Hello everyone,
As you may have come to suspect due to the long time gap between my last "Johan Bisou" post and this one, this blog is no longer active - and furthermore, I am no longer an active member of the Sims community.
I wish to stress that this is not due to any specific individual, and it's certainly not due to anyone who supported or read my work. On the contrary, I have received an overwhelming amount of support and encouragement from my fellow Simmers, which I will remain eternally grateful for. As a result, I feel that I owe them a goodbye, and an explanation.
To start with, my life circumstances have changed. I have been in a wonderful relationship for 6 years, and I am a stepmother to my partner's child. I am also in full-time employment. The simple truth is that I do not have the free time now to play hours of Sims games, alongside the extra hours to write everything up. It would be weeks, or more likely months, between even brief updates at the very least.
Also, I suffered a lot near the end from burnout and inner discouragement. A lot of that discouragement most likely arose from my self-confidence and anxiety issues, but in all truth, I did find my longer written pieces to be a harder "sell" alongside the epic visual photo legacies of fellow Tumblr users. I say this not to criticise such creators - I applaud their work hugely, as I know such edits take amazing effort - but I think, given the nature of social media, their chosen methodology is naturally more tailored to get "likes" and is more easily shareable. To sum up, I felt my stories simply couldn't compete anymore.
On a somewhat harsher note - but I feel I must be honest - Twitter debates are what really pushed me over the edge. I cannot say what it is like today, but at one time, it seemed to me as if there were constant arguments and toxicity in the Twitter Sims community. I felt I could neither mention a pack I enjoyed or politely critique one I disliked without the risk of provoking massive backlash. Seeing my fellow fans rage at each other day after day really started to dishearten me, and in the end, I deleted my Sims-focused Twitter account.
(I do remain on Tumblr, as I feel Sims and Sims-related creativity still has a strong presence there, but it's pretty much just reblogs these days!)
Perhaps most controversially of all, I feel EA have started to use the Sims franchise as a means to pump money out of players. I can understand releasing bigger expansions less frequently, but the constant breakdown and reduction of content in order to release it quicker - namely Kits - and charging triple A prices for these smaller bundles feels like a money grab to me. For conscientious reasons, I don't want to buy these Kits and support these practices, so my game - and by extension, my Sim Lit content - would never have up-to-date features.
I haven't given up writing completely: I still write original stories and fanfiction from time to time, but even that doesn't happen as often as it used to! I did take part in Camp NaNoWriMo last year and I am planning to do so again in 2022 - my writing profiles can be found here.
I also remain proud of the Sims stories I wrote, with a particularly fierce pride for The Miskin Legacy, which I still see as something of a magnum opus for me. As such, this blog will stay here as an archive of my Sims Lit.
Lastly, I want to say a huge thank you to the Boolprop.net community, whose friendship and encouragement were my rock throughout my Simming years. I will miss you and your wondefully fun forums. I still highly recommend them as a community for all Sims creators.
Thank you all for reading this, and for reading everything else I've written over the years. I wish all of my fellow creative types the very best in all of their projects, and to Simmers, may your grilled cheese sandwiches never set fire to the cooker... unless it's a plot device.
