CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

The first volume of C.M. Simpson: Short Stories and Poems from 2013 is now available for pre-order on Smashwords . It will become available from Kindle, Kobo, itunes and Drive Thru Fiction on around 21 June 2014. This collection wraps up a lot of my early stuff, polished and edited for the collection, and collates all the short individual work, I completed last year, even if it's not yet released.

Here are the novels I managed to read in May. I wanted a change of pace after Harry Harrison, so I went from other worlds to alternate worlds. Laurell K. Hamilton is a mistress of dark paranormal urban fantasy and another of my favourite authors. She had me reading long after I'd gone to bed. You can find out more about LAURELL K. HAMILTON at the following sites: http://www.laurellkhamilton.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurell_K._Hamilton http://www.randomhouse.com/features/lkhamilton/

This little guy is about as paranoid as it comes. I'm thinking if I wasn't hanging over a fence to photograph it, it would have been gone. The bird-finder on Birds in Backyards identifies it as a Crested Pigeon. You can find out more about crested pigeons at the following site: http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/species/Ocyphaps-lophotes

Yeah, it's a little late. Don't ask. Here are the books I read in April this year. If you've seen them featured before, it's because I enjoy them so much I just have to keep going back to them. And if they seem a little diverse, don't worry, that's just me. I enjoyed these tales by Harry Harrison , an early master of science fiction. You can find out more about HARRY HARRISON at the following sites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harrison_%28writer%29 http://www.michaelowencarroll.com/hh/ http://harryharrison.wordpress.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20120722083614/http://www.empmuseum.org/exhibitions/index.asp?articleID=936

A sestet is a poetical form developed by Petrarch, who is more ancient than even me. A sestet is made up of two verses, each six lines long. Sestets may have different rhyming pattern, but have varying rhythms. They can either be free verse (with no rhythmic pattern or set variation of stressed and unstressed syllables, or in iambic pentameter). The two most common rhyming schemes were a/b/c/a/b/c for the first stanza and a/b/c/c/b/a for the second stanza, or a/b/a/b/a/b for both stanzas. One variant rhyming scheme was a/b/a/b/c/c/. Shakespeare was known to use sestets in his work. An example of a sestet is below. The Ice Queen From high up in the mountains tall The ravening ice queen comes Her voice echoing, cracks bone like ice Makes our strongest towers fall Our dead will rise, and our hearts grow numb And beneath her feet we flail, fleeing her like mice. Our heroes are long gone, either dead or flown Our warriors are shattered, their life-bloo

I had two end-of-semester tests this week and took time off work to study for them. The following words were achieved once the study was done—a kind of warped reward. Of course, the only way to get the words down, was to go through my older records and transcribe them to digital form. I’m still not sure if that’s cheating or not, but it’s still a task that needs to be done, and I have salvaged more than a few ideas that bear more development. The new ideas were all written on the bus, while travelling to and from work. I really like the bus.   Overview New words produced: 2,147 Old words revised: 20,418 Works completed: 0 Works revised: 0 Covers created: 0 Works published: 0 Works submitted: 0 Competitions Entered: 0 Tier 1 Tasks Annual 13: Added 376 words Annual 14: Added 1,1771 words Publishing Tasks Created 2 blog posts for this blog; New Arrivals The following ideas arrived this week: