A Far Out Fantastic Site

  Credit: Pixabay A new year brings new hope and Martin Luther King Jr. was definitely a man of hope and a new vision, especially with his “I Have a Dream” speech. I did a post on King several years back and on how his vision of a better future for all races served a function similar to that of science fiction. I said that this was one of the few things about him that connected with the genre. I underestimated. He had another big connection with science fiction. I’ll show you what that was in a little bit. Also coming up in this post: news about my newsletter in progress and an upcoming “Frankenstein” movie.  Martin Luther King Was a Fan of a Very Famous Science Fiction TV Series  In the post on Martin Luther King that I mentioned above, I said that he did not have many connections to science fiction except for his vision of a progressive future. However, I only found out yesterday while reading over an article at MentalFloss.com that he was a regular watcher of the ori...

Credit: Pixabay   This has been a very hectic week for me. I’ve had technological problems to deal with in areas outside of my writing and art. They’ve been burning me out like the fires here in California have been burning out the forests. Even so, I continued working on my writing projects, especially the two that are most important at this time: my Patreon page and a new book cover for my short fiction collection, “The Fool’s Illusion”.  Author’s Patreon Page I spent my evenings this week creating the “tiers” and the benefits that they will offer on my Patreon page. A Patreon  page often features several levels, or tiers, of membership to choose from. Mine will offer three. The membership benefits will range from exclusive book discounts to fiction-in-progress and concept art for book covers. The top-most tier will also offer more in-depth articles on science fiction and fantasy of the past, present and future! I have only a little more to do with the page until its la...

Credit: Pixabay I know, it’s the third Saturday of the month when we’re supposed to have a Book-To-Movie review but I am going to have to postpone it until next weekend. The county I live in is still sheltering in place and so the DVD of the movie I’ve been wanting to review along with its book, “The Invisible Man”, is stuck inside my local library which is closed. I requested it through interlibrary loan but when it came, back in mid-March, the shelter-in-place mandate was just beginning. I was going to review another book and its movie adaptations this evening but the only place I know of where I can rent the movie at this time is Amazon’s IMDB TV platform. By the time I was able to figure out last night how Amazon wanted me to log into IMDB TV it was already late. The movie was 2008’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth” based on the book by the same name, written by Jules Verne. So, it looks like that will be next weekend’s postponed Book-To-Movie. In this weekend’s post I have so...

Credit: Pixabay.com Halloween’s come and gone again, but the horror and fun haven’t ended. Now we’re in the month of NaNoWriMo in which I’ve been working on my novella for. Also, there’s upcoming horror films and comics. That said, in this post I have a comic book review for you and Lightning News Flashes   covering a sci fi horror movie and the state of science fiction short stories. Working on My Novella for NaNoWriMo  For NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) I’ve been revising my sci fi horror novella that I wrote during the NaNoWriMo of a few years back. I kind of put it on hiatus back in October to concentrate on promoting the print edition of “The Boo Brothers”, now available at Amazon , and the Halloween book sale  which I hope you had a chance to check out before it ended. So now it’s back to revising the novella, which so far I’ve titled Invasion of the Avatars . I just finished writing out the details of the game for Avatars . No, the...

I have the latest update for the upcoming release of the paperback edition of my book of YA horror, "The Boo Brothers" , and a Lightning News Flash of a new Dracula graphic novel starring Bela Lugosi! “What?” you say. How can the long-dead actor of the famous Universal undead vampire play a role in a comic book? Read on to find out! ‘Boo Brothers’ Paperback I had my manuscript for the paperback edition of "Boo Brothers", my book of two short YA horror stories, formatted  and uploaded to Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP) during the week. I also uploaded the cover and reviewed the book on the website with the online previewer that allows a person to see what his/her work would look like in its final product form. And mine all looks good. Now I just have to price it and then have Amazon approve it as meeting their guidelines. I can't say for sure right now, but I may just price it at a discount off the market price (which I have not decided on yet) as a...

Credit: Pixabay.com This has been the perfect evening for Lightning News Flashes—earlier there was a lightning storm outside! So these news flashes should carry a lot of charge! Lightning News Flashes are news briefs of events in the world of science fiction and fantasy. Today we have Lightning News Flashes of Stephen King's New England mansion, his son Joe Hill's new horror comics imprint and a new British science fiction and fantasy writing award. But first some news about my book, “The Boo Brothers” . ‘Boo Brothers’ Paperback Update I’ve been working on the paperback version of my book of two short horror tales, "The Boo Brothers”, which includes the title story, and been having a hell of a time with the formatting. This has mostly been due to the Crimson font that I was using for the body text. I think there was a bug in the files for that font which I had downloaded from Squirrel Font, a website that offers free fonts. Overall, I've had good ex...

Credit: Pixabay.com It’s time for some Lightning News Flashes ! Lightning News Flashes are, here at the Fantastic Site, searing news bits and bites in the science fiction and fantasy scene especially in relation to books in the genres. Tonight’s news flashes: a space opera novel by Catherynne Valente that will be adapted to film; the young adult series of horror novels, Ameri-Scares , that will be adapted for television; and a rising demand in the horror fiction market. Screenwriter Selected for Film Adaptation of Funny Sci Fi Novel   According to Deadline , Universal has selected Joe Epstein to write the screenplay to Catherynne Valente’s funny sci fi novel, Space Opera . The plan is to give the movie a music theme, which makes sense: the novel’s story involves a galactic music competition. The story’s heroes are Decibel Jones and his band, the Absolute Zeroes, who represent Earth in the competition. The prize?  The winner’s species will be held in high honour....

Credit: Pixabay.com Here is another post of Lightning News Flashes! Lightning News Flashes are bits of news in the science fiction and fantasy scene. The news for this post: author Ian McEwan’s response to fans lashing out at his so-called denial of science fiction; a new BBC series of articles about sci fi books that correctly predicted today’s events; an artifact from a classic Universal film based on a classic gothic novel; the Locus Awards. Ian McEwan Says He Was Not Putting Down Sci Fi  Last week , I said it was reported that Ian McEwan was criticised by science fiction fans for denying his newest book, Machines Like Me , being sci fi and implying that the genre was an insignificant form of fiction.   I talked about how that was a misunderstanding on the part of those fans’. Well, this week Wired reported that McEwan himself has admitted that he was misunderstood, that he was not trying to downgrade science fiction and that he was even open to h...

Credit: Pixabay.com I have some Lightning News Flashes for this post. The month of April has sadly seen the loss of two science fiction writers but it’s also seen some good news, too. N ew TV shows based on science fiction and fantasy novels have been announced as being in the works and also an Edgar Allen Poe Museum ha s acquired a genuine letter written by Poe. For longer versions of these stories, click on the links below. Obituaries Science fiction and fantasy author Vonda McIntyre passed away at age 70 on the first of the month. She wrote several Star Trek books, including the novel adaptations of movies ST II: The Wrath of Khan and ST III: The Search for Spock . Her 1978 novel, Dreamsnake , had won both a Hugo and a Nebula. According to Geekwire .com, McIntyre started the Clarion West writers’ workshop in Seattle in 1971. Geekwire also says she completed her last novel, Curve of the World , “in less than two weeks before her death” from pancreatic ...

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get together a bigger story for this week’s post like I had hoped . So here are some more lightning news flashes, or lightning flash non-fiction, with links to the full stories. These stories cover race issues in sci fi and fantasy pop culture, and the world-building behind The Circle . Then comes news of the blogger’s current projects. Star Trek  Licence Plate Removed Due to Racist Connotation   During the week, a man in Canada was forced by policy to turn in his Star Trek - themed license plate due to “politically incorrect” language. The message on the licence plate unintentionally conveyed reference to a racist method of assimilating the indigenous population of Canada to white culture. However, it was actually referring to Star Trek (post-original series) episodes involving the alien and villainous Borgs’ attempts to assimilate other races. ReplacingLovecraft’s Image in the World Fantasy Award   The World Fantasy A...

Credit: Pixabay.com I was desperately and futilely looking for a topic for this evening’s post but couldn’t think of anything. So I decided to go with news bits or, what I like to call, lightning flash non-fiction (or even Lightning News Flashes). I call them that because they are very brief news flashes. Although I don’t believe in depending on a brief news story over full coverage of an event, both myself and you readers out there are short on time and I’m not a full-time news journalist. So I don’t rob you of the full story like too many so-called news outlets do just to attract an audience to make profit, I put the link to the full, or at least fuller, story in each flash. Just click on the link and you are there in a, uh, flash (provided you don’t have a slow internet connection). And so here they are: Writing Project Updates : I finally finished copying and pasting the text from my manuscript of “Circa Sixty Years Dead” to the template for the print edition . ...