CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

A couple of weeks ago, I talked about the first little steps of transitioning from full-time-student-looking-for-a-day-job to full-time writer, and I’m going to talk about it some more, this week. The process for turning into a professional writer is going to look different for everyone, but I’ll share bits and pieces of my journey, in case anyone else can find something useful for their own. The last week of November, was the first full week of putting those first steps into practice—and they worked really well. I liked the results, and the way it looks to be a sustainable workload… and then Friday arrived, a disrupted day, where my work schedule fell apart in the morning and never really put itself back together, which left me in a bit of a quandary come Saturday. I had words from Friday to do, and a book that had decided it wanted to go over the planned length, as well as a competition I’d been reminded about, and the tasks I had decided needed doing at the start of each...

It’s taken me a month to wrap my head around what’s next in my life. Up until now, it was a conventional job, or conventional university, full-time. And then came the realisation I needed a bit more time to recover from the experiences I had in my last work place. For now, I can have that more time, and, if I can get my writing to work, I can keep it. But going full-time writer is harder than it sounds, that shift from having to prioritise a working day over your writing time more difficult than it seems, so it’s taken me three weeks to get my feet under me enough to start really working it out. The first few steps were wobbly. I had to get a regular fitness routing going – basically, I’m sick of being sick because I’m not fit. That’s starting to consolidate itself into a regular hour of dedicated movement each day, consisting of one large chunk in the morning, and two smaller chunks later on. That’s taken two weeks, but it’s started to embed. The next step was to give m...