A Far Out Fantastic Site

If you’re like me and love highly imaginative art, you probably enjoy the hand-painted  sci fi and fantasy book cover art of the 1980s and back. As a pre-reading ritual, you may stare several seconds, or maybe even minutes, at the beautiful art on the cover of that paperback you picked up at a used book store. And it’s nothing to be embarrassed about because the illustration is part of the art of the book as a whole. It served a commercial function which was to draw in customers to buy the book, but if it was made by a great artist such as Frank Frazetta or Boris Vallejo, it has an aesthetic appeal too. It makes you think about the world the story takes place in before you start reading it. It makes you want to explore that world on the other side of the front cover, just like with a carnival haunted house’s (or dark ride’s) front with its mural of monsters. Those books are from a time when individual artists did illustrations for book covers and whose work was distinct. You could tel

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com Certain aspects of the creation process in writing fiction can be overwhelming. For me those aspects are  character development  and, although to a lesser extent,  world-building . Just think about it: you have so many levels to take care of in building a single character especially if it’s the protagonist or main character. Sometimes you feel like you have to be God just to make your characters and worlds believable. And being the Supreme Being is just a little impossible. As a writer, you not only have your character’s superficial characteristics such as physical features and speech mannerisms to take care of but also their psychological ones: the ways they think and perceive things, in many cases ways of thinking they do not directly express to the other characters but may still be essential to the story.  Although creating character profiles is relatively easy, if you’re like me you might find it difficult to apply them to the story without makin

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com For the last 10 years, mainstream readers have been taking both speculative and other types of genre fiction seriously. But they’ve also been more accepting of mixed genre fiction. The reasons for that may be many, including the popularity of mixed genre movies and TV shows such as Twilight and The Vampire Diaries both of which are romance and horror (better known as paranormal romance) and themselves originating as book series. One reason for it is that writers want to create original stories but this has become hard to do within a single genre. Author JeffSummers says , “It’s getting harder and harder to find something surprising in the usual convention of genres. But [by] mixing genres together . . . every now and then you get something explosive and beautiful.” For the last decade, we’ve seen a lot of science fiction mixing with fantasy and horror mixing with epic fantasy. But the latest trend has been the mixing of horror fiction and crime fict

Photo Credit: Mike Winklemann/Museum of Science Fiction I just launched my new pop culture blog, The Super Freek . There I’ll discuss everything in geeky (and freaky) pop culture, except reading and writing fiction. Since these last two I post about here regularly, I’m trying to focus the new blog on other forms of pop culture such as movies, TV, pop music, video games and computer technology. Other news: last week the Museum of Science Fiction in Washington D.C. launched its Journal of Science Fiction . This publication consists of well-researched articles about the genre rather than just your typical quick review of a movie or book. It examines how the genre influences society and vice versa. And the great thing about it is that you can download the premiere issue for free! To find out how to do that, check out my article  about it at Examiner.com. It’s been a long day preparing and launching the new blog and I’m not even finished with it yet. I still have plenty o

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com The problem with writing science fiction today is keeping up with the increasing speed that technology advances at. Unlike those eras before internet, technology was not as quickly advancing and so it was easier to keep up with it to reflect future technology in writing speculative fiction. But now that much of computer technology is becoming more complex it is able to develop at faster rates and it will develop at even faster ones yet. Because of that, many authors are concerned that it’s harder to write new sci fi without getting stuck with old tropes and so I’m going to talk about that but first I want to bring to light some slight changes in my own current work. Changes in Publishing Plans and a New Blog I’m slightly postponing the publishing of The Hidden  so I can first publish some of its stories individually. Therefore I’m taking a few of the stories that I planned to include in my second short fiction collection and will self-publish each