A Far Out Fantastic Site

  Credit: Pixabay.com The week has been extremely busy for me with creating more benefits for the membership Portals (Tiers) at my Patreon page and getting ready my ebook of “The Fool’s Illusion” for distribution through Smashwords . The week’s also been a trying one for these two things.  Patreon Discount and “Fool’s Illusion”’s New Book Cover One of the benefits I’m trying to create for the Patreon Portals are book discounts. But, as I said a couple of posts back , in order to do that I need to publish my books on Smashwords since I’m not qualified for Kindle Direct Publishing’s (KDP) discount program anymore. [link] Yesterday, I hired a book designer to format my “Fool’s Illusion” manuscript for Smashwords’ ebook program. In order to convert my manuscript to ebook format he needed the book cover too. I thought I gave both the manuscript and book cover files to him until I found out this morning that I had only given him the cover’s illustration and not the full cover with t...

Credit: Pixabay.com This summer has been a 50 th anniversary for the Summer of Love but it’s also been a summer of the loving dead. The latter began with my work on the “Circa Sixty Years Dead” paperback edition  and it has continued with this weekend’s Zombie Walk here in Sacramento. Sacramento Zombie Walk and Carnival of the Dead Today was the 17 th annual Zombie Walk for Sacramento. But I only attended the pre-Zombie Walk Carnival of the Dead, yet hardly even that. There were a lot of neat games and booths there, not to mention costumes of the living dead. However, it was so damn hot on this 104-degree fahrenheit Saturday afternoon/early evening that I didn’t stay for much more than an hour. I’m surprised the heat didn’t do a further job on the zombies’ already rotted skin and flesh! But the event was a knock-out and, though I wasn’t there for it, the actual walk really turned out to be a knock-out! The undead really gave it to the alt-right and t...

While we still have some daylight this weekend before the solar eclipse, let me show you my past week in writing, viewing and even drawing. These include advice from son of Stephen King, author Joe Hill and the improved book cover for the paperback version of “Circa Sixty Years Dead”. Joe Hill Interview on You Tube This afternoon, after watching my Saturday morning (vintage) cartoons on YouTube (actually one was a live-action kids sci fi series from the seventies, Space Academy ), I watched an interview with NOS4A2 author Joe Hill. He had a lot of interesting things to say about his writing and useful techniques he uses for it. One of those techniques I’d like to try with my own stories, which helps both story and character development. That technique, he says, is taking a character from a larger work in progress and writing a separate, shorter story around it just for the sake of developing the character. That’s a technique that I can definitely use since I often st...

If you happen to not have purchased the paperback copy of “Circa Sixty Years Dead” then no worries. You may be better off waiting a few days and I’ll leave it at its initial low price of $3.89 a little longer. The reason I’m saying this is because, as I promised you last post, I purchased a copy myself as kind of a proof (or author’s) copy. It turned out to be a proof alright. A proof that it didn’t come out the way I intended it to. I confess much of this was due to myself missing overlooking certain tools on Kindle Direct Publishing’s cover creator program. If you happened to have bought a copy of the paperback version of “Circa” you probably noticed a long, ugly, gray line running along the left edge of the front cover. Not only that, but the lettering of the title and the image under it were pixelated. “Circa” is not a cyberpunk story, so the pixelated edges won’t work for customers. I apologise if you bought it like that. Credit: Pixabay.com The problem...

Despite the short blackout from this evening's storm, I just finished the concept sketch for the cover art to my book, "Circa Sixty Years Dead": Click on the image to see details. Photo Credit: Steven Rose, Jr. The statue on the pedestal in the picture is coming to life, or more like death if you prefer. Therefore it's a walking dead, or in this case a sitting dead. As you can see, it's based on Hindu myth and so its a sculpture of a six arm goddess, but, no, it's not Kali. I'm going to colour the statue gold since it's made of gold in my latest horror story. ("Circa" is actually a mix genre of horror, dark fantasy and even some adventure.) The statue is basically a tomb for the corpse that has been interred in it for thousands of years. A giant's corpse as you can see. So you might be thinking that my story is about something as corny as a giant zombie. Well, that's not quite what it's about. Story titles are not alwa...

If you’re like me and love highly imaginative art, you probably enjoy the hand-painted  sci fi and fantasy book cover art of the 1980s and back. As a pre-reading ritual, you may stare several seconds, or maybe even minutes, at the beautiful art on the cover of that paperback you picked up at a used book store. And it’s nothing to be embarrassed about because the illustration is part of the art of the book as a whole. It served a commercial function which was to draw in customers to buy the book, but if it was made by a great artist such as Frank Frazetta or Boris Vallejo, it has an aesthetic appeal too. It makes you think about the world the story takes place in before you start reading it. It makes you want to explore that world on the other side of the front cover, just like with a carnival haunted house’s (or dark ride’s) front with its mural of monsters. Those books are from a time when individual artists did illustrations for book covers and whose work was distinct. You could...