A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay.com This summer has been a 50 th anniversary for the Summer of Love but it’s also been a summer of the loving dead. The latter began with my work on the “Circa Sixty Years Dead” paperback edition  and it has continued with this weekend’s Zombie Walk here in Sacramento. Sacramento Zombie Walk and Carnival of the Dead Today was the 17 th annual Zombie Walk for Sacramento. But I only attended the pre-Zombie Walk Carnival of the Dead, yet hardly even that. There were a lot of neat games and booths there, not to mention costumes of the living dead. However, it was so damn hot on this 104-degree fahrenheit Saturday afternoon/early evening that I didn’t stay for much more than an hour. I’m surprised the heat didn’t do a further job on the zombies’ already rotted skin and flesh! But the event was a knock-out and, though I wasn’t there for it, the actual walk really turned out to be a knock-out! The undead really gave it to the alt-right and t...

While we still have some daylight this weekend before the solar eclipse, let me show you my past week in writing, viewing and even drawing. These include advice from son of Stephen King, author Joe Hill and the improved book cover for the paperback version of “Circa Sixty Years Dead”. Joe Hill Interview on You Tube This afternoon, after watching my Saturday morning (vintage) cartoons on YouTube (actually one was a live-action kids sci fi series from the seventies, Space Academy ), I watched an interview with NOS4A2 author Joe Hill. He had a lot of interesting things to say about his writing and useful techniques he uses for it. One of those techniques I’d like to try with my own stories, which helps both story and character development. That technique, he says, is taking a character from a larger work in progress and writing a separate, shorter story around it just for the sake of developing the character. That’s a technique that I can definitely use since I often st...

If you happen to not have purchased the paperback copy of “Circa Sixty Years Dead” then no worries. You may be better off waiting a few days and I’ll leave it at its initial low price of $3.89 a little longer. The reason I’m saying this is because, as I promised you last post, I purchased a copy myself as kind of a proof (or author’s) copy. It turned out to be a proof alright. A proof that it didn’t come out the way I intended it to. I confess much of this was due to myself missing overlooking certain tools on Kindle Direct Publishing’s cover creator program. If you happened to have bought a copy of the paperback version of “Circa” you probably noticed a long, ugly, gray line running along the left edge of the front cover. Not only that, but the lettering of the title and the image under it were pixelated. “Circa” is not a cyberpunk story, so the pixelated edges won’t work for customers. I apologise if you bought it like that. Credit: Pixabay.com The problem...

Well, finally it’s here! “Circa Sixty Years Dead” is now in paperback format. If you’re like me, and prefer to read books in their physical forms instead of on a screen where you can’t even feel the pages that you are reading or where you can’t even put it on your (physical, not virtual) bookshelf to show your guests that you’ve read it, then now you can have the full literary experience of “Circa”.  To celebrate its print release, I’m offering the paperback edition of my short fiction story at a low price. After all the challenges and frustrations of navigating through self-publishing technology, it feels great to see that your book is available for purchase, let alone that it has been published—self-published at that. So I’m selling the print edition for the low price of $3.89! But this bargain won’t last long, so if you are interested in purchasing a copy or, better yet, several copies then head on over to Amazon now. In fact, as part of this celebration, I’m going t...

Credit: Pixabay.com The last couple days in publishing my work have both been great and frustrating. My Latest Article On Sci Fi/Fantasy Books and TV I said a while back that I sold an article to an online science fiction/fantasy magazine called BuzzyMag but that it may be a while before they actually publish it. Well the wait is over! The article is now live. “It’s alive! It’s alive!” (as Dr. Frankenstein in Universal’s Frankenstein shouts.) It covers one of the newest trends in sci fi and fantasy television: TV series based on books in the two genres. With TV shows like The Expanse , American Gods and The Man In the High Castle , that are all based on best-selling or award-winning books, there are many more TV shows such as these to come in the near-future. I discuss those as well as past and current shows based on novels in my article entitled “TheTop 10 SF/F TV Series Based On Books” at BuzzyMag . Feel free to leave any comments either there or here. ...

I’m submitting my complete file for the print edition of “Circa Sixty Years Dead” early next week. Hopefully it will be available for purchase by Wednesday. I’ll post an update for the release on my Facebook page and definitely here next week. As busy as a weekend it has been, I’m squeesing in some time for a summer sci fi flick— Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets . Valerian I’m always looking for the Star Wars -type blockbuster each summer and it looks like Valerian could be it. In fact, according to TheHollywood Reporter , it even borrows from Star Wars . However, according to the bulk of critics , it hasn’t been much of a blockbuster on this weekend of its release. But it’s definitely blockbuster-like yet with its own style and vision from its director, Luc Besson, who also directed The Fifth Element back in the ‘90s and look what became of that. It became a cult classic, and hopefully this movie will too. The reason I say that is because...

Two posts ago I gave a report of two panels that I attended at Wizard World Comic Con in Sacramento. [link] I highlighted the fiction writing advice given at these panels. One of the panels was about the Satan myth in the dark fiction genre and the term for the genre itself. I said that author Richard Kadrey talked about his Satan character in the Lucifer comic book series and that he talked some more about it in his villain creation panel later that same day. That panel is included here in part two of the report of the writing panels I attended. I had also said that the report would be divided into three posts, but it looks like I can complete it in two, so this is the final part.    A "Disco Revolution" band that I watched before attending my first panel on Saturday, Day 2 of Wizard World Comic Con in Sacramento. These guys are really heavy in keeping one of the earliest forms of electronica alive! Photo Credit: the blogger Day 2, Part II So after the ...