A Far Out Fantastic Site

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...

Credit: Pixabay.com Lately there’s been a heated debate over how young adult fiction is written. Many YA authors have been slammed by critics, both pro and amateur, for including controversial material in their books, such as racism, and how it represents minorities. One of the latest cases has been with Amelie Wen Zhao’s fantasy novel, Blood Heir (due for release in November). Back in January Zhao had pulled her book from the pre-publication stage because several people on Twitter, many who were also YA authors, criticised it for being insensitive to the slave trade in the U.S. This was regardless of Zhao herself being a minority of colour, an immigrant from China. It was also regardless of her intentions to, as reported in Publisher’s Weekly , make people aware of the issue of human trafficking as well as telling an engaging story and that much of the slave trade and indentured servitude scenes in the book were rooted in her own Asian culture’s history and not meant to depi...

Credit: Pixabay.com Sinister Creature Con is a biannual horror convention in Sacramento, California that caters to movie make-up artists. However, as with the show that occurred during the weekend of June 15th at the Scottish Rite Center, horror authors do show up as venders to present their work. Other items related to horror fiction are also featured, such as board games based on H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos. The Horror Authors The horror fiction authors at June’s Sinister Creature Con included Nicholas Grabowsky, Derek Muk and Nicolas Walls. There may have been others, but I only had time to talk with those three. Grabowsky’s table consisted of both his own and other horror fiction writers’ works, many of which he has published through his Black Bed Sheet Books publishing house which is headquartered in nearby Antelope. One of his books is his 1989 novel, The Rag Man, which he said he is doing a re-write of for a new edition that he’s collaborating on with another auth...

It’s time for another Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) post! IWSG is a monthly blog hop that occurs every first Wednesday of the month where we writers talk about the challenges in writing and how to resolve them. A couple weeks ago, I was talking to author Derek Muk at Sinister Creature Con, a horror convention in Sacramento California. I told him I was a self-published author. He asked me if I thought self-publishing still gets looked down on compared to traditional publishing. I thought for a moment. Then I said that it does but less so than when it first came onto the internet scene in the 1990s . In a way, like many of the authors themselves who have gone that route, self-publishing is making its break! I told Muk that self-published books are still not taken seriously by the majority of critics and avid readers since most of the works on the New York Times b est s ellers’ l ist come from traditional publishers such as Random House and DAW. But self-p...