A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay.com Happy New Fear everybody! (Of course, I really mean New Year. I’m a horror writer, so what do you expect?) If you read my Facebook post the other night, you can see that 2022 kind of ended  badly for A Far Out Fantastic Site. As I said in the post, our monthly Book-To-Movie  reviews have run late into the following month. Well, this is the first time in the series' history, that a Book-To-Movie (BTM) has actually run late into the following year. So, this blog post was originally supposed to be an end-of-year one but the internet in my area went down due to a big New Year's Eve storm. It didn’t go back up until last night. So, consider this post a New Year one even thought we’re going to look back on some BTMs of 2022.  In a Book-To-Movie, we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. However, because this year is just starting, and our BTM was supposed to occur on the last Saturday of December at the latest, and I don’t have a movie ada...

Credit: Pixabay.com I hope everybody had a great holiday season and is getting a good start to this new year of 2020! While the 21st century has shown a rise in the acceptance of fantasy and science fiction into mainstream culture, the past decade has particularly shown a rise in TV and movie adaptations of books in these genres. I’m not really big on TV adaptations of books and so can’t say a lot at this time about any that may be coming during this year of 2020. However, since I’m much more into watching big screen movies and reading, I can say that the new year has lined up five sci fi and fantasy book-to-film adaptations which all look really awesome! Okay, I’m speaking a bit hypocritically. I haven’t actually read any of the books these five films are based on. Still, the plots look super and worthy of the big screen. So, that gives me at least three new year’s resolutions to put on my list: 1) read the book to each of these movies; 2) see the movies; 3) do a Book-To-Movie ...

Credit: Openclipart.org Well, as you may have noticed, 2018 isn’t getting a good start here at the Far Out Fantastic Site since I missed posting last week. So I apologise for that. It was a busy weekend, and some of us celebrate the holidays as long as six days into the new year and since this isn’t a religious blog I won’t go into details with the exception of a few clues: Magic, Magi and Three Kings. Put them together or do a Google search on all three, which is, by the way, a number that has traditionally been believed by many societies to be magic. Last blog post we looked back at the previous year of 2017. This post let’s look into the very near future of 2018 of a not very well-known author’s life. To be specific, let’s look at this author’s planned resolutions of the new year. My Very Near, Planned Future of 2018 1. Do more live events to promote my books. As I said last post, one of my greatest accomplishments of 2017 was doing my first live ev...

Credit: Pixabay.com I hope everybody’s been enjoying this Holiday Season! I had a groovy Christmas Eve and Day. I was in Fresno during that time visiting the family there. My brother took me and his son to see Star Wars the Last Jedi which was just awesome! And only last night, did I see The Force Awakens on DVD. That is, I saw it for the second time only yesterday since seeing it in the theatre two Christmases ago, also with my brother and his son. (Hey, I think a new Holiday tradition is forming in my family!) Now you’re probably wondering why I’m watching the two movies out of order? Well, I hadn’t actually planned on watching the latest movie until I returned here to Sacramento, because I wanted to refresh myself on Force Awakens first. But since I only see my brother and his family a few times throughout the year, I couldn’t resist an invitation to see a movie like Star Wars with them. But now that I’m back, I’ m watch ing the two movies in order and so will se...

Credit: Pixabay.com Somewhere between Christmas Day and the New Year’s Day, I get that dark feeling as if nothing will be on the other side of the threshold between the old year and the new. It’s almost as if all hell will break loose once we step through that threshold. In fact, this concern caused me to write a short story the day after Christmas for my writers’ critique group’s holiday party, a kind of time travel story you can say. I’ve only written the rough draft though, and because it’s holiday themed, particularly New Year’s, you probably won’t see it until the end of the year. But even though for some of us the other side of the portal to 2017 maybe seemed like a black nothingness, here we are; we are alive and that’s all that counts. I thought I would look at my writing accomplishments from last year and my goals (or resolutions) for this new year of 2017. But first let me talk about how Christmas went. It went by great. Nothing that spectacularly different ...

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 ...

Photo Credit: This is a derivative form of a page taken from the  September 1941 issue of  Weird Tales via Wikimedia Commons.  The bold text at the end has been added by the blog's author. I can’t say I’m a prophet or a soothsayer, medium, fortune teller, whatever you prefer to call them. And so I can’t predict anybody’s future, perhaps not even my own. But I can anticipate my own future as far as planning for it goes and so I do believe we are all capable of determining our own futures. Can we predict them? Probably not, at least not to any kind of precision. So while I can’t see 2014 in precision through a crystal ball, I can plan for my future of 2014 as a writer. This can be done through making new year’s resolutions. But because the past determines the present which in turn determines the future, I will first look back in the crystal ball of anticipation at my accomplishments of 2013. The highlights of my writing accomplishments of 2013: I self...

It's a new year and a new year calls for a new template and background for a blog. I was looking through what seemed like hundreds of templates and I'll be be looking through hundreds more before I select one because I am very choosy about my blog's appearance. But you'll see a new look in the next week or two, maybe even three. Speaking about a new year, as late as I'm running with my book, The Fool's Illusion ,   it's a great time to put out a new book. I'm coming near to the composing of it. The stories are written, I just have to get them together in one manuscript. I'm presently working on the introduction. If you want a pre-introduction , if you will, you can read one with a free excerpt of the title story at HorrorAddicts .net .  That will give you the perfect sneak peek to the book. If you want even more of a sneak peek, go to my other posts here at the Fantastic site for two whole, free stories--" The Puppet Show " and " The...