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) 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. To my awareness, this month of September brings us two anniversaries. First is the anniversary of the IWSG which is 12 years old today! Second, is the 10th anniversary of my first full book of short fiction, "The Fool's Illusion" which is coming up next Thursday the 14th! More about that later. For now, I'm going to help celebrate IWSG's 12-year anniversary by answering the question of the month, which is catered for that: The IWSG celebrates 12 years today! When did you discover the IWSG, how do you connect, and how has it helped you?  My Answer to the Question of the Month To tell the truth, I don't really remember when or how I discovered the IWSG. I probably came across it on one of the blogs that I fo

Credit: Wikipedia /Universal Pictures Warning: A spoiler lurks in this review. I know, the title to this post makes it sound like Dracula's gone Indiana Jones. Although the summer's Dracula film, "The Last Voyage of the Demeter" , can be said to get into the genre of adventure since it takes place on the high seas, it is a very dark and terrifying film and so is horror overall like what any Dracula film should be. It's the fourth Monday of the month and so it's time for another Book-To-Movie (BTM) review in which we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation.  As you may have guessed, for today's BTM we’ll be reviewing Bram Stoker's famous classic vampire novel and its latest movie adaptation. However, the movie's not so much adapted from the overall book as it is from a single chapter and so this is how director Andre Ovredal’s “The Last Voyage of the Demeter” differs from many other Dracula films. There have been a lot of Dracula fi

Credit: Pixabay Well, we're in the latter half of the summer now, the halfway point having been this past Monday. By the way, there was no blog post then because the previous Wednesday was an Insecure Writers support group (IWSG) blog hop. If you haven’t done so yet, you can read my contribution to it here . However, the summer is really flying by like a trapeeze artist! Speaking of which, my childhood summers were full of circuses. I loved going to the circus! Until I learned of the dark side of many of them. I was eventually disillusioned of the way many of the animals were treated. Still, I can’t help cherishing my memories of visits to the circus.  So, as an adult, I’ve turned to the alternative. One that also often has a dark side but in a different sense: the nouveau cirque (‘new circus’). This type of circus is often inspired by the sideshows, also known as "freakshows", of traditional circuses of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Even so, they tend to have a much

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. The challenge I bring to today’s post is the answer to the optional question of the month which is: Have you ever written something that afterwards you felt conflicted about? If so, did you let it stay how it was, take it out, or rewrite it? My answer to the first part of that question is: yes, I have. The answer to the second part: I rewrote it. The conflicting part in my writing that I had to rewrite was in one of my recent stories that I’m working on for my upcoming book of short fiction, “Bad Apps”. This book will consist of stories about strange and deadly mobile apps. The story I had the challenge with involves a demonic creature from another universe that gets summoned through a music video. The creature is so chaotic and ev

Credit: Wikipedia As I said last post , I had to postpone our fourth Monday Book-To-Movie to this fifth Monday. In a Book-To-Movie (BTM), we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. In the previous BTM we reviewed H.G. Wells' science fiction horror classic, "The Island of Dr. Moreau" and its 1932 movie adaptation, "The Island of Lost Souls" . Today we're going to look at American International Pictures’ (AIP) 1977 film that has the same title as the book. This version has the realism of the novel and the countercultural revolution of the early 1970s.  Synopsis of the Book A short synopsis of Wells’ novel: A shipwrecked passenger takes refuge on a remote island and discovers that it is the place of exile of Dr. Moreau, a mad scientist who cruelly forces the evolutionary process in animals to make them human.  The 1977 Movie Adaptation A Twist in Plot AIP’s “Dr. Moreau” is basically faithful to the book but, as with “Lost Souls”, leaves out a

Credit: Pixabay I apologise, but I have to post pone this month's Book-To-Movie review to next Monday. I had a dentist appointment last Friday that took longer than expected so didn't have enough time to plan and write the review for today. Because of this, I thought I'd talk about one of the books from last blog post's Summer Sci Fi Reading List . I had said last week that I didn't plan on stopping the reading of any of the books on the list to switch to another book because so far, the ones that I were reading were good. Well, when I said "so far", I really did mean it. It was only the next day when Jeff VanderMeer's novel, "Borne", proved not to be so good once I came to a scene where the protagonist does something that’s there much more for shock value than for anything else.  The Shock Factor in 'Borne' Instead of writing a synopsis of "Borne" for this post, I'll just quote the synopsis I gave last week . So, in “B