A Far Out Fantastic Site

It’s the third weekend of the month and so it’s time for another Book-To-Movie ! In a Book-To-Movie, we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. Horror and sci fi can go good with the holiday season, especially on cold winter nights like we’ve been getting here in the Sacramento Valley for the past couple of weeks. No snow but plenty of rain and cold, gray skies. But some of the best horror stories are set in snowy regions. This is the case with John Campbell’s classic novella “Who Goes There?”, more popularly known from its movie adaptations as “The Thing”. Campbell’s novella was first published in 1938 in "Astounding Science Fiction" magazine. Since then there have been three movie adaptations: “The Thing from Another World” (1951), director John Carpenter’s “The Thing” (1982) and Matthijs van Heijningen’s 2011 version also titled “The Thing”. While the two remakes fall short of Campbell’s original novella, mostly due to excessive gore overridin...

At Amazon It’s frustrating when you’re trying to look for that special holiday gift for that friend or relative who’s such an avid science fiction/fantasy reader that he or she already has nearly every book on the genre’s shelves in most bookstores. The shelves in these stores aren’t big enough to hold many rare editions of certain books in the speculative genre such as an author’s work that has been out of print for the last 50 years, that Bernie Wrightson-illustrated edition of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or that signed copy of a book by a favourite author. You have a better chance of finding these rareties at a sci fi and fantasy bookstore, and so one that specialises in the speculative genre. But like many of the books it sells, this type of bookstore itself is rare. That’s why I composed a list of 8 sci fi and fantasy bookstores which consists of at least one store for each of the major regions of the continental U.S.: West Coast, East Coast, the Midwest and the South. ...

It’s time for another Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG) post! Every first Wednesday of the month we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to come up with solutions. We all know December is one of the busiest months of the year. There's holiday shopping to do and relatives and friends to visit and give seasons greetings to. And as writers, most of us know how much more busy it can be when we have writing projects going  in addition to these seasonal activities. This is especially the case if you're like me and wrestle with time management. Credit: Pixabay.com Time management has always been a relatively poor skill of mine. This is regardless of several years of handwriting onto paper writing schedules that include details such as deadline dates and time slots for working on specific projects. These schedules don't seem to be very encouraging because they cause too much paper build-up and c...