Of course, when I wake up to the news every day and see the shambles that Bush and his co-horts have made of this country, when I read stories such as this one I read last week, you really begin to wonder if there is any hope for anything and whether or not the damage they have done can ever be corrected. I mean when this country worries more about keeping a couple of the same sex from exchanging vows at the alter, or worse than that how many days Paris Hilton will spend in jail then the fact that there are over 3,000 dead in Iraq and that the President and his cohorts has made a shambles of the constitution, then they might as well start calling us The United States of Looney Tunes.
Still, I had the scene in my mind of Laurie and Angela going into that bar in my mind and it just kind of stayed there as if I needed to write it. So eventually that scene became the most important scene in Laurie’s Wonderful Life, as it was the driving force behind the whole story.
Another reason I wrote Laurie’s Wonderful Life is that I felt I owed closure to those who had been loyal followers of the story on the official Sims 2 web site. Even when I originally wrote it I didn’t expect Wonderful Life to do well on that site. Most of my regular readers had moved on after having became quite disgusted with the way the official site was being ran back then and is still being run now. I seldom use it and when I do it is to find an answer for somebody else. And as I suspected, it didn’t do well at all and was pretty much buried after being attacked by those who still held silly grudges for one reason or another including the fact that I had dared to write a story about gays and a girl having an abortion.
The thing of it is, I will probably always regret in some way that I didn’t pick up Laurie’s and Angela’s story right after the original story ended. There were several reasons for it, the main one being that because I had lost so much readership at The Sims 2 site, there would not be anybody to bother with reading it. I’m sure some of you will say that it shouldn’t matter and perhaps you are right. But writing a Sims story that is worthwhile with the pictures and everything else involved requires an enormous amount of time and effort, and you would want to think that the effort was rewarded at least in some readership. I really don’t care if someone likes or dislikes the story, but I would at least like them read. And at that time since The Sims 2 was the only outlet for those stories, it was not something I cared to pursue for that site as I knew any thing I wrote would be forever buried by those silly people with their silly grudges and narrow mindedness.
Another reason I didn’t pick up Laurie and Dag’s story right after high school is because I didn’t think I could ever do it justice. For one thing, I was clueless as to what it would be like for Laurie to struggle through College and Medical School even if I do watch Grey’s Anatomy every week. But most of all, I honestly didn’t think I could write about the Gay & Lesbian lifestyle and get it right. And if I was going to write about it, getting it right was extremely important. I had made it through Laurie & Dag by doing hours and hours of research on the internet. To go through the years with Laurie and Angela would have required researching not only what studying to be a surgeon would be like, but even more hours of research into the gay life style. And it is not that I was unwilling to do that, but to make that much of a commitment I would have to know that there were enough people out there reading it to make it worth my while.
And of course as I have mentioned time and time again, if I were to write such a story for The Sims 2 web site, I would have to constantly change what I wanted to write to fit their criteria as I did with both Laurie and Dag and Laurie’s Wonderful Life.
The graphic scene in the bar when Joe is killed was not even close to being what I wrote for this story blog. Here is the original text as Angela remembered that night. You can compare it to the rewrite I uploaded in Act One.
She had been on the dance floor with Margie. Unlike Laurie, she had not noticed the stranger entering the bar. Margie and she were just about to leave the floor when the slow dance started and Joe and Laurie had come to join them. Margie and she had decided to dance the slow dance together also. Angela had been looking at Joe, thinking that he wasn’t a bad dancer at all, when she heard the first shot, not really knowing what it was. Everything else was almost a blur of events that happened in a matter of seconds, but played over and over in slow motion in her head. She had looked over at the bar, but Jerome was no longer standing there. People stood up and began screaming. She saw a bald headed man walking towards them. It was then that she saw Joe throw Laurie to the floor, just as another shot rang out and ricocheted off the concrete walls. Both her and Margie had stood there stunned, not sure what was going on or what to do. “Get on the floor,” Joe had yelled at them again. Angela grabbed Margie's belt and started to pull her downwards. She was too late. Another shot, and blood spurted out of the back of Margie's shirt. She had been critically wounded. From the floor, Angela could see Joe headed towards the baldheaded man, and some of the other guys in the bar moved towa
rds him also. Everybody else had ducked under tables. Laurie hadn't moved, the violent force of the throw to the floor had momentarily stunned her. If Joe had been twenty years younger, or perhaps even ten, he may have reached the gunman. But just as Joe was about to reach the bald headed man, the gun fired again, one more time, more blood, and Joe fell to the floor. It had been a direct hit, the bullet piercing his heart, and he was dead. Moments later he was lying lifeless in a pool of blood, Laurie and Angela both kneeling over his lifeless body, as Laurie used every skill she had to try and bring him back. It was to no avail. Several of the guys in the bar managed to tackle the bald headed man with the gun just a second later. But it was too late for Joe, and for Jerome who would die of his wounds an hour later, and for Margie who would never walk again.As you can see it is quite a bit different if you go back and compare it to the rewrite. Is there any doubt in your mind which is more effective? And in the original pictures there was no blood. For this blog, I photoshopped it into the pictures. It was the same problem I ran across in Laurie & Dag. I had to somehow hint at Laurie having physical desires as well as her emotional ones, yet to even suggest that she might even have had such thoughts on The Sims 2 would have had the story yanked before you can say pomegranate.
Now there will be those who probably absolutely hate the epilogue in Laurie’s Wonderful Life. It is certainly filled with quite a bit of what I call the fantasy element. But let’s not forget that at it’s heart, it is not only a story about redemption it is first and foremost still a Christmas story. It’s not that you can’t write a Christmas story without some kind of fantasy elements, but I think the best ones do include it in one form or another. Certainly the original It’s A Wonderful Life movie did, and definitely the same goes for Charles Dicken’s Christmas Carol so how can you argue with success? The only thing I can say is that if it wasn’t your cup of tea pretend that the epilogue doesn’t exist and that Laurie wakes up and everything that happened to her was just her dreams just as I guess Oz was supposed to be when Dorothy woke up (movie version). Still, when I wrote those last few lines added to the picture of Joe standing next to Laurie and Bettie, even I got choked up a bit. I had brought all of these characters to life, and at that point it was over.
So where does that leave me and where does that leave this blog. I have a couple of stories in mind that I could write. But it would take a lot of time and effort. I’m perfectly willing to give it that if I feel there will be at least a few people out there not only wanting to read it but with the patience to wait in between story chapters which because of other things I have going on. It could take several weeks to complete each one. Remember, unlike these stories that were already written, I would be writing anything new from scratch including setting up the Sims game for the story and shooting new pictures. The one advantage I would have in posting to this blog is that I wouldn't have to take so many repetitious pictures. For instance, because of the way the Sims story telling interface is designed, you have to have a picture for every single very short page. So when there is something like a conversation between two characters, you may have to have five or six different pictures of that conversation whereas for this blog you would probably only need one.
I guess that’s where that little survey comes in that I have posted in the right hand column. A lot depends on it, not so much as to what the answers are but as a way to gage how many are actually reading these stories or have read them. I can post stuff on Clyde’s Place and it doesn’t matter as much that there may not be anybody reading if at all. I can write for it at my leisure when I want and when I feel like it. But writing these stories is a bit different and to put the kind of effort into it that it would take to get going again, I have to know that there are enough people reading to encourage me to do so. So the only thing I can say is we’ll see, but it doesn’t look hopeful. In all the stories I have received comments from two people in the comments section (three if you count someone promoting a porn site) and one of them was related. I have received exactly three emails in regards to the stories and that’s it whereas when Laurie & Dag were at the height of their popularity on Sims 2, I was receiving several emails a day and hundreds of comments on my Sims page. Those are not good numbers especially when you consider that I can write a five paragraph story about American Idol for Clyde's Place and get my Inbox flooded. So if you have read or are in the process of reading, please take the survey or write to me at Clydesplace@gmail.com.
And finally, I want to thank each and every one of you who have read these stories or are in the process of doing so. I do hope that you enjoyed them and I hope that in some small way they may have touched you because in the end, that’s all that really matters to me. Whatever happens in the future, at least I have once again given these three stories a home, one I hope they can have for a long long time. Thanks again.
Clyde
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