A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay It's the fourth weekend of the month and so time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie, we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. H.P. Lovecraft is known for his cosmic horror stories. Cosmic horror is a subgenre of horror that concerns itself with the dread of a force that is bigger than humanity and indestructible, or at least nearly, by anything on earth. It often involves monsters that are beyond anything recognizable in our world and because of that they are terrifying beyond description. A lot of sci fi horror contain these elements. The movie “Alien” is an example. So, there's a sense of helplessness in in this kind of horror making it existential. Although not one of his most well-known cosmic horror short stories, Lovecraft’s "The Outsider", is no exception to the subgenre. A movie adaptation of this story was released in the 1990s: "Castle Freak". However, the problem with this movie is that it’s mi...

Credit: The blogger    Last Sunday was my first author’s vendor booth at Sacramento Comic-Con since four years ago. The annual pop culture convention, held in downtown Sacramento’s convention center, was the first one since the pandemic began. The attendance was scant but only compared to the other years before the world became stricken by the current plague; because Covid is still around, there’s still a lot of people who won’t go to crowded events. Yet, considering that, it was a good turnout. I can’t say a lot about how good Sunday’s con was since I didn’t get a chance to visit the other booths or go to any panels. However, of what I did see, it all looked like it went by really well. And it went by far better for my booth than I had expected since it hadn’t looked that good earlier.  Preparations Although the con went by fine, it was still a bit of a struggle for me especially in the preparations the day before and the day of. I got my swag, which consisted of promoti...

It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s 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 of the month is: Have you ever been conflicted about writing a story or adding a scene to a story? How did you decide to write it or not? My problem has mostly been the former situation. I’ve been conflicted over what story to write more than I have over adding a scene.  The best way to explain how I deal with this problem is to show you my procedure of selecting an idea for a story. I often jot down story ideas in my journal or type them in my phone’s note app as they come to me. When I’m ready to write a new work of fiction I'll go through my journals or note app and look over the story ideas I’ve accumulated through time. Unless there’s an idea that I’m already burning over to make into a full story, I'l...