Skip to main content

A New Book and a New Look for a New Year

It's a new year and a new year calls for a new template and background for a blog. I was looking through what seemed like hundreds of templates and I'll be be looking through hundreds more before I select one because I am very choosy about my blog's appearance. But you'll see a new look in the next week or two, maybe even three.

Speaking about a new year, as late as I'm running with my book, The Fool's Illusion, it's a great time to put out a new book. I'm coming near to the composing of it. The stories are written, I just have to get them together in one manuscript. I'm presently working on the introduction. If you want a pre-introduction, if you will, you can read one with a free excerpt of the title story at HorrorAddicts.net.  That will give you the perfect sneak peek to the book. If you want even more of a sneak peek, go to my other posts here at the Fantastic site for two whole, free stories--"The Puppet Show" and "The Bazaar"--that will be included in my book. Think of it as three free excerpts from my soon-to-release short story collection plus some insight on what the book is about and therefore its major themes.

With a new year also comes new enthusiasm for writing and so I feel more energised and eager to get my book out and to conjure up more stories for you. You may even find one of those new ones here, but if not I'll definitely direct you where to go get them when they're published.

I'm not really one to create new year's resolutions by the first week of the new year but I'll be sure to make them at least by month's end when I plan to have the book released. Maybe that could be one resolution I can make for myself and all of you faithful readers: release a book by the stated time frame. Probably another resolution will be for me to write a full short story, including all revisions, by the end of each month. That may not seem like a lot of short stories in a year, but I have to consider the other writing I do for journalism such as at Examiner.com as well as all my marketing and promoting of my stories and articles and the time it takes to do all those things. That resolution's just an idea, but a very good one that I'll greatly consider.

I hope the new year is starting off good for you too and that you'll come up with your own helpful resolutions. Feel free to let me know what they are in the comments box (unless they're too personal, of course).

Until next time . . . and Happy New Year!

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book-To-Movie: ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’

Credit: Wikimedia Commons I apologise for posting outside our regular post-day which is late Saturday night/early Sunday morning. However, I got behind on several things last week and so had to postpone the post to today.  I’ve been a reader of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books ever since I was 11. What I’ve always liked so much about the series is that, like a good horror story, the stories often take place in dark settings and involve bizarre cases. Conan Doyle’s novel, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, definitely contains these elements. It’s a detective story that crosses over into the gothic horror genre. Several movie adaptations of the novel have been made that go as far back as a 1915 German silent film. In 1959 Hammer Studios released a version starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. As much as I’m a fan of the Hammer horror films, I have not seen that one yet. The only one that I’ve seen so far is the 1939 adaptation starring that other big name in classic Bri

Book-To-Movie: ‘I Am Legend’

A vampire similar to the ones in 2008's "I Am Legend" which starred Will Smith. Credit: Pixabay.com It’s time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie, I review a book and its movie adaptations. This month’s book and its movies based on it is I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. While vampires were no longer in in the American pop culture of the the 1950s, science fiction horror in general was. So Matheson’s I Am Legend brought the scientificising of vampires into the pulp literary scene of that era. Not too long after, in the early ‘60s, the first of three book-to-movie adaptions appeared and was renamed The Last Man On Earth which starred Vincent Price. The other two were The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston in the ‘70s and I Am Legend starring Will Smith in the 2001s. Even though each one debunked the myth of the vampire as a supernatural being, each had its own depiction of the creature. ‘I Am Legend’, The Book Set in a near post-apocalyptic fu

Book-To-Movie: Stephen King’s 'The Raft'

Credit: Pixabay.com It's the third Saturday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie ! In a Book-To-Movie we review a book and its movie adaptation. One of the reasons I as a horror fan don’t read a lot of Stephen King’s work is because most of it consists of novels that go more than 400 pages. I have a short attention span when it comes to reading, ironically since I consider myself an avid reader, and so I normally won’t read a work that is much more than the equivalent to a 350-page mass market paperback. The other reason why I don’t read a lot of King’s work is that, as literary scholars will tell you, a lot of his writing is poor. However, he does have some good writing in his works, especially his earlier stuff, including his short horror tales. So if I read anything by Stephen King it’s usually his short stories or novellas. One of his collections I’ve read is Skeleton Crew which includes some of his good, or at least