A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay Can you believe we’ve arrived at another holiday season and the end of the year? It seems like each year goes by so fast! There are all kinds of great stuff to look forward to at this time of year: time with family and friends, good holiday food, gifts. But it's more about the giving than the getting. But the giving can really deplete your bank account, especially if you're like me and have a big family. Well, that's when you look towards the holiday sales. One of many of those is Smashwords' End of Year Book Sale in which my books are participating in! Want something chilling to read during this holiday season? You'll find mine and plenty of other authors' books of science fiction and horror at that sale! And if that's not enough, check out the list of links to holiday horror reading and viewing below!  Smashwords End of Year Sale Is the holiday shopping making your money vault go low? Well, from now through January 1, you can find my books ...

Credit: Pixabay.com The holidays are almost here! That means the Hallowday edition of my author’s newsletter coming out soon and end of the year book sales. It also means ghosts at Christmas and . . . vampires at Christmas?  Well, there’s one coming soon to a theatre near you. A vampire movie, that is. So, keep reading for the details! ‘Nosferatu’ Remake to be a Holiday Release The new remake of the 1922 German unofficial “Dracula” movie adaptation, "Nosferatu", releases December 25th (US). This will probably be fitting for some horror fans since many of the scenes are of dark, frozen landscapes, and it’s actually set during the Christmas season according to a review at Slashfilm .  So, it's kind of a black Christmas film, but don’t expect gore exploitation in the ugly manner of “Silent Night, Deadly Night”. This movie, directed by Robert Eggers (“The Lighthouse”), is a more psycho-sexual interpretation of the original. It appears to have a more dream-like (as in nightma...

  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.  When the brink of the holiday season comes around which is, at least for me, just after Thanksgiving I never feel ready for it. Time flies by so fast that it seems like when one Christmas goes by another comes within only a week rather than a year. So, it’s from around Thanksgiving up to about the second (full) week of December that I always wonder how I’m going to handle both my regular year-round duties and the holidays. And those year-round duties include my writing. So, that brings me to the IWSG optional question of the month: Are the holidays a time to catch up or fall behind on writer goals?  For me the holidays are a time to inevitably fall behind in my writing. This means that I don’t intend to fall behind bu...

Credit: Pixabay I’m doing the Book-To-Movie a week earlier than I normally do each month because next weekend is Christmas and many of us will be busy celebrating with our families and friends. Since this is a Holiday post, we are reviewing a Christmas poem and its movie adaptation. We’re reviewing Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” and the 1963 Roger Corman movie adaptation. Normally we review a book or short story in a Book-To Movie and then compare it with its film adaptation. However, this poem can be considered a short story of a sort since it's a narrative poem. Now, you’re probably saying that "The Raven” isn't a Christmas poem. Okay, it isn’t, strictly speaking, but it does take place during the month of December and because it's a gothic story it can be considered having a tinge of a black Christmas theme. It even has angels in it! There’ve been several film versions of "The Raven", including the 1935 Bela Lugosi version and the more recent 2012 version ...

Credit: Pixabay.com To find out how you can read blog posts like this one without ads, visit my Patreon page !   Christmas is this upcoming week and a week after that will already be the end of another year. For a while it had seemed like it was the end of the world. With Covid-19 plaguing the planet, it seemed like we would not make it to the end of 2020. Perhaps a lot of you will be glad when 2020 ends and that’s perfectly understandable considering the circumstances. However, even a bad year has something good in it. And, believe it or not, that includes this year.  So, what good things have we had in 2020? One is that we and the world are still here. Another is that genius doctors and scientists have developed a vaccine that is ready for use although it will make its way slowly through the populations, for plenty of good reason I’m sure. And yet another is that here at the li’l ol Far Out Fantastic Site there have been four of the best Book-To-Movie reviews and yours trul...

Credit: Pixabay.com I got most of my Christmas shopping done. All I have to shop for is a white elephant gift for a cousin’s Christmas Eve party that I’m going to attend. So I’ve been looking for ideas for a “dumb” or weird (as I prefer to say) gift. And it’s just about as hard shopping for that kind of gift as it is a “decent” one. But as I was looking for ideas at Amazon, I came across some things that might be suitable for a white elephant gift exchange. In fact, these items probably make more-than-suitable gifts. They are so weird, so crazy and/or so hilarious that they’re almost frightening! Because of that, I call them f right elephant gift ideas. In case you still need to do that last minute shopping for that white elephant gift you were asked to bring to a holiday party, I put together for this post a Holiday Fright Elephant Gift Guide. Since this is a sci fi and fantasy blog, this guide emphasises gifts in the speculative genres. So even if the party you’re a...

Credit: Pixabay.com Well, the photographic cover for my single short story book, “Circa SixtyYears Dead” will not be here in time for the holidays. However, the print version will be here sooner than I had anticipated, thanks to Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing’s new paperback print option. “Circa Sixty Years Dead” Print Edition Until recently, a print version of a self-published Kindle book had to be produced by separate means through Amazon’s Create Space. But now a print edition of an ebook can be produced a little bit more quickly through Kindle Direct’s new print option (currently at the beta level). So far, I’ve partly regi stered “Circa” for this option . I just have to upload the manuscript and cover to the program. The manuscript is what may take a while before I upload it because I need to make sure it’s formatted correctly and formatting isn’t the best of my self-publishing skills. Apparently, the manuscript and cover have to come from my o...

It’s been a very busy week especially as we have gotten further into the holiday season. If you missed my post last week about writing around holiday busy-ness, you can take a look at it here . Hopefully some of those ideas I’ve put into practice will work for you other writers out there too. Still, my writing’s come to a slow-down because I’ve had a load of other things to do, yet I continue to work on my stories and that is most important: to write everyday even when you don’t feel like it. If you only do it when you feel like it, then you’ll never feel like it. Or, to put it more precisely, the days when you don’t feel like writing will out-number the ones when you do and so you will always come up with an excuse not to write. Credit: Wikimedia Commons I’ve been continuing to work on my novella averaging at least a page a day considering my full-time day job, and I try to get one to three extra pages in on the weekends. Plus I’ve been giving a little time to my curr...

Happy Hallow-Days/Scary Nightmare Before Christmas! Photo Credit: Pixabay.com I apologise for posting so late again, but I wanted to make this a special Holiday edition. And after spinning the gears to the point of going brain dead over what to include in this post, I overloaded the stocking with so many ideas that I couldn’t even put them all here due to lack of time. So I’ve included both a Christmas list and a Krampus list of chain-jingling links. What’s a Krampus you say? You’ll soon find out, and better here than in your room at night during this Holiday Season. But first I want to update you a little on The Hidden . Amazon's Preview Tool and  The Hidden I had said a while back that I’ll be releasing The Hidden for beta readers  but I may release an excerpt of it for previewing first. Just this weekend I found out about Amazon’s Create Space’s Preview tool which allows authors to post excerpts of their books before publication so people at large can ...

Happy Hallow-Days, Every Body! Credit: OpenClipart.org We’re only days away from Christmas and I haven’t even got all my cards out or shopping done. (Sound familiar?) Although I do have all my decorating done, including my Haunted Holiday Mansion scene. No doubt this is the busiest time of the year and you don’t have to be Santa Claus to feel it; I’ve been feeling the stress of it all week. Some of that stress is coming from trying to choose a charity to donate to for this holiday season. I wrote to one nonprofit organisation based here in Sacramento about donating some comic books to its literacy program for kids. It’s called 916 Ink .  They have a big comic book writing workshop program there for the youth they serves. 916 Ink provides creative writing classes for these kids to help improve youth literacy. They even compile the kids’ writing into anthologies they publish and sell in which the proceeds go to the program. Well I wrote to the program and offe...

It's struck my curiosity for the last couple of Christmases that if Tim Burton ever did a remake of the 1960s B-rated movie, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians , what would it look like? Probably something like the sketch below (please click it to see full detail) which is particularly taken from the toy battle scene between the evil Martians and the Earth and Martian children . . . Please click to see larger image. Photo Credit: Steven Rose, Jr. Happy Hallow-days, everybody! --Steven Rose, Jr.

I want to apologize once again for this late posting of the second part to my story. It was supposed to have posted yesterday on top of already posting late. I actually did set it to post and the program indicated that it was up on the blog displaying to the public. However, as I said, I've been having problems with my laptop. But I think the real problem may be with extra online traffic due to holiday online shoppers. And I don't blame anybody who shops online when you can buy things at much lower prices than in the actual stores; the recession may be declining but, unfortunately, many of us are still feeling the after effects of it. Hopefully that will all change soon. Hope is an essential theme this time of year and so that's what we have to remember to do, is hope for the best. But here is part two of my short story, "The Puppet Show". The final part will come next week, and unless there will be a problem with New Year's Eve online traffic or such, ...