Author's Notes

And we get to the last section. Where I share my secrets for where I got my ideas. If you've read anything else I've written, you know what to expect, and can happily skip this section if you're not here to get some ideas for your own work. But otherwise . . .

I am a collector of Sims games. I got everything for Sims, then Sims 2, and then Sims 3, and now Sims 4. But I seldom play Sims 4. Haven't gotten the 'knack' for it yet. May never in fact. Sims 3 is still simply too open ended and varied.

But shortly after I comprehended that my play style for Sims 2 would not work for Sims 3, I created for myself a sort of alternative persona, named Jack Fearthegn. He was going to be an author. He was given all the attributes that I thought an author would like. Bookworm, perfectionists, sense of humor, etc. And then I created a house full of young women to serve as a source for an LI. And Diamond was a random result of that little mix. She had lips which were too thin, and an overbite, but I kind of gave her an exotic touch, skin as dark as possible, white hair, and red eyes. I was trying to duplicate the fantasy drow. And I made her Charismatic, Flirty, Great Kisser, Hopeless Romantic, and a Party Animal.

Then when he got his little house in Pleasant View settled in, and said hi to the neighbor's welcome wagon, he walked over to that house, rang the door bell, walked in, started to talk to the girls to see which one would connect with him and shortly there after, Diamond was totally smitten by him, and the feeling was entirely mutual. And no matter how many times I played out that sequence, she and he always hit it off.

And in the dozen or so replays, that's always been the case. And so, she became his permanent LI.

So when I started this new Sims 3 game, I didn't even doubt she would be the one in the end. I was posting memories for all my other Sims 3 buddies. For the game has had a bit of a revival since computers keep getting more and more capable of handling the game with it's quirks and likewise, Nrass has a bunch of mods which fix even more of them. And most of us have some sort of sequential save as system so that if our game goes south, we can restart one or two or three sim days back and not lose much.

But I decided to mix things up a bit, and introduce her later in the game, and give Jack an affair prior, just to see what would happen. And so, in the words of Sims 3 buddies who were watching my posted memories, with their humorous dialogues and circumstances, the 'popcorn' began and I realized that Diamond needed a backstory.

It was at this point that I did something I had never done before. I looked up the english lyrics for There For You which Diamond and Jack always slow danced to when it came on the radio. And as I looked at those english lyrics I realized exactly what Diamond's backstory was. She was a stripper.

And I didn't just have a Sims 3 Game with memories being posted anymore, I had a fan fic screaming to be written.

And what was great about this backstory was that I could write about something I've always really wanted to write about and do so almost exclusively.

The Theater.

And you thought I was going to say hot and sexy exotic dancers didn't you? ; P

I spent a lot of my youth in the theater, I sang, acted, did stage magic, stand up comedy, wrote and directed my own shows. And so I while I would be talking about Diamond and her friends in the club, I wouldn't be exactly talking about great body attributes and sexual fantasies. I was going to be talking about staging, choreography, costuming, comic patter, in short, all the stuff that makes the theater fun.

You won't find a Scuzzbucket in the world today. Because I pulled up all my theatric memories and the history of theater from the past 100 years to slip into that club. In order for someone to have that elaborate a club, they would have to have links that go all the way back and your typical 'business man' who runs such a club is clueless.

I had to change a few terms. Rosa talks about poor man's theater. What she is really talking about is Burlesque, because that is what Burlesque was back at the dawn of the 20th century. A poor man could take his wife and kids to a cheap theater and see jugglers, comics, dancers, acrobats, magicians, animal acts, and all sorts of entertainment for an affordable price. Today it's something different. The so called revival is a shadow of the original.

Burlesque began to change when strip-tease was introduced. It wasn't an overnight event. The history points to it's origin with the only documented genuine wardrobe malfunction which happened to Hinda Wassu during an amateur hoochy coochy dance contest. That would take a bit history to explain so I won't. The owners of theaters became totally obsessed with this sexual fantasy because they had the money and power to make it seem real to them. But the common man could not take his kids any more, his wife could not compete with the staging so she didn't want him coming any more. They started going to movies, and when the movies pushed it in, they stayed home to watch TV, and when TV pushed it in, they threw their TV's away and turned to alternative media.

So while you'll find tons of so called histories which put the blame on Mayor Floria LaGuardia or Margie Hart, in the end, The Night They Raided Minsky's was simply the death knell of an entertainment medium which had already cut itself off from it's audience and was getting the beginning of it's comeuppance.

But for the purposes of a story, I can draw a line in the sand to where the transition has become complete to nothing but strippers, and still has all those theatric club FX. In short, Skuzzbuckets is an early 50's style burlesque which has not lost the staging but is modern in it's application.

And having set the stage as it were, I had the venue for Diamond and the theater. I could replay some of the old vaudeville skits, have the comic patter, talk about staging, effects, and while you see a little tease, you don't see much in the way of physical attributes, because I'm talking about people trying to make sense in a world which shouldn't be as off as it clearly is. The girls know something is wrong, but none of them can put their finger on it, and as Diamond begins to look at Jack's life and compares it with hers, she begins to make observations that lead her to a greater understanding as to what is really wrong with the picture.

And it's something that I feel strongly about given that our present culture is in a flaming free fall.

The story of an ordinary nebbish guy falling for the really hot and crazy girl is an old plot itself. It shows up in the movies on a regular basis. And in real life, guys who are not that physically attractive can frequently attract very good looking women simply because the guy is treating the girl better in a way none of the other guys are treating her. Women are driven more by vocals than visuals. Cyrano de Bergerac is the classic illustration of this. And Jack, like Cyrano, disqualifies himself on occasion. But the truth is, a guy who treats a woman like a human being who is important to him is going to start looking beautiful in her mind even if his nose is too big, his chest is too small, and his legs are a pasty white. What is different in this story line is that Diamond knows he's a 'cool' guy before he ever sets eyes upon her and she is looking for a way out.

But I couldn't have been able to talk about strippers if I hadn't had the chance to know one as a genuine friend. Her real name was Judy. She was bartending in the comedy club next door where I would hang out on her nights off. She makes a cameo in the story. I can sketch her face from memory and I do so. Don't ask me what her body looked like because I literally can't recall. Knee caps don't smile when you tell them a joke. Belly buttons don't wink at you when they are feeling flirty. The face is where nearly all our expressions are and when you get to know someone well, that's what you remember. Suffice to say however, she was Miss Nude for the state in that year and so you can be sure it was a knockout. On the stage that is. It really is illusion guys. There's no girl that looks like that the morning after in your bedroom under the dawn's early light. And she was my friend because I was 'safe'. I was, in her words, 'the only guy she trusted.'

And yes, she hinted she wanted to be more than friends, but I had to keep asking myself, 'what would mom and dad say?' You see by that point I knew that parents saw things I didn't and I sensed she would not be approved of even before they found out her career choices.

So we remained friends, and she introduced me to some of her dancer friends and we had a few laughs, a few drinks, and once in a great while I was in the back by the door so that the guy who wanted to give them a little 'medication' wouldn't pull any fast stuff on them. And you'd be surprised how many times that guy did try just that. Well probably not surprised at all. And stripper glitter? Some guys worry about their girl friends seeing stripper glitter. Well my problem was stripper tears. I had my shoulder cried on frequently. It was a good thing I didn't have a girl friend.

"Back story," said Jack to Tiber. He wasn't kidding either.

And for that reason, you read about quite a number of personalities among Diamond's friends because I had quite a number of personalities to draw from. There were tramps, and there were girls who were desperate. There were girls who thought they had no other options. And one of them really did enjoy performing. Most of these women came from messed up homes, or through bad decisions, cut themselves off from stable homes. One of the girl's had a father very much involved in the porn business and she just presumed being a stripper was a great option for her when she turned 18. She would come to me for advice on boyfriends "Why won't he call? I thought he liked me in bed!" That sort of thing. How do you explain it? There was the girl who was being beaten up by her boyfriend but she stuck with him because he was the father of their child and she felt he deserved some connection but hated her father because her father kept telling her the guy was no good and was still offering to protect her from him. Seriously screwed up chick here. And the girl who bit everyone's head off the moment they tried to say, ask directions to the bathroom? And of course the myriad nameless faceless girls who simply thought it was an easy way to make money. That meme you can see on google, the 'screw this I'll be a stripper' really does exist. Compared to them, Judy was a rock of stability and common sense. But her vanity was immense. There were two classes of people in her mind. Nobodies, and her friends.

So Jack is not being stupid when he avoids this. And Trey's psychological issues at the end of the story which come close to destroying his friendship with Jack are very real issues indeed.

So how do I get this desperate girl who's going to be a handful and this rather destined for success guy together in a deep and lasting love story?

I limit Jack's options. You don't have to be a stripper to be a woman who's trouble and Ariel has commitment issues. That was the whole point. Jack starts off with two choices, Cocoa and Ariel and Ariel is the most intelligent choice. Then Diamond comes into the picture just as Ariel is giving him yet more run arounds and because he does not know her profession, he falls for a girl who very much is attracted to him.

And so circumstances make Diamond the most intelligent choice for Jack, but it takes him time to work it out. And likewise, Diamond has to move in the right direction.

And then we get to the next theme of the story, that concept of destiny.

After all, the title of the story is Made For Each Other and it was true.

Now destiny has two views which people hold to. They accept either one or the other. The first view is the blind fate view. You are going to do this and there is nothing you can do about it. It's going to happen. In this point of view, Jack and Diamond are made for each other, they're going to fall in love, and stay in love, end of story.

There's just one problem with this. It only works with robots. If you can freely choose, then you can literally choose to reject the most wonderful thing in the world. You may have dozens of reasons why you don't pick the most wonderful thing in the world, but most of them involve denying to yourself that it is the most wonderful thing in the world you're rejecting.

However in the west, the Judeo-Christian view has always been expressed in the expression, "God writes straight with crooked lines." You are given the freedom to reject your destiny, but your destiny often takes into account several rejections which you will make that end up pointing out to you that your destiny really is the intelligent thing to begin with.

In other words, in the Christian perspective, the rejection of the destiny is taken into account in the fulfillment of it. And you are always free to reject it, but in the end, you will realize that you made a very big mistake which had permanent consequences.

Jack in the end, does not come to accept Diamond as his true soul mate based upon feelings, but upon experience which teaches him, in the very act of rejecting her initially, that she really is the smartest choice in spite of all the evidence which tells him otherwise. Because the two of them may be made for each other, but they really are not ready for each other. Both have got some issues which will need resolution. Diamond needs rescuing, but Jack needs to learn how to be a rescuer.

And so over the course of the story, Diamond in particular begins to sense that there is something to this pain and suffering that she's having to go through that is in some fashion making her love of Jack more permanent. While Jack suspects at the beginning that there's something going on behind the scenes which brings them together, it is Diamond who begins to suspect that the same forces are working to keep them together as well.

There was one other problem which I realized I was going to have to deal with. When you are writing about strippers, you are dealing with an atmosphere which is highly charged sexually. And the problem is avoiding pornography. Now male pornography and female pornography are somewhat different. As I pointed out earlier, men are triggered by vision which is why the vast majority of strippers are women. But women are triggered by hearing which is why the art of seduction for a man begins with words. Thus I had two things I needed to avoid. First avoid any overt visual description of strip-tease and in particular bodies. That was going to require some thought because if I'm going to talk about staging and choreography, I'm going to get visual. So, when I got into the profession itself, I began to find ways of not crossing certain lines. Many of the strip scenes leave the women still covered in some fashion before something else shifts the scene. We know Diamond wears some pretty skimpy items at times, but you never read about her taking them off in any particular detail. Likewise there are other tricks I did. She pantomimes one strip tease for Jack when she talks about an old vaudeville skit which is played with Ayumi and she's in blue jeans and sweater the whole time. Rochelle is stripping on stage but you only see the garments landing in a pile by the stairs. Gabrielle can't get her bra off in one sequence. And Jack is so mesmerized by Diamond's final 'public' performance that he can only really recall specific flashes of memory. In short, I describe things in such a fashion that you never actually see a full strip-tease in the story. The closest I get is with the male dancer at Diamond's hen party and what you get are sound effects and Crystal's high state of embarrassment as descriptors.

But likewise, I was equally circumspect with the love making sequences. You never see anyone actually 'do it'. You hear of them doing it, but I never describe it. The closest is Diamond and Jack's wedding night where she gets so charged up, but before Jack is really doing anything. But the moment she says Make love with me, we fade to black.

But I also owe a lot of these tricks again to the old vaudeville and theater. Mae West once said, "I believe in censorship, I've made a fortune off of it." Mel Brooks likewise observed that sexy stuff prior to the sixties was funnier precisely because you had to come up with ways to reference it so that the kids would not catch on. Thus you have word plays which pop up that, if you think about it, let you know some pretty randy stuff is going on at that moment.

But that is a form of humor known as bawdy, and it's quite capable of being funny. You see, inappropriate sexual behavior can be very funny because we're dealing with highly embarrassing situations. And comedy was, at the beginning very much connected to strip-tease. Gypsy Rose Lee, perhaps one of the most successful strippers, had a very comical patter as she performed. And it served her well because when she got 'too old to take her cloths off in public' she could still tell jokes and had twenty years experience of telling them for live audiences. Some of her lines are quite well known. "I'm descended from a very long line my mother listened to." And "I've got every thing I was born with, but it's a bit lower these days."

And so we have Rochelle's patter before her strip, we have Diamond's verbal flipping the bird to her audience when she announces her engagement, and there's of course Ayumi's "you must really love me!" exclamation. And it all comes to a head at Jack's stag when those three girls give him one joke after another while he's trying desperately to talk them out of it. But even there, the real joke is the misdirection they are all engaged in, keeping him occupied with them while Diamond slips in and gets behind the curtain, ready to give him the performance she has dreamed about giving him since the very first time she realized she was falling in love with him.

And that is perhaps one of the interesting components about strip-tease as a whole. There are very few women who do not at some point want to do something like that for the guy they are in love with because it does represent a very feminine expression of total giving. This is why the profession lends itself to such crazy stereotypes. And that gave me all the ammunition I needed to have that entire Jock conspiracy to get Diamond to strip for them which turns out over and over again to be on them as she plays them.

Diamond turned out to be a very complex character. Of course it helped that I've played with her as a concept since 09. But likewise the contrasts made her quite a challenge to deal with. Her belief in her mental inadequacies, coupled with her very astute and cunning grasp of male psychology. The courage she can exhibit at one point while falling to pieces in terror at another. The intense and expressive love she feels for Jack, contrasted with her anger at men in particular. And of course you have that vanity which paralyzes her when she's under Jack's loving gaze. And finally, her subdued qualities until Jack's love for her is experienced and then she seems to shine forth like a blazing fire.

And all through this, Jack just keeps reading books, tells her how pretty she is, and lets her know in all those little ways that he loves her.

There was one other problem which I had to address because again it's a typical fantasy but does not necessarily involve strippers. It's the idea that true love will make someone a better person.

It is a fantasy because while there is some truth to it, there is also a great deal of falsehood.

Diamond is shown to be sad and subdued. You can see a bit of her personality pop out when she's on stage in the very first chapter. She remembers Trey and Enrico by name, and gives them a little extra special treatment, but even then, it's for the tips they give her. You don't see her open up until she puts on a comedy routine for Jack as a way of playing for time and getting over her 'he's right in front of me!' jitters.

Jack's love for her has one crucial impact. It gives her a sense of self-worth and she begins to experience a certain level of happiness. But she's still vain, she's still a flirtatious manipulator, she still despises men in general, in short, she really hasn't changed so much as grown. Love can make you grow, but your faults won't go away.

In order for you to change as a result of love you have to be the one doing the loving. This is why Rosa tells Diamond to fix Jack a lunch. The more ways Diamond is able to give to Jack, the better a person she becomes. Likewise, the more times Jack undergoes pain, suffering, and frustration for Diamond, the more loving he becomes.

Love is a tool which can make You become a better person, but if you think your love will make them a better person, you're on your way to becoming the stereotypical abused spouse.

This is why, in ancient western civilization lore, you are told to not cast pearls before swine.

There are several scenes which I spent a great deal of time thinking about. Chapter 8 in particular was one of those I'm particularly pleased with. It starts out as a happy couple on a date, beginning to have the confidence of togetherness. You are seeing more and more of Diamond's humor and personality starting to pop out, all the nice qualities that have always been there but up to this point buried under a veil of tears. The approaching moment that you can see coming as Ariel walks out of that door and the rising tension in what looks to be an ordinary day of business and the bolt of lightning. Then the rapid descent into shock, horror, and grief. I've gotten some good emotional responses and that is what I was hoping for.

Then comes the reconciliation in Chapter Nine. The saddest sound I've ever heard is the sound of a woman desperately begging. The pathos in particular is what gets me. I kept at that in Diamond's soliloquy until I couldn't read it without tearing up. For me that really is the main climax, and it's horribly early in the story when it comes down to it. But it's the biggest hurdle that has to be overcome. Diamond has to stop lying and Jack has to be able to see that Diamond actually has good qualities which are being muted by her profession, but not yet destroyed by it. But for the rest of the story, you have that profession leaping up to threaten them again and again but each time Jack is more capable to handle it.

In the end, it hopefully turned out to be a story which evoked tears and laughter, as well as a desire to see those two, but particularly Diamond, have a happy ending.

Because at it's bottom, the story is really about hope springing forth out of the darkest situations. We never really are without it, and we never really are without another chance so long as our heart beats. And because of that, Diamond and Jack end up happily ever after, both in this life, and their next.

This from Jack