A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay.com My posts have been late these last few weeks. Instead of posting on late Saturday/early Sunday like I normally had been, I’ve been posting on Mondays. I apologise for this inconsistency but the month has been busier than usual. One of the things that have kept me busiest is a major paper accumulation in my house, let alone my bedroom. I’ve been cleaning out paper junk in my bedroom for the past couple weeks. And I haven’t even cleaned out a quarter of it done yet!  The problem with being a writer, at least for those of us who still like to write on paper and print out our work, is that paper accumulates easily and quickly. We initially don’t know when we will need our old drafts and outlines and so we hang onto them. Print copies of our stories also build up. And these are just a small percentage of the total paper excess in my house! In addition to these, bill notices have piled up over the last ten years, administration paper work and records from my college d...

Credit: Pixabay Back in September, I ordered a subscription of “Amazing Stories” but not simply because I’ve always loved the magazine.  I also ordered it because I wanted to support the continuing success of its revival after it had been out of publication for several years. Editor Steve Davidson restored it to publication less than a decade ago. So far I’ve only received one issue which was the summer 2020 one. It’s supposed to be quarterly so there should have been a fall and winter issue. I never received them. And it’s no wonder. According to Davidson in a news release last Thursday April 8, the magazine’s publisher, Experimenter Publishing Company, has been facing licensing agreement issues. Because of that, Experimenter has put the publishing of “Amazing Stories” on hiatus.   “Amazing Stories” has been one of the longest running science fiction magazines. Its publication was born in 1926 during the pulp era. It went through several relatively short publication lap...

  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. Question of the Month The optional question of the month for April is: Are you a risk-taker when writing? Do you try something radically different in style/POV/etc. or add controversial topics to your work? Overall, I’m already set in my own style of writing which I can’t really define, it’s just that it’s my own personal style. So, I wouldn’t say I normally take risks. There are times where I will go to an extreme in writing a scene, making it perhaps more sexual or more graphically violent than I normally would. However, I think the most risks, or what comes close to them, that I take in my fiction is with my protagonists. I’ll sometimes have them do anti-heroic things just to develop the character and so make it more believ...