CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

An interesting week, starting with a doctor’s appointment and ending with a mild dose of sunburn, but a feeling of wellness I haven’t had in a while. Exercise, folks, is more than worth the time you spend on it. Of course, this disrupted all routines and I didn’t manage to maintain my writing, but I’ll do better this week. I’ve flunked NaNo again this year, I think, but I learned a lot (see the post coming on Tuesday), and it was time well spent. My life is changing, but it’s not without its challenges.   Overview New words produced: 3,297 Old words revised: 0 Outlines and Notes: 1,314 Works completed: 0 Works revised: 0 Covers created: 0 Works published: 0 Works submitted: 5 Competitions Entered: 0 Bloggery: 4,492 University Prep and Assignments: 0 Back-on-Track Challenge: Design covers for, edit, format, and upload the following: Nil Finish Nil New Writing Nil Publishing Tasks Created 5 blog posts for this bl...

The word goal for Day 9 was a merciful 1,650 words; the challenge was going to be to convince the story it liked that length. Again, I randomly rolled for the two title components and came up with 2- Green and 73- in the Moon . Honestly, there are days when I think this generator needs a little more work. The title immediately morphed into Greening the Moon-a Lunar Werewolf Story , because the whole lunar werewolf thing happened when I was writing my first flash fiction collection. The Lunar Werewolves are part of a series of poems and flash fiction that came out of Ode to Hummingbirds … and now I realise that, I will have to put them all in one place fore reference. And speaking of realising things, I’ve noticed that all my science fiction, with one possible exception, is happening in the same universe: the lizardine and Odyssey are not definitely in the same universe, as are pretty much all of my colony stories. And that’s a good thing to realise, because it means that univer...

This white egret was biding his time by the edge of a small local lake, when a white-faced heron flew past.  Once it had gone, the egret continued to contemplate the water, in peace.  To find out more about the Australian cattle egret, you can visit the following sites: http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/species/Ardea-ibis ; http://www.environment.gov.au/cgi-bin/sprat/public/publicspecies.pl?taxon_id=1000 ; http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattle_egret ; http://www.parks.tas.gov.au/index.aspx?base=19294 ; http://australianmuseum.net.au/Cattle-Egret ; http://www.graemechapman.com.au/library/viewphotos.php?c=128 .

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 ...