Sim Carter: Past Tense Imperfect

WRITER A novel is in the works but for now … Sim Carter’s publication 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  (published under the title Double Vision) in the  South Bay Reader.  7 Reasons Older Women Love Older Men  was featured online at The Good Men Project,  Doing Nothing   in Children. Sim  was a regular monthly contributing writer to 805Living Magazine for several years  while various other pieces appeared in LA Family, Parents, and the Daily Breeze.  For more see  Out of Order . Find me on Twitter @simcarter On Instagram at Instagram.com//SimCarter.com About the work available to read here   While you'll find mostly  memoir , Sim also has those moments when she writes about whatever she wants to write about. It is, after all, her space. A mishmash of rants and raves, odes to Britain, love letters to France, reflections of living in Lo

Halloween 1995, Batman and me My history is littered with Halloween fails. Before I became a mother the question of what I was going to be for Halloween terrified me. 1958:  Halloween on a blazing hot afternoon in Tripoli, Libya. Age 5 All the military brats from Wheelus Air Force base were going to a Halloween party  in an airplane hangar just outside Tripoli.  Lots of civilian kids—mostly Brits and Yanks—whose parents worked on the base in various capacities were invited which meant my brother and I got to go too.  Our dad, who spoke Arabic fluently and had been with British Intelligence during the war, had something to do with managing the PX on the base. My brother went dressed as a hobo, his cheeks smeared grey by my mother with a piece of burnt cork, while his friend, the older boy who lived next door, dressed up as a woman—a pillow stuck down his sweater shaped into clownish balloon-sized breasts and big red sticky lips. I went as Minnie Mouse in a cheap, cellopha