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.  I wish I could get started on a better note with this blog hop, this being the month of one of my favourite holidays--Halloween. In fact, I was going to answer the IWSG optional question of the month (see below) with not just one favourite ghost story but a list of thirteen of them that includes both film and prose. However, someone who I'm very close to has been very sick and so not only do I not have the time to make that long of a list but, even more so, I am just not in the mood. So, I’m going to have to keep it to three. Maybe I'll come out with a longer list as it gets closer to Halloween. The problem I mentioned above has also put me behind in my writing projects although I've still kept at them the best I ca

Book cover to Harlan Ellison's new and posthumously published anthology. Image Credit: Publisher's Weekly , Blackstone Publishing No, the headline to this post is not a tabloid. This is not rag or sensationalist journalism. Even though mulit-award-winning author Harlan Ellison passed away six years ago, an anthology edited by him is posthumously coming out very soon. I’ve read all of Ellison’s anthology of dark and disturbing science fiction, "Dangerous Visions", and almost ever since his final and third book in the “Dangerous Visions” trilogy was announced as a Patreon-backed project in 2020 , I had been looking for my used paperback copy of the second volume, "Again, Dangerous Visions". I knew it sat buried, untouched and unread by yours truly among many other books of science fiction, horror and other genres, somewhere in my bedroom closet.  It was only a little over a week ago that I finally found it, and it wasn’t as buried away in my closet as much as

James Earl Jones ("Star Wars", "The Lion King"), Jan. 17, 1932 - Sept. 9, 2024 Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons I got a late start writing this post, so it will be a short one.  I don't really have a lot going on this week to talk about as far as any updates in my writing projects go. In science fiction news, James Earl Jones, who did the voices of  Darth Vader in the original "Star Wars" trilogy and Mufusa in the original animated feature of "The Lion King", died on September 9th. He was 93. Mike Glyer down at his blog, File 770, has a short but nice article that pays tribute to him.  As of this writing, I'm almost done proofreading one story for my upcoming short fiction collection, " Bad Apps ".   I'm about two pages away from completing the proofreading which is mostly for grammar and mechanics. The other story I'm currently working on for the collection, I'm about halfway through in revising the main character. 

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.  Optional Question for September Last time, I mostly skipped the optional question of the month and so just gave it a very brief answer. However, my answer to this month’s optional question was one that I wanted to go over a little more, so I’ll mostly be focusing on that. And that question is: Since it's back to school time, let's talk English class. What's a writing rule you learned in school that messed you up as a writer? In my senior year of high school, I had this creep of an English teacher who was always downgrading my writing no matter what I did to improve it. This was a time when I had fairly recently decided to go for a career in writing/journalism and had been ace-ing my English classes in my previous ye

  Credit: Pixabay The Author's Bad Deeds Aren't the Book's At my writer's critique group last week, the subject of the sexual assault accusations against author Neil Gaiman came up. I’ll admit, even though I’ve been a fan of Gaiman's work since the early 2000s, I had no idea he was accused of anything until last week. The writer’s group member who actually brought up the subject said that he would no longer purchase anything by Gaiman because of the alleged assaults. Everyone else in the group seemed to agree. Everyone but me. The meetup was virtual, so I responded by typing the following in the chat box:  “. . .  I try to separate the art from the artist. The author can be evil but their art/literary work can still be good. I'll just be sure to downgrade the artist’s bad actions aside from their art.” Please keep in mind that when I said “author” and “artist”, I wasn’t referring to Gaiman himself. Instead, I was referring to authors in general who have committe

(Credit for above image: Pixabay.com) You're probably surprised to see a post here after I had said that I'm taking today off from blogging and would be back with another post next week. Well, at the last minute, I switched my day off to next Monday. I knew you'd be expecting the print edition of "The Trespassers", my new short-read of alien terror, to release by the weekend. As you probably noticed, it didn't release. I wanted to explain the reason for the delay: I haven't released the print version yet because I had forgotten all about having to look over a proof of it.   Before I release "Trespassers" as a print book or paperback, I have to look at a proof, or unofficial sample copy, of it. I don't want to leave anybody with a badly printed and formatted book and so I want to look at it before making it available for purchase anywhere. I have to order the proof which will probably take at least three days to reach me by mail.  So, it may b