CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

Week 3 of November rolled on, and I missed my family, but that’s the problem with living so far away from everyone. We enjoyed their company while they were here, and then we went back to work. For me, that meant realising I really had to get November’s second release up and running. As with October, I already had the month’s first release out there, but the second to be edited, formatted and uploaded—and it needed a cover. By the end of the week, I had the cover and the first round of edits done, and was working my way through the print-on-demand edit and format. I also had a vague idea of where I was going, although I felt very tentative about it, because it was a path I hadn’t been able to pursue full-time, before. Last week’s progress looked like this: Progress for Week 3, November 2017 New words produced: 16,770 Outlines and Notes: 1,280 Works completed: Nil Works edited: 1 ( Wheelchair Mermaid ) Covers created: 1 ( Wheelchair Mermaid ) Works published: Ni...

It’s taken me a month to wrap my head around what’s next in my life. Up until now, it was a conventional job, or conventional university, full-time. And then came the realisation I needed a bit more time to recover from the experiences I had in my last work place. For now, I can have that more time, and, if I can get my writing to work, I can keep it. But going full-time writer is harder than it sounds, that shift from having to prioritise a working day over your writing time more difficult than it seems, so it’s taken me three weeks to get my feet under me enough to start really working it out. The first few steps were wobbly. I had to get a regular fitness routing going – basically, I’m sick of being sick because I’m not fit. That’s starting to consolidate itself into a regular hour of dedicated movement each day, consisting of one large chunk in the morning, and two smaller chunks later on. That’s taken two weeks, but it’s started to embed. The next step was to give m...

I had visitors all the second week of November, but I started to settle down into some semblance of a routine. I had decided to try and write my NaNo novel, and pick up where I had left off on a couple of other projects, while continuing my walking and language study. Let’s just say that this was a bit of a miscalculation, and I needed to start off more slowly. It’s easy enough to see looking back, just harder when you’re in the middle of it. So, progress for the second week of November looked like this: Progress for Week 2, November 2017 New words produced: 13,740 Outlines and Notes: 1,280 Works completed: 32 (1 short story— Destiny’s Queen , 16 poems, 15 flash fiction) Works edited: Nil Covers created: Nil Works published: Nil Works submitted: Nil Competitions Entered: Nil Bloggery: Nil

I struggled. With university stuff finished, I had to work out what to do next—and I find change hard, let alone next-phase-of-life-change. Was I going to go all out to find a conventional job? Was I going to go full-time on my writing? I was still pretty shocky from my experiences working for Defence, so thought of going into another workplace and discovering it was like that had me in tears. We decided I needed at least another year to regroup, so full-time writing and a little bit of language study it became. I now also had to consider the possibility that I might not ever be able to go back into the field I had just spent four years of my life building the skills for. Still, a lot of those skills can be drawn on and retuned for a career in writing, so I’ll be looking at that, and maybe trying to keep my hand in so that they stay current. I don’t know about you, but a big change like that can really knock a person about. I started to sort out my writing priorities, and th...

This much-belated report gives a quick overview of writing and publishing activity in October 2017. October was the last month of university assessment, for me—ever, and a very busy month besides. I had four Indonesian exams (spoken, vocabulary, grammar, and translation from Indonesian to English), two essays-in-lieu of exams, and two sets of family visiting from interstate: one in October, and the other in late October or early November, when the exams would be held. And then there were the usual class attendances, which had to be made to fulfil course requirements. That was October’s ‘real life’ component. In addition, I had two releases, only one of which was already on pre-order. The other was a young adult novel, which only had the cover completed; the rest of the editing and formatting was waiting. It was due mid-month. I also had to try to work out what next year’s release schedule looked like so I could start writing and publishing for it in November, when all the assessme...