CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

Right, getting into the swing of things. Gardening is supposed to be part of my writing fitness regime—it also gets me out from in front of the computer, keeps the landlord happy, and makes getting ready for the annual rental inspection much easier, thus reducing stress. It’s mid-Spring in the Land DownUnder, and season and garden waits for no man. Imagine my surprise when I went out after a long, wet winter and a fairly sploshy spring, to find my rose bushes already in full leaf, in need of a prune and covered in black spot… and then I looked at the peach tree. I learned two things that day: black spot treatment and prevention, and leaf curl treatment and prevention. Here’s what I started with: It took me a good hour to hand-pick all the black-spot-infected leaves off the rose bushes. I’m still working on the peach tree. This is what one of my poor rose bushes looked like before I picked off all the black-spot-infected leaves:    And here it ...

So, way back when, I did this post on gardening and how it was very good for your fitness. I stand by that, but I want to add a caveat and change my mind about a few things. Gardening is great, but it does require a certain base level of fitness. For example, my gardening has looked like this over the last two months: Days1-3: ·          prune 1-2 metres squared of bush ·          weed 1 square metre of garden using weeder and hands Days 4-7 ·          sore back, resting Days 8-10 ·          walk for a half hour once or twice a day. Days 11+ Not sure what happened when. I did a few days walking, interspersed by resting and, in the new year, I braved the garden again. I composted—and I’ll blog on that another time. I then headed out with a garden fork and took to about three-square metres of weed-ridden clay...

The gardening continues, but I was forced to take a slower pace. It seems that even limiting the amount I did was not enough to avoid back strain. Day 7: I weeded and pruned and the muscles gave notice they were too sore to continue. Fortunately, nothing tore. I lost the rest of the day to lying flat on my back and sleeping. Not what I had planned. It was a loss of valuable writing time as I couldn't sit at the desk Day 8: Enforced day of rest. No gardening.

From a reader's perspective: How many writers do we know of who have died of heart attacks, suffer the problems associated with being overweight, or have diabetes? It's a bit of a worry, isn't it? I mean, if our favourite writers don't look after themselves, then they might not be able to write, or finish, their next book. And that would make a lot of us really sad. And not just because of the loss of a book, but because of the loss of another bright point in our lives. From a writer's perspective: How many writing days have you lost to a headache, or to just feeling blah, or because your blood pressure was playing up, or because, for some reason, your vision was a bit blurry and you just couldn't see the words? How many times do you look in the mirror and wonder where all the love handles came from... and when they arrived? How much do you wonder if you'll ever be able to get down to a healthy weight and if you should even bother? And how many times have...

A response for a Chuck Wendig Flash Fiction Challenge . I keep forgetting how much I love the way these exercises ignite a creative spark. This week I rolled a d20 and got to set a story in a penal colony built by elvish astronauts. A thousand words isn't a lot of space to build a character, a history, and establish a setting, especially when you know nothing about it when you start. Now, I want to know a lot more, to explore this new universe of mine and see what other stories lie within. And this is why I love these challenges. This response, excluding the title, is exactly 1,000 words long, so come and meet Hasken: Hasken's Choice The first guard doubled over at 1800 hours. Dusk. According to one movie, ‘magic hour’. None of the inmates had heard of the movie, let alone seen it. If they had, they would have recognized old history – an entire species wiped out by the ingenuity of man. No wonder the elves had been angry. The dragons had been a trap – an elven trap,...