CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

The Man from the Juniper Tree This week’s terribleminds flash fiction challenge was to rewrite a fairytale—one we chose ourselves. We had one thousand words to do it in, and one catch. We had to rewrite the fairytale in a randomly rolled genre. Well, I love randomness, so I let the fairytale choose itself. I opened up Angela Carter’s Book of Fairy Tales, running with the story on that page. In this case, The Juniper Tree . I had to rewrite it in the spy thriller genre, which I’ve read, but never written. It was pretty hard with the main components being, a miracle child, a step-mother’s betrayal, cannibalism, a step-sister’s rescue, a magical transformation and the gathering and giving of gifts. Well, this retelling is close, but I don’t think it wins a cigar: I missed the gift gathering and blurred the gift giving, the miraculous birth isn’t obvious, and I missed the rule of three, and the song. I did manage the transformation, but I’m not sure I entirely captured the s

An Anthology of Blades releases today!   Axes, swords, knives, cursed, blessed or from the Otherlands, this anthology is all about things that cut, slice, dice or amputate. From a buried blade housing one of the protagonists of an ancient battle, to axes wielded by a barbarian at the crossroads of destiny, all the short stories and poems contained in this anthology have one common theme—they are some kind of blade. An Anthology of Blades is the sixth volume in The Simpson Anthologies and is available from Kindle, Kobo, Smashwords , CreateSpace (in both large and small print), DriveThruFiction, and OmniLit, as well as all outlets to which Smashwords distributes, which include Barnes and Noble Nook and iTunes. While Smashwords, DriveThruFiction, and Kobo had scheduling options, there may be a short delay before CreateSpace, Kindle and some Smashwords distributors list this title.

Show-Down at the Shadow Lake I started writing this piece on January 18, 2014, and completed it on January 23, 2014. It was written for Chuck Wendig’s terribleminds blog flash fiction challenge for this week. This time we were allowed 2,000 words, instead of the usual 1,000 words, and I found this a more difficult target to meet than the shorter lengths. As with all the word maximums for these contests, I used it as the end word count goal. For this contest, we had to roll on three tables to discover the Who, the Where and the Uh-Oh of our story. I rolled ‘7’ earning an accountant as the story’s protagonistic ‘who’. This was followed by a ‘10’, which meant my account was to be found in a casino, facing down the besiegement of supernatural enemies, resulting from a second roll of ‘10’. The story was due by noon on January 24, 2014, EST US. Never do the books when you haven’t had enough sleep – no matter how much the client threatens to do you bodily harm. They’ll do