Everything Has its Price: C.M.'s Singles, #8

By C.M. Simpson

This fantasy short story includes: A place by the fire in exchange for a story, the tale of a blind bard and a dragon, a knight and his squire, sharing stories for a place at a fire. It's a highlight of the road—but the tale of a blind bard and a dragon, and how things used to be? Maybe it wasn't my best choice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: C.M. Simpson Publishing
• Release date: Feb 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9798224644117

C.M. Simpson

I spent the first twenty years of my life living in different parts of Queensland and the Northern Territory. My father was a teacher who liked to travel, so he took teaching appointments in all kinds of places. I don’t think I stayed in one place for more than four years at a stretch. I wrote stories for most of that time, drawing on the different landscapes we encountered and giving a hyper-active imagination somewhere to run. Seeing so many different places gave me a lot of food for thought as I stepped into the world of adulthood and took my first full-time job, and I never stopped writing and exploring the worlds in my head. So far, I have written four collections of short stories and poetry, and a number of novels, with many more to come. I hope you have enjoyed this part of my journey.

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Author Forward

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Written sometime in 1996, this piece was one of the first times I attempted a short story, editing it was an education in just how far I’d come. This is the first (and only) version that has been fully updated to reflect the way I write, now. While it still retains some of the signs of early-writer me, I’m hoping it reads a lot more smoothly, and a lot less purple.

It you’re curious as to what it was originally like, you can find that version, and see where my writing was at in 1996, in the version that appears in A Collection of Dragons.

I originally published this as a stand-alone piece in May 2012, then incorporated it in An Anthology of Dragons, a small volume of dragon-themed fiction, two years later. Both volumes are now out-of-print, although the stories live on in the much-expanded A Collection of Dragons, as well as the new and updated versions that I’m working on, or which I have already released.

Editing this piece was an education in how much I’ve grown as a writer...and I both look forward to and dread what I will think of my writing when I look back on it in another twenty-years’ time. Who knows? Maybe I’ll plateau, or the growth curve will be less steep...or I’ll discover just how much further I had to go, and hadn’t yet realized.

Who knows?

None of us know what the future will bring—as 2023 made very, very clear, to me, at least.