Wow, that does sound like a nightmare. Good on you for pulling it off, though--I imagine that would drive me batty

What I've done with all four of my stories is this. It's easier to explain as if it's the procedure for a new story, so I'll just start at the very beginning, even though your story is already underway and the first part won't be particularly useful:

1. Write an outline--not for the whole story, just for the first X number of posts, just to give myself ideas for images.
2. Consult the outline for vague ideas of the first two posts.
3. Fire up the game and take pictures for the first two posts (although I only do the first two because I like having preview pics at the end of each post--if you don't want those, then just do the first post).
4. Consult the outline again for the general plot of the first post. Write to images, then select preview pic from the second set of images.
5. Post.
6. Fire up game and take pictures for third post.
7. Write to second set of images, then select preview pic from third set.
8. Post.
9. Repeat steps 6 through 8... forever and ever and ever and ever...

So in short, what I do is take the screenshots first, then write the post afterwards, with the one exception of this post, which I had actually written the first draft of before that particularly story was even considered. For the most part, I've found this has worked for me.

But of course, that's just me

Same here, same here. I don't outline the contents of individual chapters but I do have an outline of chapters I want to write in the near future. I also run through the events of a chapter in my mind for days or weeks or months beforehand, so I already know approximately what's going to happen -- a sort of mental outline I suppose.

I take pictures on weekends since the setup time is too long for me to expect to be uninterrupted in the week. I try to keep a "buffer" of a chapter or two of pictures ahead of the chapter I'm working on -- that's why I almost always have a preview banner ready to go as soon as I hit publish.

When it comes time to write a chapter, I really like to write with thumbnails of my images open next to me. (You can see that in the picture currently on my About the Author page.) I am so often inspired by something in a picture -- a facial expression, the way a character is leaning. This is how I keep the pictures closely related to the text without taking the pictures after the fact. It's a lot easier to wrap the prose around the images I have, rather than attempting to make the Sims perform exactly what I've written.

Pen's advice to take tons of pictures is right. I usually have about 150-200 pictures for an average chapter, and over 300 for a "fancy" one with lots of action. I also try to remember to take some close-ups of people's faces with no one else or no other action in the background... sometimes you'll have a dry spell where your story goes off in unexpected directions and you don't have pictures for a particular part of the scene, so you can slip in a close-up.

But don't sweat it if you don't have any pictures for a particular part of the scene. I used to freak out if I didn't have pictures for something I wanted to write, but nowadays I just write a chunk of text without pictures and have confidence that the readers will fill in the gaps with their imagination. Unless you are one of the Sim world's premier screenshot artists, people are there for the stories anyway.

It only takes a keypress to take a picture, so I don't mind taking tons. A lot of my unused pictures are of the same exact instant shot from different angles, or else the same scene 1 second later with slightly different facial expressions or whatever. You never know which one will be the perfect shot. The thing is, if I see a shot that is a pretty good shot of what I'm trying to portray, I wouldn't say "Well, it's not perfect so I'll keep trying"... I take that shot and then keep trying for the perfect shot too. Because sometimes that not-quite-perfect shot is the best you'll manage to do. (Or your computer will crash, like it did me this weekend. I lost a kick-ass shot that way. My game actually crashed WHEN I took the picture!)

Anyway, it's art! It's just like the writing... I don't mind if while revising I chop whole paragraphs out of the chapter before I publish it. I take lots of pictures and write lots of sentences, and that way I can pick and choose only the best.

The only thing I do mind is when I take pictures for a whole chapter, and then decide not to write the chapter. That burns. *shakes fist at contrary Egelric*

In that case I understand totally. You might try using Irfanview for screenshots, at least you wouldn't have to ALT+TAB every time. That's what I use to get big screenshots of the game. Whoever told me about that program is owed some karma.

But most of my pictures still use the shitty in-game camera. Since I don't consider myself a screenshot artist, I don't mind. It's only a real problem when it's a nighttime scene and there are lots of dark blues, then the JPEG compression is really puke-worthy. That's why I tried to use Irfanview to shoot the pictures for the next Egelric chapter, to previously-mentioned computer stability FAIL. *kicks and stabs otherwise beloved Mac*

Sorry, Pen, I dual-boot Windows on my Mac. (Actually triple-boot with Linux but that's because we're crazy in this house.)

I noticed that you must have been using screenshots since your aspect ratio is quite different from the in-game camera. Now that I have my game installed on my iMac, I have to run it in windowed mode because the screen is too huge for full-screen to work with my graphic chip. And I'm kind of sad about that because I like your wider shots better, and if I had full-screen I would do that too. I don't know if it's just because the aspect ratio is a little more cinematic, but it feels more intense and less cluttered with boring shoulders and so on. It would just be hard to do scenes with Sigefrith+Alred or Eirik+Sigi.

I've never reshot a scene due to lighting. (Though many have argued that I should have!) I have, however, used photoshop to boost lighting levels a bit. I'm just not picture-centric enough to find a chapter worth reshooting for merely aesthetic reasons.

Just out of curiosity, Pen, when you (and you other writers) cut paragraphs do you save them? I've read about lots of writers who save their cuttings and then reuse them later, but I can't even imagine doing that. Even if I cut something "good" because it wasn't contributing to the scene, I can't imagine myself writing any way but in-the-moment. If I cut something it would just wither and become useless.

Sorry if we're steering your thread off-topic maruutsu.

I have the big iMac... I think it's 1920x1178 pixels. I tried running the game in full-screen, but it crawled. Now I run it windowed at 1280x1024.

All my chapter shots are taken with the in-game camera at the highest graphic settings and highest size (600x450). I have noticed an improvement in the quality of the game graphics (and hence the pictures) since I installed on Finn. (I believe my first chapter on this computer was "Shosudin declares an end to the tyranny of tears", which you can tell by virtue of the ceilings and pine trees: I bought BV and AL at the same time.) My video card prior to that was still rather shitty, all things considered, though not the oozing pile of crap that my first one was. Now with Finn I have bump mapping and edge smoothing and whatever all that stuff is -- graphics options that were grayed out with my previous card.

But I think the more important difference in the quality of my images lately is my increasing level of Lighting Fu. I tweak the lighting by hand for almost every chapter now.

I did try saving my cuttings early on when I was writing this story... back when I was afraid I would run out of chapter ideas some day. *snickers at naive young self* I remember distinctly a whole long pointless conversation between young Malcolm and Dunstan. One time long afterwards I opened that file and winced at the horribleness and deleted it. I kind of wish I had saved it now. It would at least have been funny to read writing that was so bad even my three-years-ago self wouldn't publish it.

On the rare occasions that I modify images for lighting purposes, I usually create a batch action in photoshop and apply it to all photos from the chapter in one go so that the changes are consistent. But that's getting into some advanced photoshoppery I think.

The problem with the lighting mod is that it's really dark. You have to add A LOT of lamps and candles to get the lighting up to levels that give you a high contrast range. If you are doing a medieval story it's even harder because most of the flame-based lights are particularly dark. Everyone who installs it seems to pass through a phase where the pictures are too dark. I still have the problem on occasion: I start shooting a chapter and realize the images are too dark, but it's too late to add more candles, unless I want to start the scene over.

I don't remember what the Dunstan+Malcolm conversation was about, but it was probably part of a chapter that did get published. So it probably did involve Iylaine. In my earlier chapters I had a lot of stretches of really pointless back-and-forth dialogs. (Perhaps I still do But if so I am not so painfully aware of it anymore.)