A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay.com The Technology That Keeps Us Together I hope everyone’s been having a groovy holiday season! While mine was uneventful compared to most years it was actually great considering. Because so many in my family have been ill there were no gatherings Christmas Eve or Day, so most of the gathering was limited to Facebook and our phones. But it was expected. Covid-19 has caused many of us to have to alter our festivities. It’s a lot easier to do that now with the miraculous technology of internet and social media, and the recent trend with facetime apps such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams, than it was during the so-called Spanish Flu pandemic of the early 20th century. (I say “so-called” because the flu did not actually start in Spain or any Spanish-speaking country.) Such facetime technology shows you that what science fiction prophesied, if you will, decades ago has come to be!  After virtually gathering with family yesterday, I finished reading “The Christmas Tree” ...

Credit: Pixabay.com To find out how you can read blog posts like this one without ads, visit my Patreon page !   Christmas is this upcoming week and a week after that will already be the end of another year. For a while it had seemed like it was the end of the world. With Covid-19 plaguing the planet, it seemed like we would not make it to the end of 2020. Perhaps a lot of you will be glad when 2020 ends and that’s perfectly understandable considering the circumstances. However, even a bad year has something good in it. And, believe it or not, that includes this year.  So, what good things have we had in 2020? One is that we and the world are still here. Another is that genius doctors and scientists have developed a vaccine that is ready for use although it will make its way slowly through the populations, for plenty of good reason I’m sure. And yet another is that here at the li’l ol Far Out Fantastic Site there have been four of the best Book-To-Movie reviews and yours trul...

Credit: Pixabay To find out how you can read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page !   We’re well into the Holiday Season and the end of the year is coming. Although this year has been one of the most uncertain and scariest ever, the Holidays always bring hope of some sort. Besides, there’s never such a thing as a totally bad year. All years and eras have something good in them. And one of those good things are the best of something of the year. In this case, many blogs and publications over the internet will bring you a list of the best movies of the year or the best books of the year. On December 8th the book recommendation website, GoodReads, brought us the latter through its annual Choice Awards . The best books of 2020 were selected across 20 categories which ranged from general fiction to general non-fiction, from science fiction and fantasy to memoir and biography. Nearly half of these 20 books were speculative fiction or at least related to it.  So, yours truly ...

Credit: Pixabay To find out how you can read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page !   I have some Tolkien news this week. But first I want to apologise for missing last Wednesday’s Insecure Writer’s Support Group post. ( Alex , if you’re reading this, I personally apologise for missing.) With the Thanksgiving four-day weekend, I was a little disoriented in my sense of time of the week and forgot that the first Wednesday of the month had arrived. That’s the first time I missed an IWSG post and I’ll do everything I can to make sure it’s the last. One thing you can count on (unless an absolute emergency comes up which I’m not expecting one), I’ll have a post here for the IWSG next year, which is also next month.  Tolkien Museum Fundraiser The close of this year has been seeing big plans for commemorating authors with landmarks. I mentioned a few weeks back, that there were plans for a Harlan Ellison library . Only this past week, December 2nd, did a group of fundraisers l...

Credit: Pixabay.com To find out how you can read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page !   It’s time for our monthly Book-To-Movie ! 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. Today we are reviewing another book and film relevant to today’s pandemic: Michael Crichton’s novel, “The Andromeda Strain” and its 1971 movie adaptation. Crichton  is the writer of suspenseful science fiction, what would commonly be called today, science fiction thriller. “The Andromeda Strain” is exactly that. However, as good as this novel is, the suspense in the movie adaptation plays out better.  The Book In “The Andromeda Strain”, published in 1969, a NASA satellite returns to Earth carrying an alien virus. It lands in a small Arizona town by the name of Piedmont where the virus infects and kills everyone except an old man and an infant. A team of four scientists go to a top secret lab in Nevad...

Credit: Pixabay.com To find out how you can read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page !   We’re already coming to the end of the month and, I’ll admit, I’m behind on distributing Patreon page benefits . And for that reason I may have to reduce the membership prices for November (members are billed on the first of the month). But, because it has not been at the market value for at least a year, I’m also going to have to raise the price on my short fiction collection, “The Fool’s Illusion”, soon. But there’s a way you can get a free copy now and discounted copies after that and I’ll tell you how in a bit. First, I’d like to talk about one of the biggest sci fi news events going right now which is author Alan Dean Foster’s problem with the Disney Co. Alan Dean Foster’s Demand to the Disney Co Alan Dean Foster, the author of numerous books based on the “Star Wars” and “Alien” film franchises, reported to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) that the Disney...

Credit: Pixabay To find out how you can read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page !   There’s been a lot of big things going on in sci fi and fantasy news this past week! One of the biggest is the announcement of memorialising the late Harlan and Susan Ellison’s  home into a library. But in connection with that is an upcoming volume of an anthology series that features dark and terrifying futuristic fiction that Mr. Ellison had edited, “Dangerous Visions”.  Third and Final Volume In An Anthology Series The new “Dangerous Visions” anthology will be the third and final volume in the series, according to science fiction/fantasy TV writer/producer, J. Michael Straczynski . The first book in the series, “Dangerous Visions”, was published in 1967 and the second, titled “Again, Dangerous Visions”, in 1972, both of which were edited by Harlan Ellison. According to Straczynski, in 1973 a third and final volume, “The Last Dangerous Visions” (LDV), was announced and had a pl...

Credit: Pixabay.com To find out how to read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page !   Well, Halloween’s come and gone. It was mostly a virtual one for me and so most of my celebrating was online. Except later that evening in my living room when I watched a couple of horror flicks over some oatmeal cream sandwich cookies and diet cola. Still, it was good enough. I hope all of you had a groovy ghoulish Halloween!  NaNoWriMo and My Novella Now we’re into November, and for us writers that is the month of NaNoWriMo ! Although I’m not a novelist and so don’t really participate in the celebration of novel writing, I’m returning to revising my novella, “Invasion of the Avatars”, this month. That’s a novella that I wrote during a NaNoWriMo of several years back . One of the benefits that I offer at my Patreon page are works in progress and, in celebration of NaNoWriMo, I will be offering an excerpt of my novella in progress. So, if you’ve joined or plan to join my Patreon page ...

It’s the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG)  post! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. The IWSG question for November is: Albert Camus once said, “The purpose of a writer is to keep civilization from destroying itself.” Flannery O’Conner said, “I write to discover what I know.” Authors across time and distance have had many reasons to write. Why do you write what you write? My reasons for writing fiction are to entertain and scare people. As a science fiction and horror writer, I try to write fiction that helps to change the world as well as entertain it. The ancient Greeks used to produce plays to teach morals. Other societies, primitive and ancient, told stories for the same reasons.  Today they say you shouldn’t write fiction to teach anything whether it’s a moral or something else. However, I at least partly d...

Credit: Pixabay We all know that this Halloween will be unlike any other we’ve experienced. This year many of us will be required to wear masks. Many of us already are. At least in public, that is. Needless to say, the pandemic has made it necessary. Things are going to be very isolated compared to other years. Fewer trick-or-treaters in the streets, at the malls and downtown commercial areas. There will be fewer parties, or at least fewer guests at them. But it doesn’t mean that the fun has to end. There are always alternatives. One is: buy candy and other treats from the store, stay in with your family and eat them (the treats that is, not your family!) while watching scary movies, playing Halloween related games, or/and reading/telling scary stories. Make it a party inside your house limited to your loved ones and keep the plague out! Which this month’s Book-To-Movie review is exactly about that: keeping the plague out. We are reviewing Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Masque of ...

  Credit: Pixabay.com The week has been extremely busy for me with creating more benefits for the membership Portals (Tiers) at my Patreon page and getting ready my ebook of “The Fool’s Illusion” for distribution through Smashwords . The week’s also been a trying one for these two things.  Patreon Discount and “Fool’s Illusion”’s New Book Cover One of the benefits I’m trying to create for the Patreon Portals are book discounts. But, as I said a couple of posts back , in order to do that I need to publish my books on Smashwords since I’m not qualified for Kindle Direct Publishing’s (KDP) discount program anymore. [link] Yesterday, I hired a book designer to format my “Fool’s Illusion” manuscript for Smashwords’ ebook program. In order to convert my manuscript to ebook format he needed the book cover too. I thought I gave both the manuscript and book cover files to him until I found out this morning that I had only given him the cover’s illustration and not the full cover with t...

Credit: Patreon My Patreon creator page is now live! You can go on it and check out the many benefits it has to offer. However, although the benefit types are listed in each Portal (Tier), not all the benefits themselves for this month are up yet. I still have to create some more and gather others from the vaults of my home, if you will. But a benefit of some sort is waiting at each Portal. All you have to do is join!  Now, a few details about my Patreon page: The majority of artists, including writers, in the U.S. are very low-paid. Many aren’t even paid for their work at all. I’m a writer of speculative fiction and related non-fiction which includes movie and book reviews. Without creating spoilers, I give people insight into books and films beforehand so they can know whether they want to invest their time and money in them. I also take people to impossible worlds and make it seem like they are possible by telling stories. I like to entertain as well as give people a new perspe...

  It’s the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writers Support Group (IWSG)  post! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. The IWSG question for October is: When you think of the term “working writer”, what does that look like to you? What do you think it is supposed to look like? Do you see yourself as a working writer or aspiring or hobbyist, and if latter two, what does that look like? To me, “working writer” refers to a writer who writes regularly, seriously and, at least in a western economy, for payment of some sort. In other words, a working writer is a professional to some degree. Regardless of how much they are paid or how often, if they are writing to make an income while producing their best work then they are a working writer. Yet, this term can be tricky, because a working writer may never have been paid for their work but they are wo...