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Credit: Wikipedia It's the fourth Monday of the month and so time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie (BTM), we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. This is our first BTM since our new post day began two weeks ago ! A couple years back, we did a Book-To-Movie Review of Edgar Allen Poe's short story, "The Pit and the Pendulum". The story’s movie adaptation we went over was the 1961 version directed by Roger Corman and starring Vincent Price. In this post’s BTM, we're going to review the 1991 adaptation directed by Stuart Gordon ("Re-Animator", a movie that’s also based on another famous horror writer's work). Gordon's movie adaptation of "The Pit and the Pendulum" does a good job with the setting and creature effects but lacks the horror element.  I won't talk about Edgar Allen Poe's short story as much here since I do that in detail in the J anuary 2021 Book-To-Movie which you can check ou...

Credit: Wikipedia /Disney Disney has not been typically known for horror movies. However, it’s made a few. When I say “horror”, I don't mean any of Disney’s comedies based on the genre or any of its Mickey mouse haunted house cartoons or monster parodies. So, Eddie Murphy's “The Haunted Mansion” and the “Hocus Pocus” movies don't count here. What I mean by “horror” is straight, live-action horror. I'm also not including today's movies made by Disney-acquired properties such as “Halloween: The Curse of Michael Meyers” which was made by Miramax, or “The Omen” which was produced by 20th Century Fox. I'm talking about horror produced by Disney Studios itself.  The first Disney horror film made by Disney Studios with live actors and for the big screen was a 1980s movie called "The Watcher in the Woods". It was based on a young adult novel by Florence Engel Randall. I haven't read the novel, so I'm not going to talk about it here. If I would have rea...

Credit: Pixabay First Post of the New Post Day Welcome to the first post of our new post day of the week, Mondays! We’ll see how this schedule works out for most of you for the next month or so. If another day seems to work better, then we’ll move it to that day. Let me know in the comments box below how you like Mondays as the new post day.  Human Authors Vs. the AI Authors A few years ago in my writer’s critique group, one of the other members, who I believe worked in computer technology, decided to do an experiment. So, he distributed to us copies of two poems: one was written by himself and another written by an AI program. We had to guess which one was written by the AI program and which one was written by him. I told myself that there was no way I was going to let a machine fool me into thinking what’s human-made art. So, I read both versions and guessed each correctly. I’ve always had a good eye for what’s human-produced and what’s machine-produced. But now I'm not so sure a...

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.  Progress Made When Writing Fiction in Larger Timeslots Until around last Friday, I had a hell of a time fitting in time to do my fiction writing, particularly my upcoming book of short stories, titled "Bad Apps" . The cause of this was my day job which I have to make a two-hour public transit commute going and coming each day. I love my day job (I’m a library technician) and so won’t give it up, but it still takes up writing time. I don't work on my laptop on the bus or train because it's too awkward for me and so I would get less done than I would if I were writing in a more stationary place.  Lately I've had to fight my way to squeeze out a bare minimum of 20 minutes of fiction writing before going to work i...