A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay.com Warning: This review may contain spoilers for both the book and movie being discussed. Read at your own risk! As I said last post , we've moved our Book-To-Movie review from its usual fourth weekend time slot to this Halloween weekend (or as I like to call it, Halloweekend). In a Book-To-Movie, we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. The usual fate of rip-off films, it seems, is that they’re often soon forgotten as if they never existed. That was almost the case with the original film adaptation of Bram Stoker's novel, "Dracula". And those of you who are thinking the original film was Universal's 1931 film starring Bela Lugosi, it wasn’t. That was only the original legal film adaptation of the novel. The original adaptation was the 1922 German-made "Nosferatu" and is one of the oldest vampire movies. Although it was at one time destined to be forgotten, it became far from that. As this year’s media coverage of “No...

Credit: Steven Arellano Rose  And this really will be a mini report and I will tell you why in a bit. As you may have guessed, I’m delaying the Book-To-Movie  of the month to next weekend. Today was Sinister Creature Con's Sinister Halloween Con at the Scottish Rite Center in Sacramento, CA and so I wanted to go over that a little, and, as I’ve kind of already indicated, I do mean I’ll go over it just a little. Sinister Creature Con is the organization that puts on horror conventions in the Sacramento area throughout the year and is very big on make-up art but features other art as well such as books, comics, paintings, sculptures, jewelry and even clothes. And they always feature tons of guest celebrities. Now, why is this con report going to be so short? Because I didn’t attend it. Not really. I only attended the free outdoor portion. By the time I arrived at the Scottish Rite Center, which was a little before 2 PM, the length of the line for admission was nearly the equiva...

Credit: Pixabay We're just over two weeks away from Halloween! I've been slowly but surely decorating my house, and lining up my favourite horror fiction to read as well as favourite horror flicks to watch. Many of you have probably been doing similar. You’ve probably also been shopping like mad for the best deals on candy, costumes, decorations and party food. And this Halloween those deals are more important than most years because of the big inflation that's been going on. You may even be struggling to find the best deals on horror movies to rent or stream for Halloween. Well, you can really save some bucks if you look to free streaming movies which, as of this writing, include plenty of scary ones.  The drawback is that in order for the platform companies to make these films available for free viewing, you need to put up with commercials. Most commercials can get pretty annoying but the good news is that many free streaming platforms' ad breaks aren't as long as...

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. October is the month of Halloween and so when I saw the optional question for the month I knew it was perfect timing. At least for me whose one of two favourite genres is horror. The other is science fiction. So, the question of the month is What do you consider the best characteristics of your favorite genre? I’m going to divert a little in my answer to this question in that, as I’ve already named them, I have two favourite genres and there’s one characteristic that I like best about both of them: the monster character.  Of course, science fiction stories do not always have to have monsters in them, but a lot of them do and among these many have overlapped with horror. Not even horror stories have to have monsters in them, but mor...

Credit: Pixabay Today we have another guest blogger! May I introduce to you author Elizabeth Mueller ! I’m very grateful for Elizabeth to be with us this post. She is, as she puts it, “a diehard romance” writer yet has also written and published in other fiction genres, including science fiction and fantasy. She’s currently working on a dystopian sci fi / fantasy / romance novel which she’ll be sharing with us a segment from. Both a full-time author and a homeschooling mom of five kids, Elizabeth has contributed to several science fiction anthologies, including steampunk, while still writing in her favourite genre. Let me not delay any longer: here’s Elizabeth discussing her writer’s journey from speculative fiction to realist fiction, to romance!  Guest Blogger: Elizabeth Mueller Thank you for having me over at your lovely place, Steven! You’ve asked if I could talk about speculative fiction. To be honest, I’ve always wondered what that was and never tried to understand it as I’ve...