Book-to-TV Series Sci Fi; PDF and Self-Publishing

A robot warrior and a cat-like creature overlook a misty landscape.

Credit: Pixabay.com

The last couple days in publishing my work have both been great and frustrating.

My Latest Article On Sci Fi/Fantasy Books and TV

I said a while back that I sold an article to an online science fiction/fantasy magazine called BuzzyMag but that it may be a while before they actually publish it. Well the wait is over! The article is now live. “It’s alive! It’s alive!” (as Dr. Frankenstein in Universal’s Frankenstein shouts.) It covers one of the newest trends in sci fi and fantasy television: TV series based on books in the two genres. With TV shows like The Expanse, American Gods and The Man In the High Castle, that are all based on best-selling or award-winning books, there are many more TV shows such as these to come in the near-future. I discuss those as well as past and current shows based on novels in my article entitled “TheTop 10 SF/F TV Series Based On Books” at BuzzyMag. Feel free to leave any comments either there or here.

“Circa” Print Edition Update: Resubmitting the Manuscript as a PDF File

Speaking about publishing, an indie author like myself doesn’t really know or remember how tough self-publishing is until they are actually doing it. Yesterday when I was trying to submit my manuscript for the print edition of “Circa Sixty Years Dead” to Kindle Direct Publishing’s beta paperback publishing program, I was going through a series of file types to get the manuscript to lay out correctly. None of them worked. Amazon suggests submitting manuscripts in PDF formatted files because is more compatible to the publishing program. I had been considering making a PDF version of my manuscript since yesterday afternoon when I started having the submission problems but didn’t have a PDF converter. Or I thought I didn’t.

I tried searching the internet for a free converter that was recommended by articles in well-known tech magazines such as Wired and PC Mag. Well, it was just this afternoon that I was looking at an article at PCMag.com that suggested Libre Office. I’ve been using Libre Office for typing my stories for the last year or so, ever since Microsoft stopped providing its own Office package with Windows. However, I didn’t know that it had a PDF converter or editing tool until I glanced through that article. I looked on the file menu of the Writer software of my copy of Libre Office and, sure enough, there was an option to convert files to PDF that was labeled “Export as PDF”! I clicked on that with the odt (open document format) file of my manuscript open and it created a PDF copy. Now to see if Kindle’s paperback publishing program will accept the file even if it’s been created by an open source program like Libre. Microsoft Word has seemed to be the standard for everything for the last 20 years.

I’ll update you next time and let you know how the PDF file of my manuscript submission worked out. If next week’s post’s headline reads something like “’Circa Sixty Years’ Print Edition Now Available” then that means it worked out.

Until next time . . .

Book-To-Movie: Stephen King’s 'The Raft'

Credit: Pixabay.com It's the third Saturday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie ! In a Book-To-Movie we review a book and its movie adaptation. One of the reasons I as a horror fan don’t read a lot of Stephen King’s work is because most of it consists of novels that go more than 400 pages. I have a short attention span when it comes to reading, ironically since I consider myself an avid reader, and so I normally won’t read a work that is much more than the equivalent to a 350-page mass market paperback. The other reason why I don’t read a lot of King’s work is that, as literary scholars will tell you, a lot of his writing is poor. However, he does have some good writing in his works, especially his earlier stuff, including his short horror tales. So if I read anything by Stephen King it’s usually his short stories or novellas. One of his collections I’ve read is Skeleton Crew which includes some of his good, or at least...

Book-To-Movie: Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Black Cat'

Credit: Wikimedia Commons It's another fourth Monday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie (BTM), we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. A few years back, we had a BTM for Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Black Cat" and its movie adaptation. However, the movie we reviewed was actually a segment in Roger Corman’s anthology film, "Tales of Terror", which features three of Poe's short stories, including "Black Cat". And I'll tell you now, I liked that version far more than the version that we're going to review today which is the 1934 Universal adaptation starring Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff. I like Corman's version better mostly because it stays more faithful to the original short story than Universal's does. However, even though Universal's "Black Cat", directed by Edgar Ulmer, strays (excuse the pun) far from Poe's short stor...

Book-To-Movie: ‘Journey to the Center of the Earth’

Both the 1959 and the 2008 movies based on Jules Verne's novel, "Journey to the Center of the Earth", feature terrifying monsters such as the ones here in this illustration from an early edition of the book. Credit: Édouard Riou/ Wikimedia Commons Warning: This review may contain spoilers. As I said last post , I’ve postponed the month’s Book-To-Movie review from last week to this week. For those of you who are just tuning into this blog, a Book-To-Movie is when we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. And this weekend’s review is of Jules Verne’s novel, “Journey to the Center of the Earth” and its movie adaptations. There have been several movies based on this novel that was originally published in Paris in 1864 (as “Voyage au Centre de la Terre”). However, most of them have been either made for TV or video. Because I believe movies are best when made for the big screen, I am going to review the theatrical films in which there have been two: the 195...

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