Game for My Novella; Horror Comic Review; Lightning News Flashes

Credit: Pixabay.com

Halloween’s come and gone again, but the horror and fun haven’t ended. Now we’re in the month of NaNoWriMo in which I’ve been working on my novella for. Also, there’s upcoming horror films and comics. That said, in this post I have a comic book review for you and Lightning News Flashes  covering a sci fi horror movie and the state of science fiction short stories.

Working on My Novella for NaNoWriMo 

For NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) I’ve been revising my sci fi horror novella that I wrote during the NaNoWriMo of a few years back. I kind of put it on hiatus back in October to concentrate on promoting the print edition of “The Boo Brothers”, now available at Amazon, and the Halloween book sale which I hope you had a chance to check out before it ended. So now it’s back to revising the novella, which so far I’ve titled Invasion of the Avatars.

I just finished writing out the details of the game for Avatars. No, there’s not going to be a game based on it (not any time soon at least). The game that I made for it is the MORPG that the story centers around. So I’ve had to double up on the story development: I’ve had to write the story to the novella and, more recently, the story and rules to the game within the novella.

Because the MORPG is a fantasy one, I had to come up with names for settings and characters. This can be a challenge because you have to be consistent with the root spellings of the names and make sure they reflect the language they come from, often an imaginary one. Whenever I have to create names for an imaginary language, I often do this by combining the spellings of names from a variety of real languages. The source I normally use to create names for my characters is Behind The Name which I highly recommend to you fellow writers. It’s a great source for finding names for your characters. So, now that I’ve developed the story’s game, I have to work it into the story itself, which is what I’ll be doing for the rest of this NaNoWriMo.

Comic Book Review: ‘Basketful of Heads’ #1

Credit: Pixabay.com

This horror comic written by Joe Hill released the day before Halloween. Because I liked Hill’s horror short story collection, 20th Century Ghosts, so much I made sure I bought this one on the day it came out. So far, the story is okay and appears to be going in a good direction. It drags a little but that’s mostly due to introducing the characters and situation which, for a six-issue comic book, takes up most of the first issue.

The suspense in Basketful is good. In fact, the horror element opens the story in the prologue. The problem is that it ends there for that issue. But then the suspense comes back at the very end, giving a hint to what is to come but only enough to make us want to purchase the next issue to see how it will come. So far, Basketful doesn’t seem like a bad series and the art work by Leomacs and Dave Stewart is good and doesn’t over-depend on computer graphics. I think Hill was trying to capture that four-colour effect from the pre-modern age of comics, an effect that too many comic creators and fans today don’t seem to see the aesthetic value of. This is suggested on his editorial page in the comic where he talks about how his dad, Stephen King, brought him home a 1981 issue of DC’s Ghosts when he was a kid and how he fell in love with the genre since.

As a bonus, Basketful contains a comic serial strip at the end called Sea Dogs. It’s a historical horror story set in the U.S.’s revolutionary war where a troop uses werewolves to help fight the war. I normally am not into war horror stories where the monster is soldier but this one seems to have some promise. It continues in the first issue of Hill’s next comic title, The Doll House Family, due out this month. Basketful of Heads and Doll House Family are part of DC’s new horror imprint, Hill House Comics.

Lightning News Flashes

Color Out of Space Movie Trailer and Release Date: The trailer to the movie adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s short sci fi horror story, ‘The Color Out of Space’, is now out and, judging by what it’s revealed, the movie looks like it might be really good. The suspense looks good and the dark setting looks like it may capture well the New England scenery of many of Lovecraft’s stories. Color Out of Space is planned to release January 24, 2020. That’s sooner than I expected it to release, but not too soon for this Lovecraft fan!

Science Fiction Short Stories On the Rise: According to a Forbes article, science fiction short stories are coming into popularity again. It says that much of this is suggested in the fact that Amazon, the largest online distributor of books and almost everything, has come out with an anthology, entitled Forward, of stories by today’s top science fiction writers such as Andy Weir and N.K. Jemisin. If you’re mostly a novelist finding it hard to sell your work you may want to try the short story. Not that that’s so much easier to sell, (believe me, it isn’t because the fiction I write is mostly short fiction and I have trouble selling it all the time) but it may open up a new door to success while you’re working on selling that novel.


Tune in next time for the Book-To-Movie of the month, plus a special bonus mini movie review of Doctor Sleep! Are you working on anything for NaNoWriMo? Have you read any of Joe Hill’s work, prose or comics? Are you looking forward to the upcoming sci fi horror film, Colour Out of Space? Do you read science fiction short stories or short stories of any genre?

Until next time . . .