A Far Out Fantastic Site

I’ve been studying the literary markets by reading magazines to see which ones my stories would fit in. I’m still considering self-publishing my book but I want to put some of my stories in magazines too since that’s how authors get their larger works exposed. Publishing both big and small can be very beneficial. Fortunately, many of the sources I want to submit to are online magazines and so most of their fiction is free. If I had to purchase the paper magazines it would get really expensive as much as I prefer reading the paper ones. So far this summer, I’ve only bought one print science fiction magazine, issue 103 of Clarkesworld . The stories and articles looked so great that I wanted to read everything in hardcopy without having to print them up on my printer. Printing them on the printer can eventually add up to colourless clutter of papers that are held together by nothing more than staples. The Nightmare of a World Without Print This reminds me of an interview I saw...

Photo Credit: OpenClipart.org A very busy week, made even busier when you don’t have a car which is my situation. Even though I prefer public transportation and walking, sometimes those two things aren’t practical. So when I do have a car I try to reduce driving it as much as possible. I believe in taking care of our planet. Who knows when we’ll be able to find and settle on another inhabitable one. Even though scientists are discovering them already, traveling to them is a long ways off. I found this out when I was researching for the world-building of my recent short story that I talked about last time .  I was researching interstellar space travel and the sources I looked at indicated that traveling to other solar systems, where many inhabitable planets are, won’t happen that soon. According to these sources, it probably won’t be possible until after AI has dominated the planet which probably won’t be for another 100 to 200 years. Keep in mind, this is all specula...

Sorry for being so late with this post, again. Last week was kind of a bad one because I was having back problems and have been out of a car, so that slowed me down quite a bit. Also, some writer’s block may had added to it. Authors get writers’ block at different stages of their writing. Some get it at the rough draft stage, some in the revision stage. Some writers even get it outside of the draft itself, such as in the characterization and world-building stages and I’m one of those writers. Right now I’m working on a new short story and so I’m on the world-building part which is where I got the writer’s block on Saturday. It was when I was sketching out a world for an alien race in my story which is a kind of space opera-horror. So I’ll tell you how I got over that block in a little bit, but first a couple updates: Updates My Author Interview If you haven’t seen it yet, my interview at HorrorAddicts .net is up. David Watson who’s on the Horror Addict’s staff in...

(Updated 7/11/15) Happy Fourth of July, everybody! Since it's a day to celebrate freedom and independence, including the freedom and independence to be the artists and art lovers that we want and also write and read what we want, I'm going to keep this post a little shorter than usual. However, I did say a while back that I would share concept art for the cover to my next book of short stories, tentatively titled The Hidden . So here it is (Click on it to enlarge). Photo Credit: Steven Rose, Jr. I'm thinking about using  red and black as  the main colours. However, because the wall that the girl is standing against is supposed to be shadowed, I may make that blue in a tone that complements the red or mediates between the red and black. I'm not sure if I want to leave the club in her hand or give her a knife instead. I'm strongly considering the knife since it's more iconic of the horror genre which several of the stories in this book will be of ...