CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

This week’s terribleminds flash fiction challenge was enticing. We were given five titles, and the option of mixing the words from those titles to make a sixth title to write to using only the words existing in the titles on offer. I decided I liked the randomised method of selection found in previous flash fiction challenges and rolled a d6. The result was a ‘4’ and the title I was given was ‘Bright Stars Gone to Black’. For the last four days, I haven’t really been able to latch onto an idea, so I’ve worked on some administration and let my subconscious work on it. Today, while waiting for an appointment, I worked through some ideas and decided the following: I didn’t want to go with the literal meaning of real stars turning black. I figured it would be too big a story to deal with in 1,000 words and was also too obvious a path to take. Scratch the obvious sci-fi or horror angle. The next thing I decided was not to go with famous people (literal ‘stars’) going from being ...

First the Theory behind the Tale: Welcome to my third week of taking up Chuck Wendig's terribleminds blog Flash Fiction Challenges. This week's challenge was to incorporate the randomly generated sentence "A novice revenges the rhythm" into a piece of writing less than 1,000-words long. Here is this week's process.   Okay, so when I started this, I was very aware I was working in a limited time frame. For a start, I only had time to really look at it today, after finishing my novel. So, at first I was going to write a thousand-word story, exactly 1,000 words like last time , and that reminded me of the hundred-word challenges I'd participated in before. I was also going to use the mandatory line "A novice revenges the rhythm" somewhere in the middle of the story, but when I started writing, it wanted to be first on the page... and that's when the whole project changed. It stopped being a hundred-word prose piece. You might have notice...

Australia has a lot of spiders that are deadly and might be accused of being ugly. The peacock spider is not one of them. Check out these you-tube clips proving that spiders can dance :-) Peacock Spider Videos Apologies for no pictures. It's late. I promise I'll do an artist's impression of one in chalk pastel tomorrow, and maybe provide a sneak peek at an idea the little gromits have spawned.