A Far Out Fantastic Site

It's the first Wednesday of the month, and so it’s time for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) monthly 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. Lately, as much as I love the book, the publishing process of my soon-to-release short story collection, “Bad Apps”, has been a challenge for me. Yet, it’s even sooner-to-release and so it’s only a matter of days until it releases! However, before that will be the cover reveal. So, I have the latest on these and the optional question of the month below! Book Updates and Prep-Publishing Challenges I've said before that I’m not a deadline person, as much as I try to and believe in getting things done promptly. So, I try to be as transparent as possible with my writing projects. That includes “Bad Apps”. There are often unexpected challenges for the artist, and so I’ve been getting those in the formatting and publishing pr...

Credit: Pixabay You're probably surprised to see me posting so early in the month. For at least since the beginning of the year, I've been posting at the end of each month. But I thought I should post something now to keep everyone updated on my upcoming book of short fiction, "Bad Apps". Since I'm not a deadline-oriented person, I try to keep people updated as much as possible on my book projects so they can have a sense of how close I am to publishing it. And it is a lot closer yet! "Bad Apps" Blurb "Bad Apps" is a collection of techno-horror short stories. They explore mobile device apps that are strange, sinister, and deadly. Many of these stories encounter the weirdly scientific while others go right to the brink of the supernatural. Some of the stories blur the lines between reality and virtual reality, others feature handheld devices that connect to parallel universes and alternative timelines. One story involves a young woman who discov...

It's the first Wednesday of the month, and so it’s time for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) monthly 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. The last few days have been exhausting for me. I've been trying to keep everyone updated here at my blog on the progress of my upcoming book, "Bad Apps", preparing the manuscript for upload to Kindle Direct, and working with the illustrator on the book's cover. Plus it's been in the triple digits here in Sacramento, California which I've had to walk through and wait in for the public transportation that I take to and from my day job of library tech. So, the last couple of days have been so exhausting to the point where I've nearly fallen asleep over the computer and so would end up conking out on the couch for the rest of the night.  Yet I've been working around all that. Even though I was ...

I’m sorry for posting for July so late. (This post serves as the July post, even though it's now August.) I was busy this past Friday filling out my annual fiscal year tax return for my freelance writing which, as easy as it seems considering today’s automation, is always time consuming and a headache. And that was on the due date. I usually don’t wait until then, but this fiscal year of ‘25/’26 has been exceptional. But I wasn’t going to let you go without a Book-To-Movie of the month or the latest on my upcoming book of short fiction, “Bad Apps”! Book-To-Movie Review: Arthur C. Clarke's '2001: A Space Odyssey' Credit: Pixabay Good science fiction makes us wonder about the universe and our place in it, even to the point of terror in certain cases. Both Arthur C. Clarke's short story, "The Sentinel", and the Stanley Kubrick film adaptation, "2001: A Space Odyssey”, definitely do that well. The two works make people think about the possibility of inte...

It's not only the first of the month but the first Wednesday of the month! So it’s time for the Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) monthly 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.  Challenges There've been a couple challenges I've had to deal with in my writing, especially in preparing my newest book of short fiction, " Bad Apps ", for publication. That's been especially the case with finding a designer for my book's cover, in which I was about to hire one last week until there was a disagreement with the pricing. You can read that in more detail in my latest blog post outside of IWSG which I published (can you believe it?) only last night! So, that was kind of my other writing challenge that I had: my blog posts' schedules got backed up and so I've been trying to cram in both. I think a lot of it had to do with some bad sleep I was g...

Credit: Pixabay.com Update: The Alt text for the illustration at the top of this post has had a slight phrase-change as of 7/3/2026. Whereas the phrase used to read as "a gorilla", it has now been changed to "an ape".  During all of June, I’ve seemed to have been possessed by the Spirit of ’76. I had been staying up nights hunting on internet for and collecting US 250th anniversary  commemorative coins and even some American Bicentennial artifacts from a year that celebrated a revolution while social and cultural revolutions were currently going. This Fourth of July here in the US we’ll be celebrating 250 years of our nation’s freedom, or at least some level of freedom. And, like what the many of the computer hobbyists believed in the 1970s, and to quote a 1984 phrase by Stewart Brand , “information wants to be free.” And it’s because of them that information became free, at least to some extent. It’s way more easily accessible than it used to be. We can fit persona...