A Far Out Fantastic Site

Credit: Pixabay It's the fourth weekend of the month and so time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie, we review a work of prose fiction and its movie adaptation. Well, finally we've returned to our fourth weekend of the month schedule for these reviews! For the last three months we've had to keep postponing them by a week. I'm going to do everything that I can this new year of 2023 to stick to the fourth weekend schedule (Saturday late night/early Sunday). Today we have "The Haunting of Hill House", Shirley Jackson's 1959 gothic horror novel. While the Netflix TV series based on the book has been the big talk since its 2018 premiere, it seems to stray too far from the original story. Which is too bad, because Jackson’s novel leaves a lot of room for an on-going TV series since it is epic in many respects. However, this is a Book-To-Movie post and not a Book-To-TV one, so let’s look at some of the film adaptations that have been out. The 1...

Photo Credit: the blogger. Book and Illustration Credit: Wilfried Satty.  Last Thursday January 19th was the 214th birthday of Edgar Allan Poe, the Father of American horror fiction. To celebrate, I thought it would be neat to do a book review but not of one of his short stories. Instead, I want to review a collection of them, but not one that was put together by publishers or editors of Poe’s time. The book that I want to review here wasn’t even put together by an editor after his time. It was put together in the 1970s by an artist. Wilfried Satty was a collage artist, who selected several of Poe’s stories and made the illustrations for them in the book, "The Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe". Satty's art in this collection enhances the nightmarish situations of the stories.  Published in 1976 by Clarkson N. Potter, Satty’s “Illustrated Edgar Allan Poe” opens with a very informative introduction by “San Francisco Chronicle” art critic Thomas Albright. The hardcopy I own has a...

Credit: Pixabay 2022 for me was the year of marketing. Particularly it was the year of both marketing my upcoming book of short fiction, "Bad Apps" ,  as well as my other work such as this blog. The problem with marketing one's work, especially if you're an indie author with a day job like me, is that you never get the book done. So, that's what 2022 was, a year of not getting "Bad Apps" done but marketing it. When I say “marketing”, I mean basically advertising your work. When I say “advertising”, I not only mean formally announcing your work for sale but also decorating that announcement to attract attention. I feel like I had done that too much last year and so, as I said in the Insecure Writer's Support Group for this month , I'm going to focus on writing my book more and same with my blog and newsletter.  I spent so much time last year making my blog look good with the best illustrations and hunting down the best words for SEO so search engi...

It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) post! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions. It’s also the first IWSG for 2023! I can't believe we're already in the new year! It seems to come faster each year especially as you get older. As we all know, a new year is a time for resolutions, and this month’s IWSG optional question of the month kind of addresses that. That question is: Do you have a word of the year? Is there one word that sums up what you need to work on or change in the coming year? . . . I thought about what a word of the year might be for me and thought that word was “speed”. I’ve always been a slow writer due to having ADHD. But then speed is something I've worked on all my life so I don't think that's a problem to be resolved as much as it is to be worked around. So, then I thought t...

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...

I never thought 1976's "Carrie" as being a good movie. I saw it when I was a freshman in college and thought it was one of the most pessimistic, most despairing films ever. But that's when I had a different view of horror movies and what they should consist of. After all, I was just out of high school and carrying with me my own family's beliefs of what decency is. So, I've been meaning to watch the movie again lately but haven't had a chance. But now I'm inclined even more to see it since it’s been selected for the Library of Congress's National Film Registry (NFR). “Carrie” is one of at least three films that are science fiction or fantasy that will be inducted into the NFR. What’s more is that all three are based on books! The other two are Disney’s "The Little Mermaid" and 2008’s "Iron Man". (Yes, I’m including comic books.) I haven't seen "Iron Man" (as much as he’s a favourite Marvel character of mine) and do...

  It's the first Wednesday of the month and so it’s time for another Insecure Writer’s Support Group (IWSG) post! In an IWSG post, we writers bring our writing challenges and problems out into the open to share with each other and try to offer solutions.  When the brink of the holiday season comes around which is, at least for me, just after Thanksgiving I never feel ready for it. Time flies by so fast that it seems like when one Christmas goes by another comes within only a week rather than a year. So, it’s from around Thanksgiving up to about the second (full) week of December that I always wonder how I’m going to handle both my regular year-round duties and the holidays. And those year-round duties include my writing. So, that brings me to the IWSG optional question of the month: Are the holidays a time to catch up or fall behind on writer goals?  For me the holidays are a time to inevitably fall behind in my writing. This means that I don’t intend to fall behind bu...