A Far Out Fantastic Site

  Credit: Wikimedia Commons   /Arthur Rackham Warning: This review may contain spoilers.   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. Normally, we do a Book-To-Movie every fourth weekend of the month. However, because it was necessary for me to make a sudden change of story and movie for review, I had to postpone this month’s post in the series to this fifth weekend. My apologies. This month’s book and movie review is Edgar Allen Poe’s short story, “The Pit and the Pendulum” and the 1961 movie adaptation directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price. I truly believe that no one can adapt any of Poe’s gothic horror stories to film in a way that does those stories justice. However, many of Corman’s films come close to doing so. One of his best adaptations of Poe’s short stories is “The Pit and the Pendulum”. Why this movie adapt...

Credit: Pixabay.com I apologise, but I have to push down the Book-To-Movie  to next weekend. The movie that I thought was on YouTube wasn’t. So, I had to look for another that’s based on a book I’ve read. I found two, one of which I will watch tonight and have the review of it for you next weekend. This weekend, I thought I’d show you what’s coming up in my writing projects for the new year. Often it takes me a couple of weeks to come up with a list of new year resolutions. So below are two lists: one of resolutions to improve my writing and another of plans for upcoming writing projects.  New Year Writing Resolutions Ease Off of My Demands for Success: Throughout the previous year I was getting frustrated with myself for not completing projects in the time frames I had set for myself or for not selling the number of books that I felt should have sold. But I realised that when I get too demanding of these successes I wear myself out, become moody, and sometimes don’t even enj...

  Credit: Pixabay A new year brings new hope and Martin Luther King Jr. was definitely a man of hope and a new vision, especially with his “I Have a Dream” speech. I did a post on King several years back and on how his vision of a better future for all races served a function similar to that of science fiction. I said that this was one of the few things about him that connected with the genre. I underestimated. He had another big connection with science fiction. I’ll show you what that was in a little bit. Also coming up in this post: news about my newsletter in progress and an upcoming “Frankenstein” movie.  Martin Luther King Was a Fan of a Very Famous Science Fiction TV Series  In the post on Martin Luther King that I mentioned above, I said that he did not have many connections to science fiction except for his vision of a progressive future. However, I only found out yesterday while reading over an article at MentalFloss.com that he was a regular watcher of the ori...

  It’s the first Wednesday of the month, and year, 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. A new year always presents new opportunities. That includes new opportunities for reading books we’ve never read before. And so many of us make resolutions to read a certain number of books through the new year. Yet, there are some things that would make me deliberately break such a new year’s resolution. And so that’s where the answer to this month’s IWSG question comes in. The question: Being a writer, when you're reading someone else's work, what stops you from finishing a book/throws you out of the story/frustrates you the most about other people's books?  I can deal with bad writing as long as the story and pacing of it is good. I don’t prefer poorly written books but I can deal with them as long as they m...