A Far Out Fantastic Site

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...

Credit: Pixabay Last post I had a cover reveal for the illustration itself. In this week’s post I have what I call a full cover reveal and so a cover that includes both illustration and lettering! Again, this is a new cover for my speculative fiction short story collection, “The Fool’s Illusion”, which turned 7 years old last month ! (No new internal content at this time. Sorry. Maybe on the book’s tenth birthday in 2023.) And my Patreon page is getting closer to launch! I made a schedule of Patreon benefits for the month of October! Full Cover Reveal for ‘The Fool’s Illusion’ Credit: The blogger/ Alex Vintagee Synopsis: Here is a collection of dark fantastic events and terrifying scientific phenomena. It contains stories of deadly creatures, including vampires and other undead things, and adventures into the unknown and terrible--tales that brew to the bursting point. This book will not fail to fool you with its terrifying visions of events that could be and ones that are impossible ...