A Far Out Fantastic Site

Well, October is already here and before we know it Halloween will be here! That’s why I’ve decided to forget the formatting to the paperback version of my YA Halloween horror book, “The Boo Brothers”, and pass on that part of the project to someone else. I’m hiring a book designer.

I create stories. I do not design books. I have designed books before but that is not my primary skill or passion. I’m a teller of stories not a designer of their media. I’m a writer and an artist. My job is to write stories and illustrate them. So, besides writing the books, I’ll make the covers for them, and I’ll promote and market them since doing so involves storytelling of a sort. When you market and promote a book you need to describe the book whether in writing or in speech.

For the past two weeks, and I indicated this in the IWSG post on Wednesday, I have been struggling and getting really frustrated working with the book manuscript format for the paperback version of “The Boo Brothers”. After nea…

It’s time for another Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) post! Every first Wednesday of the month we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share and try to come up with solutions and encouragement. In this IWSG post, I have my latest writing progress and an answer to the question of the month.

In the last couple weeks, I haven't  written a lot of new fiction. I've mostly been working on my weekly blog posts and as far as fiction goes I've mostly been doing editing and formatting. The formatting is really taking me out. I'm formatting my book of two short stories called "The Boo Brothers: Two Tales of Terror". I came out with the electronic version around this time last year. This year, I'm formatting for a paperback version that I'm planning to release for Halloween, though hopefully way before the 31st of the month. But I had to format it a second time because the files from the font that I used messed up. Then yo…

This has been the perfect evening for Lightning News Flashes—earlier there was a lightning storm outside! So these news flashes should carry a lot of charge! Lightning News Flashes are news briefs of events in the world of science fiction and fantasy. Today we have Lightning News Flashes of Stephen King's New England mansion, his son Joe Hill's new horror comics imprint and a new British science fiction and fantasy writing award. But first some news about my book, “The Boo Brothers”.


‘Boo Brothers’ Paperback Update I’ve been working on the paperback version of my book of two short horror tales, "The Boo Brothers”, which includes the title story, and been having a hell of a time with the formatting. This has mostly been due to the Crimson font that I was using for the body text. I think there was a bug in the files for that font which I had downloaded from Squirrel Font, a website that offers free fonts. Overall, I've had good experience with Squirrel Fonts’ products,…

It’s the third weekend of the month and so it’s time for another Book-To-Movie! In a Book-To-Movie, we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation.


If you’ve read Ray Bradbury's short science fiction story, "A Sound of Thunder", the 2005 movie adaptation of the same name may strike you as a continuation of where the former left off. That's not to say that director Peter Hyams and the movie’s screenwriters may as well had made it a cinematic sequel to the short story instead of a direct adaptation. The movie does a great job staying true to the basic elements of this short story about time travel. However, the plot is further developed extending beyond where the short story ends. Why shouldn’t it? It has to fulfill a two-hour feature film based on a tale that can be read in less than fifteen minutes.

‘A Sound of Thunder’, the Short Story Bradbury's "A Sound of Thunder" is about a hunting expedition in the future that travel's back in time…

I'm sorry for missing last week's post. I was away in San Francisco visiting a friend. We were so busy seeing the sites that I really didn't have any time to write except a little in a my personal journal each evening. I'm just now getting back into the daily writing routine and resuming with my current projects. I've been working a little each day for the past week on the formatting of my upcoming paperback version of "The Boo Brothers: Two Tales of Terror". When the week begins I'm going to go full blast on it so I can get the manuscript uploaded to Kindle Direct Publishing hopefully by the end of the week. I'll need time to review a proof copy of it before publishing it which I'm aiming to do next month and so in time for the Halloween season.

Because I've been busy with the time that I've taken off from my day job, busy with things such as cleaning excessive paper accumulation out of my house and rearranging my book shelves, I'…

It’s time for another Insecure Writer's Support Group (IWSG) post! Every first Wednesday of the month we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to come up with solutions.

The IWSG question of the month is “If you could pick one place in the world to sit and write your next story, where would it be and why?” The one place in the world that I would pick to write my next story is my house. That’s because this is where I write all my fiction, at least at the first draft level. When I’m at home and not in front of or around other people I can do my best fiction writing and my imagination can expand far more than in a public place or at a friend or relative’s home. It is there that I come in touch best with, what I think are, my most awesome fantasies.

Most writers have what can be considered the equivalent to a sacred space. Like Zen monks have their sacred space to meditate and expand their minds, many of us writers have t…