About Sim
People who don’t know me very well call me Sweet Sim. I don’t know why. The alliterative appeal, I guess. Or they imagine my vanilla exterior coats a similarly inoffensive inside. I assure you I’m not sweet. Don’t confuse fear and timidity for goodness. I have a friend who says part of the reason she’s not on Facebook is that she doesn’t want to encounter someone from her past who might pull the rug out from her present persona. I know how she feels.
It’s not as though I’m a murderer or anything. It’s just that like many of you, I've got a checkered past littered with my fair share of mistakes. Some of which I’ll share with you here.
Born in England in the '50s, my parents wandering ways meant we spent a few years in Tripoli and Turkey prior to coming to North America in the early 1960s. I came of age in Canada with the British Invasion before we took a detour to Puerto Rico and finally landed in L.A. I've been a writer, a realtor, a media buyer, a copywriter, a Universal Studios tour guide, a substitute teacher, a film & television production coordinator and more. I've worked with stars like Brad Pitt, Bill Pullman, and Elizabeth McGovern and I've worked with special needs kids who made me feel like I was the real superstar. Sharing my life's stories, just trying to get it all down before I'm too old to remember, that's the whole point of this blog. A book? That would be nice too.
About the work
Torn between two blogs: I started my book-to-movie blog, Chapter1-Take1, to share my fascination with big screen adaptations. Here at Sim Carter: Past Tense: Perfect/Imperfect you'll find mostly memoir.and creative nonfiction. Lately I've been concentrating on taking another look my own history, filling in my personal timeline; you'll find most of those pieces under the On the Street Where I Live stories label here.
I’ve also just embarked on a new adventure, a virtual one, taking an imaginary walking tour of London. Follow along with me over at theA Virtual Walking Tour of London page.
And sometimes I just write about what I want to write about. You know how that goes. It’s a mishmash of rants and raves, odes to Britain, love letters to France, reflections of living here in Los Angeles and the occasional film-centric piece ala this series of posts about working on That Thing You Do. Like the L.A. freeways, it’s kind of crowded and all over the place.
Some of my credits include Beach Music which ran in the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine, Last Dance first appeared in the Skylark Literary Journal and The Arab boy who took out his eye was published in The South Bay Reader under the title Double Vision. Recently The Good Men Project ran my piece 7 Reasons Older Women Love Older Men. I did some freelance work while my son was growing up for various publications including Parents, LA Family, 805 Living magazine and the Daily Breeze. You'll find a few of those pieces reproduced under the Out of Order heading. And like everyone else in Hollywood I have a script in a drawer. My husband works in the film business and our son is a fledgling director teaching himself the ropes. I trace my love of reading back to my mum who used to take me on regular trips to the library where we would depart with stacks and stacks of books in our arms. I've found myself writing more and more about my mother lately. She died from complications related to Alzheimer's Disease and I find I can't get her out of my head. I'm working on gathering those pieces together as well, you'll find them under the tab Songs of My Mother.
