A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay.com Summer is already nearing its end. Typically the summer months are thought to be June through August but the season doesn’t officially end until around the 20th of September. Still, that will be here before we know it! So we should savor these last few weeks of the sunny skies before the dark months of autumn come. Yet, I look forward to it. So I thought I’d savor the summer moment by going over my current projects that I’m working on and look forward to the groovy moments of the fall by previewing what’s to come both in terms of my own writing and of  movies. Particularly horror movies based on horror novels!  Current Writing Projects As many of you may know, I’m mostly a short story writer and so rarely write long works. However, I’ve been working on a novella that I had written the first draft to about two years ago .  And after seven months I just finished a first reading for revisions Thursday night! So I’m ready to go on to the...

For this month’s Book-To-Movie   I thought I’d do something a little different. Instead of writing a new article for this monthly series, where I review a book and its movie adaptation, I decided to present a review that I did for the content website, Helium, back in 2009. Unlike Examiner.com, which closed up in 2016 (and that I used to write for regularly ), Helium wasn’t as well known and so I doubt many of you have seen this review before. I had published this review to Helium relatively not too long after I left grad school. So don’t be surprised if I’m using academic terminology that I often don’t use and if the language comes across in a scholarly manner. I guess I was still speaking and thinking in the foreign language of Scholarly when I wrote this review. Because of that, it is more of a literary analysis than a review. It compares, somewhat, Philip K. Dick’s dystopian sci fi novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? with its 1982 movie adaptation, Blade Runne...

Credit: Pixabay.com When I found out this week that a film adaptation of Color Out of Space will be p remiering in September ,  I thought, “Finally, a film based on one of Lovecraft’s horror novels is coming to the big screen!” And I was right! Only it was the big screen at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). A little far for me, a Northern Californian, to go to see a sci fi horror flick! Still, the movie will star big name actor Nicolas Cage and is directed by Richard Stanley. Hopefully the fact that a famous actor such as Cage being in the movie will help it get the praise that film adaptations of Lovecraft’s stories have been lacking. So what if Cage’s Ghost Rider flopped at the box office? (I actually thought that often overlooked Marvel film was really good.) Lovecraft’s work deserves film adaptations of critical praise because he has had a big influence on horror fiction as we know it today. His work is credited as starting the sub-genre that has be...

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. For today's post, I'm going to answer IWSG's question for the month which is: Has your writing ever taken you by surprise? For example, a positive and belated response to a submission you'd forgotten about or an ending you never saw coming? Well, I'm sure there have been several times that my writing has done this to me such as when I’ve received positive responses from critique groups or have come up with a scene in a story that helped further develop the plot. However, having a bad memory, I can't recall a specific moment when any of these have happened. Because of that, I'll talk about my most recent experience with this sort of thing which occurred with a rejection letter that I received about a month ago. Rejection letters alw...

Credit: Pixabay.com It’s time for some Lightning News Flashes ! Lightning News Flashes are, here at the Fantastic Site, searing news bits and bites in the science fiction and fantasy scene especially in relation to books in the genres. Tonight’s news flashes: a space opera novel by Catherynne Valente that will be adapted to film; the young adult series of horror novels, Ameri-Scares , that will be adapted for television; and a rising demand in the horror fiction market. Screenwriter Selected for Film Adaptation of Funny Sci Fi Novel   According to Deadline , Universal has selected Joe Epstein to write the screenplay to Catherynne Valente’s funny sci fi novel, Space Opera . The plan is to give the movie a music theme, which makes sense: the novel’s story involves a galactic music competition. The story’s heroes are Decibel Jones and his band, the Absolute Zeroes, who represent Earth in the competition. The prize?  The winner’s species will be held in high honour....