January 2019 – David Kubicek

by David Kubicek

My strangest writing job didn’t have characters and a story. It had numbers and equations.

At one time in my career I was doing lots of writing and photography contract work. I wrote brochures and newsletters for businesses and took photos for a Nebraska Department on Aging brochure. One guy hired me to write a letter of complaint to one authority or another–I forget what he was complaining about. During the 1990s I copy-edited and inserted codes (for boldface, italics, etc.) into many CliffsNotes manuscripts and even wrote a Notes on Willa Cather’s My Antonia.

The Notes editor, Gary Carey (who told me he had a brother named Harry), asked if I was interested in doing a project that was out of my wheelhouse. I would be working with another editor because this was out of Gary’s wheelhouse, too. It was an entirely different division in the company. The project would be to write the mathematics section for CliffsNotes software to help people study for their General Educational Development (GED) exam.

I met with the other editor about the project and agreed to take it on. At that time, I still had a fairly good grasp of my high school math. I’d been rather good at math (except for polynomials) and had taken it every year although it wasn’t required for my senior year. The computer people at Cliffs would create the software–all I had to do was write the questions with four or five possible answers that sounded plausible, with one of them, of course, being the correct answer.

It was actually a fun break from working with words all the time. The only part I was weak at was the polynomial section. I had almost flunked polynomials in high school algebra because I could never understand them. To this day I don’t understand them. So I asked my brother John for help. John was a math whiz, and he got me through it. Unfortunately, I couldn’t offer to share my byline with him, mainly because I don’t think I got a byline. I haven’t seen bylines on too many multiple-choice exams.

In fact, I never saw the finished product. I turned in my work, and the editor was satisfied (it has been so long, and I only worked with this fellow that one time, so I don’t remember his name), and Cliffs paid me, so I assume that my work was used for the software. And although the company was sold a few years later, the software may still be helping students prepare for their GED’s today just as my Notes on My Antonia is still out there.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

by David Kubicek

Those of you who have read the comments after my short story “Ball of Fire” in The Moaning Rocks and Other Stories know the basic inspiration for that tale. To recap, my brother John and I, while investigating UFO sightings near Wilber, Nebraska, ended up parked in a farmer’s driveway just after sunset waiting for a UFO which didn’t show up that night. But earlier in the day we had done something else for an article I was writing: we took a fake UFO photo in the name of scientific experimentation.

John was in high school at the time and was heavily into science. He and some of his friends had started a club called the Aerial Phenomena Investigation Team (APIT), which proposed scientific explanations for UFO sightings. They also examined UFO photos for possible hoaxes (such as garbage can lids thrown into the air and photographed). One of the first articles I sold (to Grit , which at that time was a weekly newspaper) was about APIT, in which the team mentioned stapling two aluminum pie pans together to make a credible UFO if it were seen in the right context. To the left is a section of the photo that Grit published showing the pie pan UFOs.

On the day John and I went to investigate the UFO sightings in southeastern Nebraska, we stopped at the farm near Crete where our Dad grew up and where one of his sisters and two of his brothers still lived. It seemed like an ideal location to create a hoax. I was working on the Grit article, and we thought it might make a good addition to the story to actually show the pie pan UFO in flight, looking like an honest to God alien spacecraft.

To create our illusion, John stood on the roof of the car and flung the “UFO” like a frisbee while I photographed it from the ground. This was before digital photography so I couldn’t see the result until the film was processed, and there was no Photoshop so we couldn’t manipulate the images later. I had to shoot lots of photos and hope for the best. I shot in black and white for two reasons: 1) If it were in color, it might be easier to see that the UFO was a fake, and 2) In those days, because of the difficulty and expense of printing color photos, most newspapers used primarily black and white, and Grit was no exception.

Luck was on our side, and we got a fairly decent UFO picture (at right is the full frame and an enlargement of the significant portion), but unfortunately Grit published only the photo of the APIT members holding the pie pan UFOs and not our fake UFO photo.

The trees along Turkey Creek are about half a mile away and the phony spacecraft is actually closer than the windmill tower in the foreground, but because of the way everything came together the spacecraft seems to be rising out of the trees. So here, for the first time in print, is the result of John’s and my dabbling in UFO trickery.

For more information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

Month: January 2019

My Strangest Writing Job

The Day I Took a Fake UFO Photo