A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay.com To find out how to read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page !   Well, Halloween’s come and gone. It was mostly a virtual one for me and so most of my celebrating was online. Except later that evening in my living room when I watched a couple of horror flicks over some oatmeal cream sandwich cookies and diet cola. Still, it was good enough. I hope all of you had a groovy ghoulish Halloween!  NaNoWriMo and My Novella Now we’re into November, and for us writers that is the month of NaNoWriMo ! Although I’m not a novelist and so don’t really participate in the celebration of novel writing, I’m returning to revising my novella, “Invasion of the Avatars”, this month. That’s a novella that I wrote during a NaNoWriMo of several years back . One of the benefits that I offer at my Patreon page are works in progress and, in celebration of NaNoWriMo, I will be offering an excerpt of my novella in progress. So, if you’ve joined or plan to join my Patreon page ...

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...

Credit: Pixabay.com Last year for National Novel Writing Month, a.k.a. NaNoWriMo, I wrote my first full novella. However, I didn’t finish the first draft until sometime around the new year. I’m not sure if it will be much different with the novella I’m writing this year. I haven’t been meeting the minimum goal I originally set for myself which was 1,250 words a day. It shows that I don’t have the attention span to write long works. However, I compromised with myself saying that if I don’t feel I can make it to 1,250 words a day, considering that my day job takes up most of my time, then I’ll shoot for one page a day give or take a little. I say “give or take a little” because the numbers of words vary between pages in almost any kind of writing. I’m also behind because of procrastination. Or what I at first thought was procrastination. I’m the kind of person who likes to plan things when it comes to projects rather than just div e in. Although I’m not a fan ...

I apologise for not having posted since the special Halloween post . I wasn’t feeling my best one week and then the following week I was really busy with both my day job and writing. In relation to writing, I didn’t make that Halloween deadline for the short horror story I’ve been working on. I’m almost done revising it, so I will have it ready for my critique group soon. Which is the upside of missing that submission deadline: I have a chance to have it critiqued. I wouldn’t have had time for that otherwise. Writing for a Publication’s Deadline as Motivation I may either use this story for another magazine accepting submissions or my next short fiction collection that I have taken a hiatus on since last year but plan to resume it in the upcoming one. But I think I got much more done on the story than I would have if I hadn’t been writing for a submission deadline and was doing it for self-publication instead. So if you are a self-publishing author like myself, maybe ...

The most far out fantastic events for me since last week have been my participation in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and news of author Neil Gaiman producing a new sci fi TV series. World-building and Character Development for NaNoWriMo I had said at the beginning of the year that I would write a full first draft of a novel (or novella) and there’s no better motivator for it than now, NaNoWriMo. In the last two posts I talked about writing through writer’s block for one of my short stories and searching for new monsters for another. [ link to the posts that talks about these ] But I’ve decided to take a break from both these stories so I can write my novella during this month of November. The problem is I only started writing it last week and we’re already in the middle of the month. In fact, I didn’t even actually start writing it; I just planned it. But even so, there probably won’t be another motivator for another year, so I’ll still write it even if so...

Credit: PDClipart.org This past Saturday I watched one of Harlan Ellison’s videos on his YouTube channel . It’s really inspiring, so I suggest you take a look at it. As always, he has a lot of interesting things to say, including about how his birthday falls on the same day as actor Christopher Lee’s, his Warholian Daffy Duck tee shirt (I have a Batman Warholian one), and authors intending their best work when they write. This last one really inspired me because he talks about how writers will take on jobs they don’t like but will perform their best work anyway. During my entire writing career, I’ve never hated any of my writing jobs (so far at least) even if I didn’t prefer them to other projects. I like to write in general, and so even if I’m not writing fiction, my favourite form, I still love the very act of composing words no matter what the project is. Because of that, I’ll intend to do my best work. I’ll do this at all levels of the writing process, even the rough (or ...