Month: October 2020

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How I Mark My Writing Progress

by David Kubicek

Many writers measure their progress by how many words they write each day. I’m not one of them. The words I write today may be discarded tomorrow or cut in the second or third draft. For me, the  words that matter most are the ones that end up in my final draft.

The idea for my young adult dystopian novel Empath first came to me in 2011. I wrote 25,000 words, wasn’t happy with the direction of the story, and set it aside for a few years.

In 2016, shortly before the election, I took it up again. The day after the election, I set it aside and didn’t work on it for six months.  The novel was a speculative fiction story set against the backdrop of a totalitarian regime 200 years in the future–I feared that by the time it was finished and published, bookstores would shelve it in the “Contemporary” section.

But eventually I took it up once more. I tried to take it in a new direction, wrote some new scenes and discarded them. Finally I discarded everything and started over. I did this two or three more times. I cranked out a lot of words, which I discarded before even completing  one draft. In all, I deep-sixed over 90,000 words, more than enough for a complete novel.

One reason I kept starting over was that Kassidy, my main character, was too passive. She reacted to things that happened to her rather than striving for a goal and making things happen. The other reason was that Empath was too much like many other young adult dystopian novels: heroine is pissed off at the leaders of her society, heroine leads a band of rebels to overthrow the government, etc. Ho hum. Yawn.  I wanted something different.

Then in January of 2020, out of nowhere, “something different” dropped into my head. A complete idea. That has never happened to me in all the years I’ve been writing. It dropped into my head at 10 p.m. and kept me awake for two hours as my mind worked feverishly to iron out some details. Apparently, while I struggled through these early drafts, my subconscious mind–a frequent collaborator–had been hard at work, and it chose this moment to reveal to me the fruits of its labor.

But it hasn’t been easy sailing since then. There are lots of kinks I need to iron out as I work through the first draft. With a little bit of luck and a lot of hard work I expect to have a complete draft of Empath by June 2021. I won’t give any plot spoilers but will describe it only as a young adult dystopian time travel romance.

One thing I want to make clear is that in my novel, the instrument of our present day civilization’s near demise has always been a plague because a pandemic is cleaner than an atomic war–it kills people but leaves the architecture intact. It was a pandemic in 2011 when I conceived of the story, and it is a pandemic today as the novel finally nears completion.  It’s not, as they say, a story ripped from the headlines; my story was in progress years before the novel coronavirus made the scene.

One thing I can say, though, is that COVID-19 has allowed me to do some hands-on research about what it’s like to live during a pandemic. But I would have preferred to do my research in a library.

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

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Ghost Tales for Halloween

by David Kubicek

 

Here are a few ghost tales for Halloween. I’ve always been fascinated by true ghost stories.  I longed to see a real ghost but never quite reached that goal. I have, however, had some close encounters of the ghostly kind. These stories are true in the sense that the ghostly encounters happened to me or people I know.

The Ghost in the Library

The first was when I was very young–nine, ten, or 11. While my Dad was grocery shopping in the Havelock business district I went to check out the local library. It was an old, creaky-looking building–this was before the new branch was built.

I think my sister was with me, but I it was so long ago that can’t remember. When we got past the front door, there were some steps leading up to the library proper. We heard the clacking of a typewriter at the top of the stairs, but when we reached the top step, the sound stopped suddenly.

We peered around the corner, and no one was sitting at the desk. No one was in sight at all. That’s as far as we got with our explorations. We were out of there.

The Flasher

My next encounter was several years later, when I was in my late teens. It was Halloween night. After the trick-or-treaters had all gone home, I went for a walk. It was nearing the witching hour.

The streets were deserted. The light breeze swept dry leaves along the pavement, making scrabbling sounds like many tiny footsteps. In one intersection, was a pile of smashed Jack-o-lanterns, which I presumed some tricksters had collected from neighborhood doorsteps.

Then, as I was walking past a park, I saw a flash down among the trees. It was a big globe of blue light that expanded  and then disappeared. I decided to check it out, but it was moving, too.

I followed it for several blocks, and it always remained a couple of blocks ahead of me. Every time when I thought I had lost it and was about to turn  back, it would flash again, as if it had read my mind.

I never did catch the thing. It looked like the flash made by a flashbulb like the ones photographers used before they had electronic flash (in Alfred Hitchcock’s Rear Window, incapacitated photographer Jimmy Stewart uses flashbulbs to temporarily blind a murderous Raymond Burr).

The problem was, I was close enough and had followed the flash far enough and the terrain was well lit enough, that I should have been able to see a person operating the flash. But I saw nothing. Just a disembodied flash. And the only sounds I heard were the skeletal tree branches knocking together and the dry leaves scrabbling across the pavement like disembodied footsteps.

Murder on the Street Corner

Fast forward many years to when I was married. My wife, Cheryl, was into ghosts and horror as much as I. Her favorite author was Stephen King. We happened upon a copy of Alan Boye’s A Guide to the Ghosts of Lincoln and decided to visit some of the hot spots of paranormal activity.

One stop was a certain street corner on the south central side of town where it was said that a murder had been committed. The corner on which the poor wretch had died was supposed to be several degrees cooler than any of the other three corners of that intersection.

We stopped at the intersection and did an in-depth scientific experiment–we stood on each of the four corners to feel if the temperature dropped on any of them.

On the corner where the alleged murder took place, it was definitely cooler. We deduced that the drop in temperature may have been due to three of the corners being in direct sunlight, whereas the fourth, the one where we stood, had a shade tree.

Haunted University

Cheryl had a couple of ghostly encounters when she worked the late shift for the custodial department at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln.

The first was in the Temple Building, which housed the school of dramatic arts, where it was rumored that some workers had died during its construction. She was working on a lower floor one night when the building was supposed to be empty, and she heard sounds coming from one of the top floors. She followed the sounds up and up until she came upon a group of theater students who were rehearsing.

Her other encounter was in Love Library. She was a custodial leader then, and her team was spooked by sounds coming from the top floor late at night–things like high heels clicking down the tiled hall and doors opening and closing.

Cheryl heard these sounds, too, but when she went to investigate, no one was up there. No one that she could find, anyway. The top floor was deserted. Only empty desks and the book stacks. No sign of any recent human activity.

For additional reading check out Horror Stories for the Halloween Season and my very short horror story, “Unblinking Eyes”, which appeared last Halloween season in the online publication, Theme of Absence.

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