Names

As you may have noticed, apart from the heirs to the three original homes of the founding families I'm not going to be putting any particular effort into keeping the Bhalli, Darwin and King names the main ones in the 'hood. There's several reasons for this. First, and least importantly, it's more realistic. Second, it makes it easier for me to identify particular family lines, eg Darwin vs Pasang. Third, it means when the game doesn't recognise sims to be related and I'm not too squicked out to let them get together (or they refuse point-blank to let me not get them together) I don't get the issue of sims who are in love and only tangentially related having the same surname and thus freaking me out!

Quick Note: Haunted Houses

I've decided that I want ghosts around, even though they are extremely annoying... hey, if I'm going to have vampires, witches and maybe even zombies eventually, ghosts are nothing. Most graves, including almost everyone descended from the founding families, will get moved to the cemetery but in the case of deaths like Esther's I'm going to hide the urns somewhere in the house where they can't be interfered with. I will try and keep the number of "haunted houses" low - one per sub-neighbourhood (I forget the game term for that), and the ghosts won't become apparent unless they actually haunt someone to death or something.

Usually they'll happen via gameplay, but I have made one on purpose - I set fire to the Jacquards in Bluewater and hid their urns in the foundations of their fire-damaged house, thus bringing a whole curse-malarky in. It may become a plot-point if anyone ever moves in there, but then again, they may not... The supernatural abounds, apparently.

Selling Novels

I still don't have any suitable novelist Sims, but when I do... is there any way they can "sell" their novels to other local sims, or at least a way for me to put their books on the other playables' shelves?

Hacks

Does anyone got any links to good hacks for less typical businesses compared to art, restaurants, flower shops etc - eg, a couples counseling office? Also, I'm getting annoyed with how easy it is for my sims to get insanely rich even though their children go to private schools and they've been through university so should technically have tuition debts hanging over them. Are there any hacks to automate this or should I keep manually send the headmasters and university professors money with the postal order thingamajig (oh, how I love that and the no-20k-startup, too many super-rich sims are no fun!).

Final question - my sims can no longer write novels. Well, they can, they just don't get a choice of name/theme/etc and are finished in 20 seconds. I thought I had a hack that fixed that but if I do it's not working! Any ideas?

Quick Note: How I'm Playing University

Usually I'm trying to keep to a listed schedule of sending students to university based around age, and I'm attempting to not give in to frustration at the lengthy teen years and send them off early as some teens won't want or need to go to university at all. However, sometimes I will break that system for drama purposes or not wanting to only have one sim in university at the time! I am still new to University as an EP (ironic that the first one is probably the last one I'm gonna get! although I'm suddenly tempted by Seasons...) so expect a few bits of confusion from my end :)

Just installed the Realistic Sickness hack...

Wish me luck! Because with my luck the population's going to get halved 0_0