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IWSG: What 'Abandoning' the First Draft Can Do For You

It’s the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) post! 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. IWSG Question of the Month The IWSG question for this month is: "For how long do you shelve your first draft before reading it and re-drafting? Is this dependent on your writing experience and the number of stories/books under your belt?" I don't have a precise amount of time that I shelve, or in my case file, the first draft to a story that I write. However, when I file a draft in a folder that I keep first drafts of fiction in, the time that it sits in there often averages from four to six months. I've set up my own rule to let a first draft sit in my filing cabinet for at least two weeks if it's a short story. If it's a longer work, which I seldom write, I'll let it sit for longer, at least about two mo

Book-To-Movie: 25 Horror and SF Films Starring Vincent Price

Credit: Wikimedia Commons Well, finally, I'm back from that hiatus that I had said I was going to take. With the nice help of family, I got my bedroom cleaned of the paper clutter that dominated it. But that wasn't the only thing I was busy with that kept me from my regular writing schedule. I was in the hospital for three weeks, a follow-up from the last time I was there. The doctors had to remove the benign tumor they had found in me the time before. They had to take me apart, limbs, head and torso, and stitch me back together again like Frankenstein's monster. Okay, I'm exaggerating. Like really exaggerating. They only had to make one incision that they had to stitch up (with staples). The surgery lasted one day but the recovery lasted three weeks. I still have to limit my activity here at home, but I've been feeling well and enthused enough to at least give you this Book-To-Movie review for the month! I decided to take a deviation from our usual Book-To-Movie

Paper Piles; Blog Hiatus; ‘Circa Sixty Years Dead’ at Smashwords

Credit: Pixabay.com My posts have been late these last few weeks. Instead of posting on late Saturday/early Sunday like I normally had been, I’ve been posting on Mondays. I apologise for this inconsistency but the month has been busier than usual. One of the things that have kept me busiest is a major paper accumulation in my house, let alone my bedroom. I’ve been cleaning out paper junk in my bedroom for the past couple weeks. And I haven’t even cleaned out a quarter of it done yet! The problem with being a writer, at least for those of us who still like to write on paper and print out our work, is that paper accumulates easily and quickly. We initially don’t know when we will need our old drafts and outlines and so we hang onto them. Print copies of our stories also build up. And these are just a small percentage of the total paper excess in my house! In addition to these, bill notices have piled up over the last ten years, administration paper work and records from my college days

Publisher Puts ‘Amazing Stories’ on Hiatus

Credit: Pixabay Back in September, I ordered a subscription of “Amazing Stories” but not simply because I’ve always loved the magazine. I also ordered it because I wanted to support the continuing success of its revival after it had been out of publication for several years. Editor Steve Davidson restored it to publication less than a decade ago. So far I’ve only received one issue which was the summer 2020 one. It’s supposed to be quarterly so there should have been a fall and winter issue. I never received them. And it’s no wonder. According to Davidson in a news release last Thursday April 8, the magazine’s publisher, Experimenter Publishing Company, has been facing licensing agreement issues. Because of that, Experimenter has put the publishing of “Amazing Stories” on hiatus. “Amazing Stories” has been one of the longest running science fiction magazines. Its publication was born in 1926 during the pulp era. It went through several relatively short publication lapses. After its

IWSG: Making the Protagonist Go to the Extreme

It’s the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) post! 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. Question of the Month The optional question of the month for April is: Are you a risk-taker when writing? Do you try something radically different in style/POV/etc. or add controversial topics to your work? Overall, I’m already set in my own style of writing which I can’t really define, it’s just that it’s my own personal style. So, I wouldn’t say I normally take risks. There are times where I will go to an extreme in writing a scene, making it perhaps more sexual or more graphically violent than I normally would. However, I think the most risks, or what comes close to them, that I take in my fiction is with my protagonists. I’ll sometimes have them do anti-heroic things just to develop the character and so make it more believable. But

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