A Far Out Fantastic Site

It’s the first day of September and so the summer is almost over and the fall almost here! But it's also the first Wednesday of the month and so that means 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. And I do have a few challenges, namely getting all my stories together for my next book, “Bad Apps”.  Upcoming Short Fiction Collection I've been aiming to release “Bad Apps”, a collection of short fiction about weird and deadly mobile apps, by, ha! this month. I had moved the release date from August to September, but now the latter is here and I still have several stories to revise. I also want to do a beta release before I do an official release. If anyone is interested in reading a beta copy of the book just let me know and I'll be happy to send you one. All I ask in exchange is, of course, your honest feedback

  Credit: Pixabay Warning: This review may contain spoilers. I apologise for missing last week. It was a rough one; I got very little sleep throughout it and so had gotten behind on other things. I was almost totally worn out which took out my creativity for blogging. But now things are back to normal, somewhat. Well, at least they’re back to normal in time for this fourth weekend, the weekend of our monthly Book-To-Movie. In a Book-To- Movie, we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. This post we are reviewing Stephen King's short story, "Children of the Corn" and its 1984 movie adaptation. When compared to the short story, the movie adaptation is much more comical.  The Short Story Published in 1976, “Children of the Corn” concerns Burt and Vicky, a married couple whose relationship is on the brink of divorce and who get stranded in a small Nebraska town. They discover that all the adults of the town have disappeared and only the children are there wh

Credit: Pixabay I've been working on my upcoming short fiction collection  all week but have been worn out too many times, mostly from a bad case of allergies and insomnia. When I would work on one of my short stories for the book, there were several times when I nearly fell asleep ready to drop my head on the keyboard. So, I'd just go to bed intending to get more done in the morning but once in bed I wouldn't be able to fall asleep. Isn’t that ironic? Maybe I should make the computer keyboard my bed from now on.  Well, there's some good news. Tuesday, I shared with my writer's critique group part two of "The Watch Party", one of the short stories that I’m including in my book. Compared to when the group critiqued part one several weeks ago, they didn’t have any problems with it. However, I did not factor in the changes suggested by the group from the last time. I've only done that for the first part so far. So, there's going to be some work that I

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. And did I have a challenge last week that I want to bring out into the open. That challenge was, what I call, a writing drought.  A Week of Writer’s Block Last week was a bad one for writing. I had a writer's drought all that week like my region has had a water drought for a lot longer. In other words, I had writer’s block. I felt like I couldn't come up with anything new to write either fiction or non-fiction. I had just barely come up with something for last weekend’s post .   Because of my writer’s block, I got behind with the story I've currently been working on for my upcoming book of short fiction. Originally, I planned to get the book out by this month but my stay in the hospital made me have to push it back to Septem

Credit: Pixabay Often, I try to mark my summers with a big screen movie. Summers are magical and they especially were when we were kids. And they’re still magical for us adult artists, and that includes writers. I remember my summer from when I was 9 because that’s when “Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back” premiered (1980) and my dad took my kid brother and I to see it.  Even bad movies served as a landmark, or maybe more like a “timemark”, for some of my summers when I was a kid. I won’t forget how unamusing the fourth “Jaws” film, “Jaws: The Revenge”, was when I saw it on the big screen during the summer (1987) just before my junior year of high school. Still, it was an event that I shared with my younger brother that was characteristic of summer. Of course, I thought I would like the movie and so that’s why we went to see it. So even now as an adult, every summer I’ll go see a movie that I think I’ll like and then remember the summer for it regardless of whether I liked it or not. 

Credit: Pixabay Warning: This review may contain spoilers. In past Book-To-Movies, we’ve reviewed several movie adaptations of books and short stories by famous science fiction and horror authors. All those films have stuck to the plot of the original work to at least some recognizable degree. But this week’s Book-To-Movie will be the first to review a film that does a poor job of staying faithful to the original plot. The film is 1992’s “The Lawnmower Man” which is based on Stephen King’s short story of the same name. Even so, the movie is a really good one. So then what’s the problem? The problem is that it’s hardly an adaptation and so more its own story simply with the title of King’s short work slapped onto it.  ‘The Lawnmower Man’: The Short Story Stephen King’s “The Lawnmower Man” originally appeared in “Cavalier” magazine in 1975 and was then collected into his book of short fiction, “Night Shift” the following year. The story’s protagonist is a middle-aged husband and dad by t