A Far Out Fantastic Site

It has no skin! Or does it? This sculpture of an alien is said to be from the H.R. Giger Museum. Photo Credit: Pixabay.com I finally saw A Quiet Place yesterday evening. It was really good in almost all aspects. T he story to this film was not made to be merely an audience pleaser. This was an intelligently made movie with well-developed characters and a well-written storyline. But the monsters were designed terribly. So as not to create any spoilers I won’t go into too many details, but at many points in the film the monsters looked like they were cut open in parts of their bodies. I know that’s been a major characteristic in the creatures of horror films ever since Alien in the late ‘70s, but it’s been over done too many times. I’m not against the design of the Alien movies’ exoskeleton creatures that’s muscle tissues seem to be exposed. In fact, the first movie has been one of my favourites among sci fi horror. But those monsters were Ridley Scott and H.R. Gige...

Unfortunately I wasn’t able to get together a bigger story for this week’s post like I had hoped . So here are some more lightning news flashes, or lightning flash non-fiction, with links to the full stories. These stories cover race issues in sci fi and fantasy pop culture, and the world-building behind The Circle . Then comes news of the blogger’s current projects. Star Trek  Licence Plate Removed Due to Racist Connotation   During the week, a man in Canada was forced by policy to turn in his Star Trek - themed license plate due to “politically incorrect” language. The message on the licence plate unintentionally conveyed reference to a racist method of assimilating the indigenous population of Canada to white culture. However, it was actually referring to Star Trek (post-original series) episodes involving the alien and villainous Borgs’ attempts to assimilate other races. ReplacingLovecraft’s Image in the World Fantasy Award   The World Fantasy A...

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com Certain aspects of the creation process in writing fiction can be overwhelming. For me those aspects are  character development  and, although to a lesser extent,  world-building . Just think about it: you have so many levels to take care of in building a single character especially if it’s the protagonist or main character. Sometimes you feel like you have to be God just to make your characters and worlds believable. And being the Supreme Being is just a little impossible. As a writer, you not only have your character’s superficial characteristics such as physical features and speech mannerisms to take care of but also their psychological ones: the ways they think and perceive things, in many cases ways of thinking they do not directly express to the other characters but may still be essential to the story.  Although creating character profiles is relatively easy, if you’re like me you might find it difficult to apply them to...

Photo credit: Wikimedia Commons/Doalex I apologize for Amazon not yet putting The Fool’s Illusion at its reduced price that I talked about in the special FI anniversary post earlier this week. If you missed that one, go check it out to read more about that fantastic deal in celebration of FI ’s 2nd year anniversary .   Amazon seems to take long with its price changes, something that we indie authors have no control over since we only price our books through them (besides publishing through their self-publishing services) and don’t display the price in the online store itself. Again, I will update you here (at the Fantastic Site ) once I find out the reduced price is displayed and therefore when the book is actually selling at that price. Because it’s hard to say when that will be, I can’t tell you at this point when I will post notice of that. So you don’t miss out on this limited offer, subscribe to the blog in the form below on the right-hand side or follow it by e...

Photo Credit: OpenClipart.org A very busy week, made even busier when you don’t have a car which is my situation. Even though I prefer public transportation and walking, sometimes those two things aren’t practical. So when I do have a car I try to reduce driving it as much as possible. I believe in taking care of our planet. Who knows when we’ll be able to find and settle on another inhabitable one. Even though scientists are discovering them already, traveling to them is a long ways off. I found this out when I was researching for the world-building of my recent short story that I talked about last time .  I was researching interstellar space travel and the sources I looked at indicated that traveling to other solar systems, where many inhabitable planets are, won’t happen that soon. According to these sources, it probably won’t be possible until after AI has dominated the planet which probably won’t be for another 100 to 200 years. Keep in mind, this is all specula...

Sorry for being so late with this post, again. Last week was kind of a bad one because I was having back problems and have been out of a car, so that slowed me down quite a bit. Also, some writer’s block may had added to it. Authors get writers’ block at different stages of their writing. Some get it at the rough draft stage, some in the revision stage. Some writers even get it outside of the draft itself, such as in the characterization and world-building stages and I’m one of those writers. Right now I’m working on a new short story and so I’m on the world-building part which is where I got the writer’s block on Saturday. It was when I was sketching out a world for an alien race in my story which is a kind of space opera-horror. So I’ll tell you how I got over that block in a little bit, but first a couple updates: Updates My Author Interview If you haven’t seen it yet, my interview at HorrorAddicts .net is up. David Watson who’s on the Horror Addict’s staff in...

Image Credit: Openclipart.org I was choking on dust all week, especially in bed late at night. So I made sure I spent this Saturday afternoon dusting the flat. And it’s not even half done when you think about it. Being a rat pack, more dust is in the clutter of my house than sand in the Sino-Indian border’s desert. I think I have to scan and put some of those old manuscript copies and notes for past work on flash drive and trash the paper copies. Though there are certain paper copies of my work that I forbid myself to exclude to digital form, since I’m a lover of the printed word and like to read and present words on a tangible medium such as paper. But enough of that. On World-building I told you last time that I would have a post on world-building. Most people probably think of world-building as something only done by fantasy writers who make up imaginary universes. That’s not true. World-building is simply the manner an author describes the environment the story...