A Far Out Fantastic Site

Well finally the air here in my state has been clearing up from the smoke from the wildfires. We can at least breathe a little better. I’ll miss those blood red sunsets though! But we have to sacrifice for the greater good of everybody, as they say. I’ve also been making progress on my literary projects. I’ve been revising my Patreon page; I just today hired an illustrator for the new cover to “The Fool’s Illusion”; and I completed another revision of my interdimensional-time travel short story that’s been a real pain to write this past year. 
The Portals In My  Page On Patreon©I retitled the tiers on my Patreon page as well as revised the membership price on one. I had titled the tiers “Door Patrons” as in “Door 1 Patron”, “Door 2 Patron”, and so on. However, I didn’t like the word “Door” in the titles because it sounded too much like something from a gameshow to me which is not what my Patreon page is going to be. My Patreon page is going to be a place where you can join a community …

This has been a very hectic week for me. I’ve had technological problems to deal with in areas outside of my writing and art. They’ve been burning me out like the fires here in California have been burning out the forests. Even so, I continued working on my writing projects, especially the two that are most important at this time: my Patreon page and a new book cover for my short fiction collection, “The Fool’s Illusion”. 
Author’s Patreon PageI spent my evenings this week creating the “tiers” and the benefits that they will offer on my Patreon page. A Patreon page often features several levels, or tiers, of membership to choose from. Mine will offer three. The membership benefits will range from exclusive book discounts to fiction-in-progress and concept art for book covers. The top-most tier will also offer more in-depth articles on science fiction and fantasy of the past, present and future! I have only a little more to do with the page until its launch date which I hope to be in th…

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.The IWSG question of the month is: If you could choose one author, living or dead, to be your beta partner, who would it be and why? I’ll have to choose two authors because I feel like one won’t give me enough critique as great of writers both of them are. These two authors are Harlan Ellison and Ray Bradbury (both deceased). As much as the two were friends, their personalities were opposites: Harlan Ellison was the blunt, loud-speaking, somewhat negative-talking author; Ray Bradbury was the more poetic, positive-speaking, energetic author who was more of a straight-out optimist. Yet, each was a top expert in writing fiction who was enthused about his work and enthusiasm alone is big motivator and influencer. Today’s IWSG is brought to yo…

It’s been a hard week, as fast as it went. Although it’s let up in the last couple of days, the smoke from the not too distant fires was so badly infesting my area that people were forced to leave work early, outdoor events have been getting canceled, and the blogger’s had a bad headache all week from breathing it in. I’m just grateful that those fires didn’t reach us but I feel bad for the people in the areas of our state that it did reach. I really hope these fires will be under control soon and that the firefighters will come out of it alive and unharmed. I can’t say enough how grateful I am for the huge risk that they take to protect everyone from these blazes. Yet, through all this apocalyptic chaos, I’ve been keeping myself busier than usual by creating a Patreon page.This past week, I had been working on the “About” statement of my Patreon page. In this statement I introduce myself as an author of science fiction and horror and I list the benefits of becoming a Patreon member.…

It’s the fourth weekend of the month and, so, according to our unofficial pandemic schedule, it is time for another Book-To-Movie! For those of you who are just tuning into this blog, a Book-To-Movie is when we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. This month we are reviewing Philip K. Dick’s science fiction short story, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” and its 1990 movie adaptation, “Total Recall”. And I will say it straight out right now, I hated the movie. Yet, it was the very few good points of the movie that got me to read and really like the short story. 
The Short StoryWhen Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” was originally published in the April 1966 issue of  “The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction”, the Martian craze in sci fi was still going. So, it’s no doubt that that craze, at least in part, influenced this story. But there are no little green men in it (at least as far as Martians go). However, the story does contain creatures an…

I can’t believe this is already the third Saturday of the month! I only realised it earlier this week. Because it came up so quickly, I’m going to again postpone the Book-To-Movie review for the month until next weekend. I know, it seems like I’ve been doing this regularly since the pandemic started in March (at least that’s when it started for my area). Well, as the news media outlets have been recently hollering about society as a whole, this is the new norm. I tried getting a Book-To-Movie together for this weekend but didn’t come up with anything until Thursday in which I viewed the movie adaptation that evening and then read the short story original only yesterday. I’m not going to tell you what the story or its movie adaptation is, though. To find out you will have to tune in here next week. For this week . . . 
Harlan Ellison’s Wife Susan Dies at 60Shockingly, the late Harlan Ellison’s wife, Susan Ellison, died the first of this month. She passed away at her Sherman Oaks home, a…