A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Wikipedia /Disney Disney has not been typically known for horror movies. However, it’s made a few. When I say “horror”, I don't mean any of Disney’s comedies based on the genre or any of its Mickey mouse haunted house cartoons or monster parodies. So, Eddie Murphy's “The Haunted Mansion” and the “Hocus Pocus” movies don't count here. What I mean by “horror” is straight, live-action horror. I'm also not including today's movies made by Disney-acquired properties such as “Halloween: The Curse of Michael Meyers” which was made by Miramax, or “The Omen” which was produced by 20th Century Fox. I'm talking about horror produced by Disney Studios itself.  The first Disney horror film made by Disney Studios with live actors and for the big screen was a 1980s movie called "The Watcher in the Woods". It was based on a young adult novel by Florence Engel Randall. I haven't read the novel, so I'm not going to talk about it here. If I would have rea

Credit: Pixabay First Post of the New Post Day Welcome to the first post of our new post day of the week, Mondays! We’ll see how this schedule works out for most of you for the next month or so. If another day seems to work better, then we’ll move it to that day. Let me know in the comments box below how you like Mondays as the new post day.  Human Authors Vs. the AI Authors A few years ago in my writer’s critique group, one of the other members, who I believe worked in computer technology, decided to do an experiment. So, he distributed to us copies of two poems: one was written by himself and another written by an AI program. We had to guess which one was written by the AI program and which one was written by him. I told myself that there was no way I was going to let a machine fool me into thinking what’s human-made art. So, I read both versions and guessed each correctly. I’ve always had a good eye for what’s human-produced and what’s machine-produced. But now I'm not so sure a

It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s 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.  Progress Made When Writing Fiction in Larger Timeslots Until around last Friday, I had a hell of a time fitting in time to do my fiction writing, particularly my upcoming book of short stories, titled "Bad Apps" . The cause of this was my day job which I have to make a two-hour public transit commute going and coming each day. I love my day job (I’m a library technician) and so won’t give it up, but it still takes up writing time. I don't work on my laptop on the bus or train because it's too awkward for me and so I would get less done than I would if I were writing in a more stationary place.  Lately I've had to fight my way to squeeze out a bare minimum of 20 minutes of fiction writing before going to work i

Credit: Pixabay New Blog Posting Day Coming I said a few weeks back that our blog posting schedule would change from the weekends to Mondays. And so it did. For one Monday . However, I’ve temporarily returned to posting on the weekends for about two weeks. I hadn't announced the new post schedule here at the Fantastic Site enough and so I don't think a lot of people know about the new schedule yet. So, I'm officially making the announcement now that we will be changing to a Monday schedule beginning March 13th.  This new schedule is due to the statistics reflecting throughout the last six months-to-a-year that many of you prefer to read blog posts during the week and, so far, Mondays seem most popular for that. The new posting schedule doesn't count the Insecure Writer's Support Group blog hop. That's exceptional because it's a group activity and so will, to my knowledge (since I don't coordinate it), continue on its first Wednesday of the month schedul

Credit: Pixabay This time, I’m not posting late. As I mentioned at my Facebook page , I'm switching from posting on weekends to during the weekdays. As of now, I’ll be posting Mondays. Google Analytics has been showing me that it's a time many of you prefer and so I want to make the timing as convenient for you as possible. Now for today’s post . . .  Back in December, the admin of a Facebook writers' group I belong to announced a new rule for the group: no posting of anything done by an AI writer or AI artist. She gave several reasons why. Reasons I mostly agree with, including the jeopardising of writers’ and artists’ careers. Since around that same time, there's been a lot of online controversy over AI content creators which include both writer software and artist software. You'd think most writers and artists (digital and freehand) would be hella angry over this new technology that, basically, does your work for you. Well, I don’t know about most but I can say t

It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s 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. Well, it's already February and so we've made it through the first month of a new year! I've started this year out by trying to take a load off of myself and not concentrate too much on the marketing side of the writing and to focus much more on the writing itself, including my fiction. Last year my most current book that I've been working on, "Bad Apps", a collection of short fiction about strange and deadly mobile apps, kept getting postponed in its release because I was playing the role of marketer too much and I’m not a marketer, I'm a writer. And “Bad Apps” still has yet to see publication. So, this year I’ve laid off the extensive marketing and plan to continue doing so. However, one form of marke