CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

Only one cover created in February, although another is now on its way. This month's cover was for Carlie Simonsen's , first young adult fantasy novel, Anna and the Rock Dragons . EBook Edition Cover for Anna and the Rock Dragons When Anna heads out to her family’s country cottage for the holidays, she has no idea what lies in store. Chosen as the Key Bearer and Door Finder for a race of exiled, Anna soon finds herself in a race against a mining magnate set to make his fortunes by turning the dragons into crystal, and being hunted by a nightmare from local legend. Will she survive long enough to find both key and door in time to help the dragons escape, and then live to tell the tale? CreateSpace Large Print-on-Demand Edition Cover CreateSpace Normal Print-on-Demand Edition Cover

I have a cover for Carlie’s first young adult fantasy novel, Anna and the Rock Dragons . Here it is:   EBook Edition Cover for Anna and the Rock Dragons When Anna heads out to her family’s country cottage for the holidays, she has no idea what lies in store. Chosen as the Key Bearer and Door Finder for a race of exiled, Anna soon finds herself in a race against a mining magnate set to make his fortunes by turning the dragons into crystal, and being hunted by a nightmare from local legend. Will she survive long enough to find both key and door in time to help the dragons escape, and then live to tell the tale? Oh, and there will be print-on-demand editions from CreateSpace. Their covers look like this:  CreateSpace Large Print Edition Cover CreateSpace Normal Print Edition Cover  

‘The Dragon in my Shadow’ is my latest experiment in writing short fiction. It didn’t turn out quite how I expected it to, but it’s growing on me. Written specifically for this anthology and completed on the 6 th April 2012, it can best be described as contemporary paranormal with an almost literary twist. It starts like this: All my life, I’ve been ordinary. I’ve done all the ‘right’ things, made all the ‘right’ moves and failed spectacularly to actually achieve anything more than mid-line success. All my life. Nothing has worked. can be found in   An Anthology of Dragons has been uploaded to both Smashwords and Kindle, and is awaiting release.

Anthology1 has a name. It’s had a name for months, but I haven’t wanted to share it, until I was sure I could actually complete it and get it off the ground. Anthology1 is called An Anthology of Dragons . It is just over 13,690 words long and contains three short stories and two poems, written over a period of 18 years. The pieces range from pure fantasy (although without the ubiquitous wizard) to contemporary speculative, and haiku-esque. Over the next few days, I’ll share the cover, first paragraphs and lines from stories and poems, and let you know when this sucker goes live. In the meantime, I’ll be formatting for upload and preparing Anthology2 and Anthology3 for release, while I rewrite DarkFantasy1 and complete CrimeNovel1 and RomanceNovel1… amongst other things.

I have completed revising a children’s picture book I wrote almost twenty years ago. This triggers the next part of my learning curve: Where do I find artists/illustrators willing to illustrate a children’s picture book that’s going to be independently published? How much do they charge? Do I break up the text, or does the artist decide what selection of words suits their pictures best? Would it be better to co-create and split the royalties 50/50 with the artist? Would it be better if I waited before launching this side of my author name until I had developed my artistic skills to the standard require? (I do have the time.) How does this side of independent publishing work? Anyone know? Anyone have an idea or opinion? Will I give a taster? Not yet. Not until I decide if the book is going up somewhere in the next three months. The only thing I will say, is that this is the story of a little-girl’s first day at school and how she finds the courage to face it and make friends....

Project1 has just crossed the 31,000-word mark. Character classes are done—and I mean completely done, bar the play-testing—so I am now working on the new races. Normally, I’d put up a short free read to celebrate, but I can’t do that without giving away what the project’s about. Since that might imply a relationship with the publisher that doesn’t exist, I’d rather not do that. Project1 is planned as an on-spec submission with no guarantee of acceptance. I can’t even discuss the research I’ve done as that might also leave clues, so all I can say is that I’m enjoying this project. Whatever the outcome of the submission, this project is something I have to get out of my head. I’m not worried that I’ll regret the time spent on it. It won’t be wasted. Despite Project1’s relatively unique nature, working on it has spawned other ideas that lend themselves to more generic systems and settings, and these are now waiting to be written. I’ve also had an idea for a setting that I can use ...

Adventure 1 The writing on this project is going well. Yesterday, after posting here, I added 2,000 words in adventure, new creatures, and spells. Today, I added another 2,000 words, although it was slow and frustrating. I created a template when I started writing this adventure, which means I have to remove unused parts of the template as I go, which means I go backwards in words. In spite of this word removal, the adventure and appendices now stand at 22,000 words. I'm fairly happy with that, as I have added details for seven new creatures, two variations on existing creatures, and two completely new spells. I have almost completely written the details for two more new creatures, but need to sleep on the equipment, magic and abilities. All in all, not a bad day. Next Up: Catch the first installment of the first free read.

Emdras Campaign   Session 2 of the Emdras Campaign semi-complete. Session 3 is in planning - just as soon as we can work out a date we are all available for play. Post on Sessions 1 and 2 up soon. Writing Been thinking of how to approach this. I think I'll just call the books by their working titles, but the adventures I want to submit for publication I'll just call Adventure #, until I do or don't have a contract for them, and then I'll give all the details once I have permission. Free Reads to come. Writing Update Adventure 1: is a contemporary paranormal fantasy adventure. It currently stands at 18,000 words. Finished length should be between 30,000 and 35,000 including stats and descriptions for new items, spells and creatures. I'm looking to finish it on the 22nd, maps by the 25th, playtesting and revision by the 30th and submission on the 31st of this month. Anyhow, back to writing, while the baby is content to play.    

Babes in London had a mind of its own from the start. What I had thought of as a single scenario grew into an arc which spawned more ideas along the way so, in a desperate effort to get the monster under control, I wrote a 'Plan'. The plan consisted of turning the arc into bite-sized chunks, each of which would fit into a single session of play. This worked fine and I soon had three Acts outlined and ready for fleshing out. The only problem was, that I still had no one to play it with. So I kept writing, and thought that maybe I would submit it to Fantasy Flight Games after playtesting the completed product. These plans died shortly after spawning when, just as the first Act was completed, Fireborn went away, and Fantasy Flight Games moved into a whole new phase of publishing. Still liking the game, I decided I would share that enjoyment as a convention game, giving people something different to savour, but then my life moved into a whole new phase and Fireborn and its r...

In late 2004, I discovered a roleplaying game called Fireborn, and immediately fell in love with the setting. I bought both books, and downloaded the supporting PDFs that used to be on Fantasy Flight Games' website. As I read, I found the system was very different to the d20-based games I had been playing. It had curly bits! Now curly bits were not a problem and, after a couple of weeks of reading, I managed to wrap my head as around them as you can get without actually playing, and that was where the problem lay. Everyone I knew was busy playing something else. Living Arcanis and Living Greyhawk were pretty big in my area at that time, and then there was the Camarilla, Magic the Gathering, Warhammer, and real life. Short story - no one had spare playing time, and I struck out on all fronts. That left me with only one avenue for exploration: writing a campaign, and I had just the idea... While the Fireborn setting revolved around the concept of adult PCs as reincarnated dra...