A Far Out Fantastic Site

 It’s been a hard week, as fast as it went. Although it’s let up in the last couple of days, the smoke from the not too distant fires was so badly infesting my area that people were forced to leave work early, outdoor events have been getting canceled, and the blogger’s had a bad headache all week from breathing it in. I’m just grateful that those fires didn’t reach us but I feel bad for the people in the areas of our state that it did reach. I really hope these fires will be under control soon and that the firefighters will come out of it alive and unharmed. I can’t say enough how grateful I am for the huge risk that they take to protect everyone from these blazes. Yet, through all this apocalyptic chaos, I’ve been keeping myself busier than usual by creating a Patreon page. This past week, I had been working on the “About” statement of my Patreon page. In this statement I introduce myself as an author of science fiction and horror and I list the benefits of becoming a Patreon mem...

Credit: Wikimedia Commons/SpaceX It’s the fourth weekend of the month and, so, according to our unofficial pandemic schedule , it is time for another 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. This month we are reviewing Philip K. Dick’s science fiction short story, “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” and its 1990 movie adaptation, “Total Recall”. And I will say it straight out right now, I hated the movie. Yet, it was the very few good points of the movie that got me to read and really like the short story.  The Short Story When Dick’s “We Can Remember It For You Wholesale” was originally published in the April 1966 issue of  “The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction”, the Martian craze in sci fi was still going. So, it’s no doubt that that craze, at least in part, influenced this story. But there are no little green men in it (at least as far as Martians go)....

Credit: Pixabay I can’t believe this is already the third Saturday of the month! I only realised it earlier this week. Because it came up so quickly, I’m going to again postpone the Book-To-Movie  review for the month until next weekend. I know, it seems like I’ve been doing this regularly since the pandemic started in March (at least that’s when it started for my area). Well, as the news media outlets have been recently hollering about society as a whole, this is the new norm. I tried getting a Book-To-Movie together for this weekend but didn’t come up with anything until Thursday in which I viewed the movie adaptation that evening and then read the short story original only yesterday. I’m not going to tell you what the story or its movie adaptation is, though. To find out you will have to tune in here next week. For this week . . .  Harlan Ellison’s Wife Susan Dies at 60 Shockingly, the late Harlan Ellison’s wife, Susan Ellison, died the first of this month. She passed away ...

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. This month’s question comes with a quote: "Although I have written a short story collection, the form found me and not the other way around. Don't write short stories, novels or poems. Just write your truth and your stories will mold into the shapes they need to be." And the question: Have you ever written a piece that became a form, or even a genre, you hadn't planned on writing in? Or do you choose a form/genre in advance? Strangely, a similar experience happened to me just recently with the short story I’ve been trying to revise off and on. It’s one of the most challenging that I’ve written because it deals with an alternate universe, which is a topic that gets into quantum theoretical complications and I am not a s...

Credit: Pixabay Well, we’re already at the first day of August and so that just says the summer is racing by! And I feel like I’ve gotten so little done with my fiction writing. I’m several pages behind in revising my novella after I had scheduled deadlines for the completion of so many pages. But I’ve decided that I’m going to take a fellow author/blogger’s advice (I apologise, I don’t remember who it was that gave it) and write at least a page a day for those days of the week that I’ve blocked out to concentrate on my novella and just try to work out the deadline for the completion of the book as I come closer to completing it. I may even set the daily goal according to word count and so write so many words a day. That’s probably a more efficient measurement than a page count because the number of words varies from page to page. I’m also behind on my alternate universe short story. However, I had given it a break back in the spring and only resumed revising it a few weeks ...