CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

I did a little bit of catching up last week… and then I went back to studying for my exam. Most of my writing was transcribing a young adult novel from its hand-written form. And I hit my 30,000-words-for-the-month goal—yay! Overview New words produced: 581 Old words revised: 7,254 Works completed: 0 Works revised: 0 Covers created: 0 Works published: 1 (5 platforms) Works submitted: 0 Competitions Entered: 0 Tier 4 Tasks TweenNovel1A: added 7,254 words Publishing Tasks Created 11 blog posts for this blog; Formatted and uploaded C.M. Simpson: Short Stories and Poems from 2013: Remnants to Recent Years (1988-2012) to Amazon, Smashwords , DriveThruFiction, and OmniLit. New Arrivals The following ideas arrived this week: Poem384 (The Ice Queen): a dark fantasy poem about an ice queen; Poem385 (Have all the Dragons Gone and Died?): a fantasy kyrielle about the loss of dragons

This little lady came to visit. She and her friends pop by on occasion, but they always flee before I can get them all on camera. This is a superb fairy wren. You can find more information on the superb fairy wren at: http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/species/Malurus-cyaneus

The kyrielle is a French poetic form dating from medieval times. It sometimes consists of couplets, or couplets paired into a quatrain usually linked by a chorus or refrain. The chorus may be as short as one word, or take up a whole line. Each couplet is usually four lines long, and each line consists of eight syllables. Different rhyming formats are used. If the poem is written in couplets it has an a-A, a-A format. If it is in quatrains, it might be rhymed in   a-a-b-B, c-c-b-B or a-b-a-B, c-b-c-B format, with the capital letters signifying a rhyme ending a chorus line. A kyriells should be no less than three quatrain stanzas (24 lines) long. An example of a kyrielle is below. Have all the Dragons Gone and Died Long ago, they lived in caves, as did mankind; we were their slaves We feared them once, all men and I Why ever did the dragons die? Where did they go, the dragons bold? Where did they go, when they grew old? There is no sign of them on high. ...

The first volume of C.M. Simpson: Short Stories and Poems from 2013 is now available for pre-order on Smashwords . It will become available from Kindle, Kobo, itunes and Drive Thru Fiction on around 21 June 2014. This collection wraps up a lot of my early stuff, polished and edited for the collection, and collates all the short individual work, I completed last year, even if it's not yet released.

Here are the novels I managed to read in May. I wanted a change of pace after Harry Harrison, so I went from other worlds to alternate worlds. Laurell K. Hamilton is a mistress of dark paranormal urban fantasy and another of my favourite authors. She had me reading long after I'd gone to bed. You can find out more about LAURELL K. HAMILTON at the following sites: http://www.laurellkhamilton.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laurell_K._Hamilton http://www.randomhouse.com/features/lkhamilton/

This little guy is about as paranoid as it comes. I'm thinking if I wasn't hanging over a fence to photograph it, it would have been gone. The bird-finder on Birds in Backyards identifies it as a Crested Pigeon. You can find out more about crested pigeons at the following site: http://www.birdsinbackyards.net/species/Ocyphaps-lophotes

Yeah, it's a little late. Don't ask. Here are the books I read in April this year. If you've seen them featured before, it's because I enjoy them so much I just have to keep going back to them. And if they seem a little diverse, don't worry, that's just me. I enjoyed these tales by Harry Harrison , an early master of science fiction. You can find out more about HARRY HARRISON at the following sites: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harry_Harrison_%28writer%29 http://www.michaelowencarroll.com/hh/ http://harryharrison.wordpress.com/ http://web.archive.org/web/20120722083614/http://www.empmuseum.org/exhibitions/index.asp?articleID=936