CM Simpson: Writer & Gamer

In the last week, I tried something new. It almost worked, but reality is a hard master. So, since I’ve decided I’ll be finishing my degree, it has to have some priority and this interferes with my writing, but I try, each day, to fit in as much writing around it. It’s sort of working, as you can see from the words below. As you can also see, though, the university words are taking a lot of time. I completed and submitted two 1,000-word assignments as well as doing a bit of class prep… and I still have three classes to prep for. In spite of that, some of the goals were progressed and I’m almost on track.   Overview New words produced: 10,424 Old words revised: 0 Works completed: 39 (for inclusion in two different, longer works) Works revised: 0 Covers created: 0 Works published: 0 Works submitted: 0 Competitions Entered: 0 Bloggery: 3,503 University Prep and Assignments: 8,433 Back-on-Track Challenge: Design covers for, edit, format, and upload t...

For a long time, now, I’ve been writing poetry, and it never ceases to amaze me how many different types of poetry there are. Now, my poetry does not always come spontaneously. If I waited for that to happen, I wouldn’t fill my annual collections or anthologies on time, so there are days when I sit down and say “I’m going to write 10 poems today.” I’d like to tell you that it got easier over time, and it does, but it doesn’t. Some days the poem is waiting to come out—and those are the ones that are either wonderful, or need the most editing. And, some days, you have to fight for every word, and those ones are either wonderful, or need a lot of editing. Most days, however, the poem arrives shortly after you type the first line and has enough momentum of its own to keep going. I like those days. Some of my best work comes from those days. For the difficult days, however, the days when I’m tired, or don’t feel like writing poems or whatever, I needed a little help, and that’s w...

While I was working through the Story Match challenge, I was wondering what on earth I was going to do with the stories I was producing, and I toyed with the idea of submitting them to external markets, which meant I would have to be very careful to make sure I didn’t put them in any anthologies if they were accepted, and that I would have to be prepared to track their availability and any periods of exclusivity to which they might be subject. I also considered some of the competitions I’d entered in the past which considered only the first year of a story’s publication, anywhere, for eligibility, and came up with another important reason to track them. The resulting Excel spreadsheet listed the title of each piece vertically, had columns for the date each was created, completed and first published, as well as length and genre. Beside the ‘first published’ date was a column for recording where. I keep separate pages for poetry, flash fiction and short stories, and then c...

Even writers with 40 years’ experience feel self-doubt: Another thing I noticed was that Dean Wesley Smith pushed himself to write, and that he never assumed that what he produced would be publishable. By the sixth day of his challenge, he had repeatedly expressed amazement that the story he’d produced worked for his very experienced beta reader. And this was encouraging. If someone who had produced so much quality work could doubt that what he created had worked, then all those times I’d felt the same way were perfectly normal. It also meant that it was more important than ever that I not rely on myself to judge the quality of each piece of work I produced. Damn, that last was going to be a hard ask when I didn’t have a writing group to turn to. I guess I’m going to have to rely on my readers to let me know what they like and don’t like—after all, they’re the ones that matter.

I need to develop a body of work: I learned this early on. Almost every short story Dean Wesley Smith wrote in the first week was connected to one of his writing worlds. The June 30 warm-up story titled The Library of Atlantis is linked to his Poker Boy world. The July 1 story, The Case of the Dead Lady Blues , was quickly identified as being a Pilgrim Hugh story. The July 2 story, The Bad Patch of Human Interest , and the July 6 story, A Matter for a Future Year , he discovered to be part of his Seeders universe. The July 3 story, They Were Divided by Cold Debt , he found to be part of his Bryant Street subdivision setting. The July 4 story, The Problem of Grapevine Springs , ended up being part of his time-travel western setting Thunder Mountain. The July 5 story , Best Eaten on a Slow Tuesday , seems to have been a stand-alone. So, I quickly realised that being able to draw on a universe, even a partially developed one was useful when writing under pressure. I...