CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

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...