A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay I know, I’m posting this first weekly post of the year very late and I apologise. I did post earlier in the month, but that was for the monthly Insecure Writer's Support Group blog hop . If you haven't had a chance to look at it, please do so. I talk a little about working on my writing over the holidays and how you can be a beta reader for “Bad Apps” , my upcoming book of short fiction! [link]  After that posting, I had a sinus infection that was keeping me awake too many nights and so was not up to writing as frequently as I normally do. My doctor subscribed me some meds, and so I’m doing much better.  For today’s post, I have my new year’s writing resolutions and a list of 13 science fiction and fantasy movie adaptations of books releasing in theatres in 2025! 2 New Year’s Writer’s Resolutions of 2025 In this new year of 2025, one resolution I’m trying to make is coming up with a clear schedule of all my writing projects, and that includes “Bad Apps”. I’ve b...

Credit: Pixabay Today we have another guest blogger! May I introduce to you author Elizabeth Mueller ! I’m very grateful for Elizabeth to be with us this post. She is, as she puts it, “a diehard romance” writer yet has also written and published in other fiction genres, including science fiction and fantasy. She’s currently working on a dystopian sci fi / fantasy / romance novel which she’ll be sharing with us a segment from. Both a full-time author and a homeschooling mom of five kids, Elizabeth has contributed to several science fiction anthologies, including steampunk, while still writing in her favourite genre. Let me not delay any longer: here’s Elizabeth discussing her writer’s journey from speculative fiction to realist fiction, to romance!  Guest Blogger: Elizabeth Mueller Thank you for having me over at your lovely place, Steven! You’ve asked if I could talk about speculative fiction. To be honest, I’ve always wondered what that was and never tried to understand it as I’ve...

Credit: Pixabay.com I apologise for missing last week. I was really behind on things due to some insomnia I was having and so didn't get to post anything until now. Tuesday will be the Summer Solstice and so the first official day of summer! So, in case you’re up in the air on what to read during those upcoming scorching days when you don’t want to go out, I have my summer sci fi and fantasy reading list for you. I also have a movie mini review of “Jurassic World: Dominion” which I saw last weekend! (Fortunately, with that insomnia from that previous night, I didn’t fall asleep on it.) So, read on!  Summer Sci Fi and Fantasy Reading List The Club Dumas , by Arturo Perez-Reverte: An international bestseller from Spain, this novel is about book collector Lucas Corso who examines a fragment of the original manuscript of Alexandre Dumas's "The Three Musketeers". This leads him to a scheme involving devil worship, the occult, several people who suspiciously resemble chara...

Credit: Pixabay Summer is almost here! And in my region June is typically the beginning of the season. Many people look forward to the pool or beach. Most of us don’t look forward to the excessive heat. And so many of us look forward to lounging in air-conditioned movie theatres watching the next flick that's intended to be a blockbuster. I'm definitely in this last category but the movie doesn't have to be a blockbuster for me to enjoy, although I'll take one if it seems to be good beyond action and special effects. Summer 2022 looks like it has some promising, new sci-fi and fantasy movies as well as ones that aren't so promising although that can be simply a matter of opinion or taste. So, I conjured up two movie lists for you.  One list consists of films that are definitely science fiction, fantasy or horror. The other list consists of movies that some people may consider as falling into any of these genres but that others, myself included, can just as easily co...

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 To find out how you can read this post without ads, visit my Patreon page !   I have some Tolkien news this week. But first I want to apologise for missing last Wednesday’s Insecure Writer’s Support Group post. ( Alex , if you’re reading this, I personally apologise for missing.) With the Thanksgiving four-day weekend, I was a little disoriented in my sense of time of the week and forgot that the first Wednesday of the month had arrived. That’s the first time I missed an IWSG post and I’ll do everything I can to make sure it’s the last. One thing you can count on (unless an absolute emergency comes up which I’m not expecting one), I’ll have a post here for the IWSG next year, which is also next month.  Tolkien Museum Fundraiser The close of this year has been seeing big plans for commemorating authors with landmarks. I mentioned a few weeks back, that there were plans for a Harlan Ellison library . Only this past week, December 2nd, did a group of fundraisers l...

Credit: Pixabay Last post I had a cover reveal for the illustration itself. In this week’s post I have what I call a full cover reveal and so a cover that includes both illustration and lettering! Again, this is a new cover for my speculative fiction short story collection, “The Fool’s Illusion”, which turned 7 years old last month ! (No new internal content at this time. Sorry. Maybe on the book’s tenth birthday in 2023.) And my Patreon page is getting closer to launch! I made a schedule of Patreon benefits for the month of October! Full Cover Reveal for ‘The Fool’s Illusion’ Credit: The blogger/ Alex Vintagee Synopsis: Here is a collection of dark fantastic events and terrifying scientific phenomena. It contains stories of deadly creatures, including vampires and other undead things, and adventures into the unknown and terrible--tales that brew to the bursting point. This book will not fail to fool you with its terrifying visions of events that could be and ones that are impossible ...

 It’s been a hard week, as fast as it went. Although it’s let up in the last couple of days, the smoke from the not too distant fires was so badly infesting my area that people were forced to leave work early, outdoor events have been getting canceled, and the blogger’s had a bad headache all week from breathing it in. I’m just grateful that those fires didn’t reach us but I feel bad for the people in the areas of our state that it did reach. I really hope these fires will be under control soon and that the firefighters will come out of it alive and unharmed. I can’t say enough how grateful I am for the huge risk that they take to protect everyone from these blazes. Yet, through all this apocalyptic chaos, I’ve been keeping myself busier than usual by creating a Patreon page. This past week, I had been working on the “About” statement of my Patreon page. In this statement I introduce myself as an author of science fiction and horror and I list the benefits of becoming a Patreon mem...

Most Saturday afternoons I’m usually recording my expenses in the cheque transaction booklet and cleaning house so that later in the day I can work on what I enjoy most: writing. But this Saturday I ditched the usual routine and took a bus out to the second annual Sacramento Zine Fest held held at the Verge Center for the Arts in downtown. My first experience with zines was when I picked up a couple free science fiction fanzines at my first full sci fi/fantasy convention, BayCon in San Jose, several years ago. Soon, I came across one called The National Fantasy Fan and purchased a membership that gave me as many as six issues a year. I even wrote a review of a Larry Niven book for one. That was one of my first published works. Ever since then, I’ve always been interested in the zine scene. Many famous speculative fiction writers started off writing for fantasy and science fiction fanzines-- Harlan Ellison and William Gibson to name two.  Many fantasy and science ficti...

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 California’s primary elections are this Tuesday but the voting doesn’t stop there in my home state. In fact, it doesn’t even stop with California. No, I’m not talking about the other states’ elections or the national elections in November. I’m talking about the elections for the Hugo Awards! The Hugo Awards are taking votes from now until the end of July and the winners will be presented their awards at WorldCon 76 in San Jose, California. As much as I’m “next door” to the location of this world science fiction convention (I live in Sacramento) I found out about it only a couple of days ago. And it’s this August 16 through 20! So if you’re interested in attending, I suggest you get your tickets and accommodations fast. Nearby hotels are already booked! What makes this con so big is that it presents the Hugo Awards which many world famous science fiction and fantasy authors and artists have been awarded. If you register for WorldCon ,   you m...