A Far Out Fantastic Site

Last Tuesday evening we were going over a story of mine at my writers’ critique group. The other members had all kinds of great things to say about my story and gave me really helpful advice as usual. So I'm very grateful for their help. The exception was when two of these members criticised me for using British spelling. I’m not the least bit British, but I told them it was my preferred style of writing. They said they understood that but that my American audience would hate it. I told them I don't write for an American audience; I write for an English-speaking audience (meaning any readers who speak English regardless of country of origin or residence). And that's where I put my foot down and said that I personally believe U.K. English is the most correct form of English as far as standardisation goes because it originated in the British Isles and not in the United States. I said that there are many American authors who have used British English, authors such as Edgar All...

Photo Credit: Pixabay.com Daylight savings started last Sunday in my area and it took me nearly all week to adjust to the change in my sleep schedule. On top of that, I returned to a seasonal day job and so had to adjust to my new sleep schedule for that! It was a big pain in the ass since one night I did not sleep a single blink. So, every day last week I ended up having to go to bed earlier than usual just to catch up on missed rest. A couple of those days I went to bed before the sun was down! So you can say I was a semi-vampire those days. Because of that weird sleep schedule, I hardly got any writing done and much less book cover art for “Circa Sixty Years Dead”. In fact, I didn't get any of the book cover illustration done. So I'll have to further delay the cover reveal by another two weeks. I apologise. But my daylight savings insomnia isn’t the only reason for the further delay. You’ll be glad to know that the other reason is that I’m using one of you readers’ su...

Photo Credit: Openclipart.org I apologise, but I have to postpone the cover reveal to my horror short story by two weeks. It’s been a total burn-out week, mostly from writing--particularly from writing technical subject matter. So that’s held me back. I was so burned out one day that I hardly even wrote at all. I don’t just write imaginative, high-soaring fiction. I don’t even just write fiction. Many of us freelance writers are “forced” into writing for sources that we would prefer not to. Many of those sources are ones that require technical writing. That’s what I call writing for a living as opposed to writing for a passion. Generally speaking, there is rarely a job opening for a fiction writer, much less a fiction writer of a particular genre. There are very few ads that read “Science Fiction Writers Wanted” or “Horror Writers Wanted”, “Fantasy Writers Wanted”, “Thriller Writers Wanted”, etc. The establishment controlled by the corporate head honchos and even the head hon...

Despite the short blackout from this evening's storm, I just finished the concept sketch for the cover art to my book, "Circa Sixty Years Dead": Click on the image to see details. Photo Credit: Steven Rose, Jr. The statue on the pedestal in the picture is coming to life, or more like death if you prefer. Therefore it's a walking dead, or in this case a sitting dead. As you can see, it's based on Hindu myth and so its a sculpture of a six arm goddess, but, no, it's not Kali. I'm going to colour the statue gold since it's made of gold in my latest horror story. ("Circa" is actually a mix genre of horror, dark fantasy and even some adventure.) The statue is basically a tomb for the corpse that has been interred in it for thousands of years. A giant's corpse as you can see. So you might be thinking that my story is about something as corny as a giant zombie. Well, that's not quite what it's about. Story titles are not alwa...

If you’re like me and love highly imaginative art, you probably enjoy the hand-painted  sci fi and fantasy book cover art of the 1980s and back. As a pre-reading ritual, you may stare several seconds, or maybe even minutes, at the beautiful art on the cover of that paperback you picked up at a used book store. And it’s nothing to be embarrassed about because the illustration is part of the art of the book as a whole. It served a commercial function which was to draw in customers to buy the book, but if it was made by a great artist such as Frank Frazetta or Boris Vallejo, it has an aesthetic appeal too. It makes you think about the world the story takes place in before you start reading it. It makes you want to explore that world on the other side of the front cover, just like with a carnival haunted house’s (or dark ride’s) front with its mural of monsters. Those books are from a time when individual artists did illustrations for book covers and whose work was distinct. You could...

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: 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 ...