CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

While I was working through the Story Match challenge, I was wondering what on earth I was going to do with the stories I was producing, and I toyed with the idea of submitting them to external markets, which meant I would have to be very careful to make sure I didn’t put them in any anthologies if they were accepted, and that I would have to be prepared to track their availability and any periods of exclusivity to which they might be subject. I also considered some of the competitions I’d entered in the past which considered only the first year of a story’s publication, anywhere, for eligibility, and came up with another important reason to track them. The resulting Excel spreadsheet listed the title of each piece vertically, had columns for the date each was created, completed and first published, as well as length and genre. Beside the ‘first published’ date was a column for recording where. I keep separate pages for poetry, flash fiction and short stories, and then c...

Even writers with 40 years’ experience feel self-doubt: Another thing I noticed was that Dean Wesley Smith pushed himself to write, and that he never assumed that what he produced would be publishable. By the sixth day of his challenge, he had repeatedly expressed amazement that the story he’d produced worked for his very experienced beta reader. And this was encouraging. If someone who had produced so much quality work could doubt that what he created had worked, then all those times I’d felt the same way were perfectly normal. It also meant that it was more important than ever that I not rely on myself to judge the quality of each piece of work I produced. Damn, that last was going to be a hard ask when I didn’t have a writing group to turn to. I guess I’m going to have to rely on my readers to let me know what they like and don’t like—after all, they’re the ones that matter.

I need to develop a body of work: I learned this early on. Almost every short story Dean Wesley Smith wrote in the first week was connected to one of his writing worlds. The June 30 warm-up story titled The Library of Atlantis is linked to his Poker Boy world. The July 1 story, The Case of the Dead Lady Blues , was quickly identified as being a Pilgrim Hugh story. The July 2 story, The Bad Patch of Human Interest , and the July 6 story, A Matter for a Future Year , he discovered to be part of his Seeders universe. The July 3 story, They Were Divided by Cold Debt , he found to be part of his Bryant Street subdivision setting. The July 4 story, The Problem of Grapevine Springs , ended up being part of his time-travel western setting Thunder Mountain. The July 5 story , Best Eaten on a Slow Tuesday , seems to have been a stand-alone. So, I quickly realised that being able to draw on a universe, even a partially developed one was useful when writing under pressure. I...

One of the good things about learning from more experienced writers is exactly that—they are more experienced. They’ve done all the things you haven’t even thought of trying and then some, and they’ve learned from those experiences. And sometimes, if you’re very lucky, they share what they’ve learned and you can see if it applies to you. I write in isolation. I have no mentors I can go to, no experienced writer who is further down the independent-hybrid publishing path than I am, no more established writer anywhere near, that I am aware of, who even thinks the independent publishing path is more than a form of vanity publishing—and that makes things difficult. The only way I can learn is to do what I’m doing—experiment, copy the things successful independent writers do, and learn what works for me and why. I don’t even contact those writers I emulate, because I don’t want to infringe on their time, or to create a false impression of there being a connection beyond the one I...

Well, my Story Match Challenge finished on the 2nd August. It wasn’t the greatest of finishes, but I can’t complain. I learned a lot, even if I didn’t manage to complete the 28 stories I was aiming for. I managed 10 new tales, completely finished. With a bunch of stories unfinished, a pile of editing to catch up on, and five titles still in the publishing queue, I think my next challenge is pretty clear. I think I’ll call it the Back on Track Challenge. The aim is to be back on track by the end of the year. I’ve broken the tasks down into sections and given each title a tentative publishing date. It’s a pretty scary list, and doesn’t include everything I’ve started, but it helps put things into perspective and give a priority work order. At the moment, I’m defining ‘back on track’ as having everything ready that has a publication date of February 2016 or earlier. The good thing is that this will give me a clear idea of what I can do while at university and what I can do when I d...