A Far Out Fantastic Site

It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) blog hop! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. Today I’m going to just limit my post to answering the optional question of the month. I was busy all weekend writing my own post for A Far Out Fantastic Site and was doing it up to the very Monday I had been trying to post on a weekly basis. However, as I said a while back, I’ve had to ease off of the weekly blog posts and just post every other week or so. In addition to that, I have to also be more flexible of when I post because shooting for Mondays would cause me to have to stay up until 3 AM on early Sunday mornings and so it had been causing me to lose sleep during the week and to stress out. So, the post will not always come out on a Monday, and it won’t always be every week but possibly every two weeks. I discuss it more...

Posting-Schedule: Change in Frequency I have a book review of a vintage paperback this post. But before we go on to that, I want to let you know something about the posting frequency of A Far Out Fantastic Site. You may have already noticed me doing this, but I may have to post at random times of the week instead of on the usual Monday. Also, I may have to limit the posting to every other week instead of once a week which you may have also noticed I’ve already, more or less, been doing. The reason for these changes is because I need to give more time to my book of short stories, " Bad Apps ".   I've been trying to put together “Bad Apps” for the last three to four years. I've put off its release for too long, and so I need to give more time to working on it. So, if you don't see a post here at the Fantastic Site on a Monday, it doesn't necessarily mean I forgot. Rather, it just means that I've been backed up with the book among other things, some that are ...

It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) blog hop! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. May raced by and so we're already in June! I always look forward to summer as it approaches. I really don't know why since I hate the excessive heat it brings. (It’s gotten to the one-hundred tens in Northern California where I live!) Maybe it's just the thrill of upcoming summer movie releases or making a reading list. I do read slightly different types of books in my genre, speculative fiction, in the summer than I do at other times of the year. But my summer reading list I’ll save for another post. For this post I answer the optional monthly IWSG question which emphasises books and reading. I also have some latest progress on my current writing projects. So, keep on readin'! IWSG  Question for June The IWSG qu...

Credit: Wikimedia Commons Sorry for posting so late in the week. But I thought I would time the release of this post perfectly by releasing it on the birthday of author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, most famously known for his Sherlock Holmes stories and books. And I timed it perfectly just in time: it was only this morning that I found out today was his birthday, a day popularly known as "Sherlock Holmes Day"!  Sir Doyle was born May 22, 1859 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Although he was best known for his Holmes detective stories, he also wrote several works of science fiction and even some horror. His most famous work of science fiction is the novel, "The Lost World" (1912), the first book of the Professor Challenger trilogy. The other two are "The Poison Belt" (1913) and "The Land of Mist" (1926). His horror includes short story "Adventure of the Sussex Vampire" (1924) and novel "The Hound of the Baskervilles" (1901).  Here at the Fan...

  It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) blog hop! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. I apologise for posting so late again and having to double-up again between the IWSG entry and the weekly entry for A Far Out Fantastic Site. My excuse this time is that I had family from out of town visiting all week last week and so I got very little writing done. I was fortunate to fit in the little time that I had to at least plan this post and get some typing of revisions done for “Virtual Voodoo”, one of the many short stories to be included in my upcoming book, " Bad Apps "! I’ll talk about that story and the problem with long endings in a little bit. First let me start with the IWSG part of the post, which mostly consists of my response to the optional monthly question, in case anyone out there is not a scien...

Credit: Pixabay I've lately been working on the last of my revisions for "Virtual Voodoo", one of the short stories to be included in my upcoming collection, " Bad Apps ". I had rewritten the ending a while back which I presented to my writer’s critique group last Tuesday evening. Some people told me to make changes apparently forgetting what genre the story falls within. "Virtual Voodoo" is a science fiction horror story about a teenager who, with help from an app, abuses the Voodoo religion.  What ‘Virtual Voodoo’ Isn’t  Some of the critique group’s comments were basically calling for the story to be written in other genres. One such comment was that the Voodoo was misrepresented. I had researched the religion and went through extra means to clarify in the story that the religion was being misused by a disturbed youth who is motivated by Hollywood horror myths and stereotypes. Still, I was basically told that I the author was portraying the religion ...