A Far Out Fantastic Site

It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) blog hop! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. Today I’m going to just limit my post to answering the optional question of the month. I was busy all weekend writing my own post for A Far Out Fantastic Site and was doing it up to the very Monday I had been trying to post on a weekly basis. However, as I said a while back, I’ve had to ease off of the weekly blog posts and just post every other week or so. In addition to that, I have to also be more flexible of when I post because shooting for Mondays would cause me to have to stay up until 3 AM on early Sunday mornings and so it had been causing me to lose sleep during the week and to stress out. So, the post will not always come out on a Monday, and it won’t always be every week but possibly every two weeks. I discuss it more...

Well it’s already the first week of the month and so that means it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Group (IWSG) post! IWSG is a monthly blog hop that occurs every first Wednesday of the month where we writers talk about the challenges in writing and how to resolve them. Each month the blog hop offers an optional question for us to answer, in which I have opted to answer this month’s. The question is “Of all the genres you read and write, which is your favorite to write in and why?” My answer: horror and sci fi. As for the why: I’ve been a longtime lover of the unknown which science fiction and horror expresses. Horror and sci fi appealed to me most ever since I was a kid, almost since I learned to walk! I guess you can say I got into those genres because several members of my family were sci fi and/or horror fans, especially on my mom’s side (though my mom herself wasn’t a fan) but my dad also watched a lot of the two genres. I got hooked to sci fi early w...

Last month, many science fiction fans and authors were enraged at Ian McEwan’s dismissal of the genre when he talked about his newest novel, Machines That Think Like Me , in an interview with The Guardian . As much as it contains the elements of science fiction, it was said that McEwan does not refer to it as that. Many people took this as literary elitism on his part. Science fiction has had a history of belittlement which has given the genre’s term a negative connotation. In this age of political correctness, many people do not like using the term and much less its shortened version, “sci fi”. Because of that, fans and even authors of the genre are self-conscious of using the word “science fiction” to refer to their reading preferences or work. I know because I’ve been there myself. However, there is nothing bad in the word “science fiction” except what the literary elite put in it. But that doesn’t count since what they put in it is only based on their own biases . Credi...

Credit: Wizard World I apologise for missing last week’s post. I was busy with a special writing project that was due any day and so I didn’t have time to post anything except to my Facebook page. You can visit my Facebook page for any updates in between blog posts.  I promised you a fuller report of Wizard World Comic Con Sacramento in my last post and so that’s what I have here for you today. However, I don’t have enough time to go over all three days of the con in one post, so I’m going to break up the coverage into three parts. The con offered a lot of great events such as cosplays and panels on comic book creation, including art and writing. I’m not a costumer but I just dug seeing the people who are and that go way, way out with their apparel! And that’s a great thing. To see what I mean, check out the photos in my last post if you haven’t done so yet.  But my favourite part about sci fi and fantasy conventions is talking to the other artists an...

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com For the last 10 years, mainstream readers have been taking both speculative and other types of genre fiction seriously. But they’ve also been more accepting of mixed genre fiction. The reasons for that may be many, including the popularity of mixed genre movies and TV shows such as Twilight and The Vampire Diaries both of which are romance and horror (better known as paranormal romance) and themselves originating as book series. One reason for it is that writers want to create original stories but this has become hard to do within a single genre. Author JeffSummers says , “It’s getting harder and harder to find something surprising in the usual convention of genres. But [by] mixing genres together . . . every now and then you get something explosive and beautiful.” For the last decade, we’ve seen a lot of science fiction mixing with fantasy and horror mixing with epic fantasy. But the latest trend has been the mixing of horror fiction and crime ...