Book-to-TV Series Sci Fi; PDF and Self-Publishing

A robot warrior and a cat-like creature overlook a misty landscape.

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.

“Circa” Print Edition Update: Resubmitting the Manuscript as a PDF File

Speaking about publishing, an indie author like myself doesn’t really know or remember how tough self-publishing is until they are actually doing it. Yesterday when I was trying to submit my manuscript for the print edition of “Circa Sixty Years Dead” to Kindle Direct Publishing’s beta paperback publishing program, I was going through a series of file types to get the manuscript to lay out correctly. None of them worked. Amazon suggests submitting manuscripts in PDF formatted files because is more compatible to the publishing program. I had been considering making a PDF version of my manuscript since yesterday afternoon when I started having the submission problems but didn’t have a PDF converter. Or I thought I didn’t.

I tried searching the internet for a free converter that was recommended by articles in well-known tech magazines such as Wired and PC Mag. Well, it was just this afternoon that I was looking at an article at PCMag.com that suggested Libre Office. I’ve been using Libre Office for typing my stories for the last year or so, ever since Microsoft stopped providing its own Office package with Windows. However, I didn’t know that it had a PDF converter or editing tool until I glanced through that article. I looked on the file menu of the Writer software of my copy of Libre Office and, sure enough, there was an option to convert files to PDF that was labeled “Export as PDF”! I clicked on that with the odt (open document format) file of my manuscript open and it created a PDF copy. Now to see if Kindle’s paperback publishing program will accept the file even if it’s been created by an open source program like Libre. Microsoft Word has seemed to be the standard for everything for the last 20 years.

I’ll update you next time and let you know how the PDF file of my manuscript submission worked out. If next week’s post’s headline reads something like “’Circa Sixty Years’ Print Edition Now Available” then that means it worked out.

Until next time . . .

Book-To-Movie: ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’

Credit: Wikimedia Commons I apologise for posting outside our regular post-day which is late Saturday night/early Sunday morning. However, I got behind on several things last week and so had to postpone the post to today. I’ve been a reader of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books ever since I was 11. What I’ve always liked so much about the series is that, like a good horror story, the stories often take place in dark settings and involve bizarre cases. Conan Doyle’s novel, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, definitely contains these elements. It’s a detective story that crosses over into the gothic horror genre. Several movie adaptations of the novel have been made that go as far back as a 1915 German silent film. In 1959 Hammer Studios released a version starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. As much as I’m a fan of the Hammer horror films, I have not seen that one yet. The only one that I’ve seen so far is the 1939 adaptation starring that other big name in classic Bri

Book-To-Movie: ‘I Am Legend’

A vampire similar to the ones in 2008's "I Am Legend" which starred Will Smith. Credit: Pixabay.com It’s time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie, I review a book and its movie adaptations. This month’s book and its movies based on it is I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. While vampires were no longer in in the American pop culture of the the 1950s, science fiction horror in general was. So Matheson’s I Am Legend brought the scientificising of vampires into the pulp literary scene of that era. Not too long after, in the early ‘60s, the first of three book-to-movie adaptions appeared and was renamed The Last Man On Earth which starred Vincent Price. The other two were The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston in the ‘70s and I Am Legend starring Will Smith in the 2001s. Even though each one debunked the myth of the vampire as a supernatural being, each had its own depiction of the creature. ‘I Am Legend’, The Book Set in a near post-apocalyptic fu

Book-To-Movie: Stephen King’s 'The Raft'

Credit: Pixabay.com It's the third Saturday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie ! In a Book-To-Movie we review a book and its movie adaptation. One of the reasons I as a horror fan don’t read a lot of Stephen King’s work is because most of it consists of novels that go more than 400 pages. I have a short attention span when it comes to reading, ironically since I consider myself an avid reader, and so I normally won’t read a work that is much more than the equivalent to a 350-page mass market paperback. The other reason why I don’t read a lot of King’s work is that, as literary scholars will tell you, a lot of his writing is poor. However, he does have some good writing in his works, especially his earlier stuff, including his short horror tales. So if I read anything by Stephen King it’s usually his short stories or novellas. One of his collections I’ve read is Skeleton Crew which includes some of his good, or at least better, fi

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