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 To find out how you can read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page !   We’re well into the Holiday Season and the end of the year is coming. Although this year has been one of the most uncertain and scariest ever, the Holidays always bring hope of some sort. Besides, there’s never such a thing as a totally bad year. All years and eras have something good in them. And one of those good things are the best of something of the year. In this case, many blogs and publications over the internet will bring you a list of the best movies of the year or the best books of the year. On December 8th the book recommendation website, GoodReads, brought us the latter through its annual Choice Awards . The best books of 2020 were selected across 20 categories which ranged from general fiction to general non-fiction, from science fiction and fantasy to memoir and biography. Nearly half of these 20 books were speculative fiction or at least related to it.  So, yours truly ...

Credit: Pixabay.com I hope everyone had a great Thanksgiving and are looking forward to the holidays. Me? I had a great, but very busy Thanksgiving with the family and so had to skip a weekend of posting. As far as the holidays go--I’m getting there. What I’m looking forward to right now, though, is the new science fiction-horror series that premieres this Sunday night on the SyFy channel, Nightflyers ! George R.R. Martin’s Nightflyers Nightflyers is based on a novella by Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin. According to the LA Times , he novella actually had two versions , the shorter version which was published in 1980 and an expanded version published three years later.   Then in 1987 a movie based on it came out but, because it got so scant of an audience ,   it fell into oblivion. It fell into oblivion to everybody e xcept those who are into B-rated and cult films such as myself although I haven’t seen this one. Neither have I read ei...

Credit: Pixabay.com Sorry about the late post. My desktop was having problems. Traditionally books have been adapted for the big screen but now the trend is in ones adapted for the small, including online television. This isn ’t a new thing even for the science fiction and fantasy genres. It started as early as the Six Billion Dollar Man in the ‘70s, which was based on Martin Caidin’s novel, Cyborg . Several of Steven King’s novels were made into television series such as It (1990), and then George R.R. Martin’s Game of Thrones has been an HBO hit since its debut in 2011. But now that there are five novels by four different popular sci fi/fantasy authors that have either recently been adapted to television or are in the plans to be, a book-to-TV trend is definitely forming. Therefore you can expect to see more famous novels (and maybe even not so famous) turn into television shows in the near future. Here are the most recent upcoming five: 1) Neil Gai...

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com I hope everybody had a great holiday season. Mine was groovy. One of the best gifts I got was from my brother. He knows how much I like Neil Gaiman’s work so he got me Gaiman’s latest biography, The Art of Neil Gaiman: The Story of a Writer by Hayley Campbell. Campbell does a super job telling the story of Gaiman’s career as a writer and uses abundant photos and interview clips. I’ve been a little burned out from writing several articles for clients over the weekend and so that’s why I’m posting late again, but I should be back on my Saturday publishing schedule this weekend now that the holiday rush is done. I’ve also had a bit of a cold today and so have been mostly taking it easy on this slightly moanday Monday, so I’m going to keep this post simple and short. I said I would post my writing resolutions for the new year but first I want to leave you with a couple of links to good sci fi news to start the year off. Print books have actually ...

Sinister Creature Con was a blast. I was there most of the day. Even though it catered more to the cinematic special effects and make-up crowd, I found a lot of great inspiration and motivation for my own art, the art of words particularly. I want to share with you that inspiration and the tips that came from it but it’s been a long day, so tonight’s not the best time. I would do it next week but that’s when I want to give you a chance at winning a giveaway through a Halloween contest and I’m not sure if I’ll be able to fit both in that weekend, especially since I have a family gathering to go to that evening. So it will probably be either Halloween weekend or the weekend after. But I would like to share some photos* with you that I took at the con which you’ll find below. Most are of attendees who came in costume which theirs and many others’ were really out’a sight! Two furries (or hairries?) Three cousins in costume, from left to right: Michael J...

Photo Credit: Steven Rose, Jr. Well, today did not only mark the last official day of summer but it also marked the 2 nd Anniversary of The Fool’s Illusion ! As I said in my last post, I would have a special offer for you to celebrate the occasion. Well, there’s both good news and bad. The good news is that the special offer is a $4 price reduction of the print copy at Amazon! Therefore the regular price is $12.99 but, for a limited time, I’m making the book available for only $8.99! The bad news is that I set the reduced price only yesterday and didn’t realise until after that Amazon takes three to five business days to put the reduced price into effect. The price reduction should be in effect by this Saturday. I’ll notify you here as soon as I find out. The best way to keep updated on it is to subscribe to my blog which you can do on the form towards the bottom of the right-hand side sidebar. Or you can keep checking T he Fool’s Illusion ’s page at Amazon throughout ...

Photo Credit: Wikimedia Commons/Radio-Science Publications I just started reading Larry Niven’s novel from the ‘70s, Protector , and so far it’s been really grabbing and thought-provoking. I’ve been reading a lot more novels for about the past two years even though I’m more a short story person both as reader and writer. Over all, short fiction isn’t as well-received as it was in the earlier half of the 20 th century. It may be better received in the sci fi and fantasy genres than it is in other genres such as mainstream. But even among speculative fiction for the last decade or so, the short story has been dwarfed in popularity by larger works. Until now. The literary market is beginning to lean towards shorter works again. The Short Story Returned For the past year, media and literary organizations have been reporting on the return of the short story. Sources everywhere from the New York Public Library to Writers Digest have been indicating this. What has made th...

Photo Credit: Openclipart.org Labor Day isn’t the only holiday we have this weekend. Although it may not be official, tomorrow, Sunday the 6 th of September, is National Read A Book Day .  people are encouraged to read a book. So don’t just take a break from work, but take a break from burning your eye-balls out from the TV, computer, and cinema screens and read a book. Although some like to read books on a computer screen of some sort, I prefer my book in print and so like to feel with my hands what I’m reading; I like to hold the art of the book binding. But what medium you read on is up to you. As long as you forget the video for the day and read a book--or even better, read several books--you will be truly celebrating Read A Book Day which is what I plan to do. For those of you who are not sure which books to read, I conjured up this list of past blog posts featuring book titles to help you. Most of these are sci fi and fantasy books since this is primarily a spe...

I’ve been studying the literary markets by reading magazines to see which ones my stories would fit in. I’m still considering self-publishing my book but I want to put some of my stories in magazines too since that’s how authors get their larger works exposed. Publishing both big and small can be very beneficial. Fortunately, many of the sources I want to submit to are online magazines and so most of their fiction is free. If I had to purchase the paper magazines it would get really expensive as much as I prefer reading the paper ones. So far this summer, I’ve only bought one print science fiction magazine, issue 103 of Clarkesworld . The stories and articles looked so great that I wanted to read everything in hardcopy without having to print them up on my printer. Printing them on the printer can eventually add up to colourless clutter of papers that are held together by nothing more than staples. The Nightmare of a World Without Print This reminds me of an interview I saw...

Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons I apologise for posting so late. I normally have been posting on a Friday or Saturday, but this past Saturday I had a family event to go to and was there a little longer than I had intended. Earlier last week, I was in bed reading a used copy of the Arabian Nights only to find out a page was missing. It was a missing leaf to be exact; the actual pages were 41 and 42, front and back. It was right in the middle of the story about the fisherman and the genie. I was really mad when I discovered this because I didn’t want to continue until I could replace the missing page. Even though the Arabian Nights is a compilation of stories, they are told within one overarching story. The book begins with the Princess Scheherazade’s tale that she tells to the king in order to hold off her execution. Even though she is the chief story teller in the book, within her stories are other stories told by the characters. So they are stories within stories, li...

I used to take off to BayCon in the Silicon Valley on these Memorial Day weekends but haven’t done so in the last three years. If there was any year I should have went it was probably this year, since HorrorAddicts.net had their book release party for TheHorror Addicts Guide to Life there last night. But my day job made things a little unpredictable and so I didn’t plan for it early enough. I did, however, keep up with the party on Facebook. According to Emerian Rich, founder of HorrorAddicts.net, the party went by great. It was a panel discussion/release party where they were giving away prizes and selling books, including the Horror Addicts Guide . I don’t have the numbers but Emerian said they sold several books, whether that included the Horror Addicts Guide or not, I’m not sure. I know they were selling, or at least displaying, a number of other Horror Addict authors’ books that they set out on their table which looked really neat, the main colours of the banner and cloth b...