A Far Out Fantastic Site

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...

Credit: Pixabay.com I was desperately and futilely looking for a topic for this evening’s post but couldn’t think of anything. So I decided to go with news bits or, what I like to call, lightning flash non-fiction (or even Lightning News Flashes). I call them that because they are very brief news flashes. Although I don’t believe in depending on a brief news story over full coverage of an event, both myself and you readers out there are short on time and I’m not a full-time news journalist. So I don’t rob you of the full story like too many so-called news outlets do just to attract an audience to make profit, I put the link to the full, or at least fuller, story in each flash. Just click on the link and you are there in a, uh, flash (provided you don’t have a slow internet connection). And so here they are: Writing Project Updates : I finally finished copying and pasting the text from my manuscript of “Circa Sixty Years Dead” to the template for the print edition . ...

Pasting my draft of “Circa Sixty Years Dead” to the manuscript template for the print edition is taking a little longer than I thought it would. I didn’t realise how tedious it would be to cut and paste from my manuscript to the template. I have to do it paragraph by paragraph rather than in larger sections. W hen I did it the latt er way with The Fool’sIllusion   it screwed up the entire format and so I had to keep readjusting the settings which doing so delay ed the book’s releas e. I think the template is formatted based on paragraph breaks more than on larger units of text. Cutting and pasting my manuscript one paragraph at a time was so redundantly frustrating that I had to stop after about an hour and get out of the house for a while. So I hopped into my Chevy Malibu (a.k.a. a “Classic”) and drove down to one of the nearby fast food joints for a diet cola and to work in some revisions of the short story I’m currently working on. I had to get away from the redun...

I wish this were only an April Fool’s joke: the print edition of “Circa Sixty Years Dead” is not ready. Earlier in the week I started transferring the story to the manuscript template but then found out that there were some technical problems. The template was made for a book divided into chapters. I don’t use chapters in “Circa” since it’s a short work. But problems like these can easily be fixed. I simply placed the cursor of my mouse on the first tab of a chapter’s opening page. Then I back-spaced until I got rid of the chapter heading as well as the page break. The page breaks are often used so the next chapter won’t begin on the same page as the end of the previous one. I did this for the first page of each chapter. Now I have to see if there are any other technical challenges in the template but I won’t be able to tell until I start pasting my story’s text to the template. Unless you’re an expert at book design, which I’m not, formatting your own book is really all abo...

Credit: Pixabay.com A couple of weeks ago, I was about to format the print version of “Circa Sixty Years Dead” but ran into a software compatibility problem. When I tried transferring the text of my manuscript to the Word-based formatting template, offered for free by Kindle Direct Publishing, my word processing software, Libre Writer, by default used a sans serif font in place of the template's serif font. Sans serif is a font-type that does not have the elaborate design, such as extra curves and “tails”, that serif font has. It is strongly recommended to use serif for formatting a fiction book. I had to open the template file with Libre since my laptop doesn’t have Microsoft Word. At the time, my desktop, which had Word, was not working. Libre Writer offers plenty of serif fonts but I wanted a  style most fitting for fiction. I looked at some articles about fonts. One of the articles recommended FontSquirrel.com as a source for free fonts. So I looked at the various s...

io9 .com announced Friday that Tweets about a fictional pirate radio show based on the Amazon streaming TV series, The Man In The High Castle , angered several Republicans and Trump supporters. No, the radio show is not a high seas scallywag geek program. Instead it refers to a type of underground radio. The conservative Twitter users thought the show was a real one produced by anti-Trump protesters and so reacted to its title’s hashtag of #ResistanceRadio by lashing out criticism. This was likened to the radio broadcast of H.G. Well’s War ofthe Worlds  of which many listeners who tuned in late flew into panic thinking the Martians really were coming. However, in the case of Resistance Radio the reaction is one that says “the rebels are coming”.   The Man In The High Castle is based on Philip K. Dick’s novel of the same name. I can’t say a whole lot about the novel or TV show since I haven’t read the former or watched the latter, as much as I’m a big fan of Dick’s wo...

Credit: Pixabay.com It looks like I’m going to have to outsource for the photographic version to the cover of “Circa Sixty Years Dead” . I tried getting together a digital cover during the week and I just couldn’t do it in the little time that I have. It’s a hell of a lot tougher than one would at first think, but a lot of the problem isn’t that it’s tough. A lot of the problem is that I’m just not a digital artist. I am a freehand artist. Yet I know the majority of the book market today does not call for freehand illustrated book covers which i s a damn, sad thing because it is a result of the total reliance on computer technology that is robbing the freehand artist of what he/she does best and puts their heart and soul into. So while I don’t embrace the digital trend in book cover illustration, I need to sell my books and so I am willing to have a digital cover edition of my book made. I won’t go into the details of this circumstance here because I’ve already done that...