Sim Carter

WRITER

A novel is in the works but for now …
Some of my credits include Beach Music in the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine, Last Dance in Purdue U's Skylark Literary Journal, 
The Arab boy who took out his eye appeared under the title Double Vision in the South Bay Reader.  The Good Men Project featured 7 Reasons Older Women Love Older Men in their online magazine. Doing Nothing appeared in Children. I was a regular monthly contributing writer to 805Living Magazine for several years while various other pieces appeared in LA Family, the national magazine Parents, and the Daily Breeze. For more see Out of Order.

While you're here, can you please do me a favor? If you like what you read—or even if you don't— can you please let me know? I've disabled comments here because —well you probably know why and it has nothing to do with what you like or don't like about my writing!

Find me! Please!

On Instagram @ simcarterwriter

About the work available to read here  

While you'll find mostly memoir, I also have those moments when I write about whatever I wants to write about. It is, after all, my space. A mishmash of rants and raves, odes to Britain, love letters to France, reflections of living in Los Angeles, and the occasional film-centric piece ala this series of posts about working on That Thing You Do under the direction of Tom Hanks, meeting Tom Cruise and Ryan Gosling. You'll find those pieces under the Brushes with Stardom section. Like the L.A. freeways, it’s kind of crowded and all over the place.

I trace my love of reading back to my mum who tookme on regular trips to the library as a child when we’d depart with stacks and stacks of books—the maximum allowed— in our arms. You can find my pieces reflecting on my mother's life and demise due to Alzheimer's at Songs of My Mother.

Why am I here?

"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 website. A book? I'm working on two. The memoir collection and a novel set in the world of advertising in the 1970s."

People who don’t know me very well sometimes call me Sweet Sim. I don't know why. The alliterative appeal, probably. Or they imagine my vanilla exterior coats a similarly inoffensive inside. I beg to differ.  

“My family, my friends, my husband, can all assure you, I am not sweet. It’s not as though I'm an ax murderer or anything quite so evil. It’s just that like many of you, I have a checkered past littered with my fair share of mistakes.”

I share some of those mistakes on the site's Memoir section. I hope to sneak a few of these pieces into a book currently in progress under the working title About a Boy. What do you think? Too derivative? 

Also on the agenda, a Bildungsroman novel in the final throes of one last edit (I hope) and then the hunt for the right agent. Bildungsroman-in case you don’t know is a high fallutin word for coming of age, particularly appropriate perhaps when your main character isn’t a teenager but a 23-year-old protagonist named Alex, short for Alexandra.


More on Alex when the time is right. In the meantime, more about me! 

Born in Britain in the '50s, my parents' wandering ways meant our family of five—an older brother, a younger sister—spent a few years in Tripoli and Turkey before coming to North America in the early 1960s. I came of age in Canada with the British Invasion before the family took a detour to Puerto Rico and finally landed in Santa Monica.  I've worked as a journalist, a copywriter, a realtor, a media buyer, a Universal Studios tour guide, a substitute teacher, a film & television production coordinator and likely a few others my brain is too addled to recall.

Earlier in this blog's life, I also embarked on a virtual adventure, taking an imaginary walking tour of London. Tag along on my journey Above Ground on the London Underground. 

Like everyone else in Hollywood, I have a script in a drawer. My husband works in the film business and our son is a writer/director/comedian you can follow on Instagram at dangerr_russ