fiction – David Kubicek

October 21, 2023

Learning How to Write Fiction

by David Kubicek

This is the way I learned how to write fiction.

At first glance it appears to be a simple formula. There are only four steps, but each of those steps requires lots of time and effort. Today, when everyone and his or her brother is writing blogs or books about how to write fiction, it is easy for the novice to become confused–especially since some of these blogs and books offer conflicting and even bad advice.

It’s unlikely that I’ll ever write a how-to-write book on writing because I wouldn’t be able to ramble on for 80,000 words. Following these four principles is how I learned, and I believe it is the best way for the serious aspiring writer to learn the craft.

Step 1: Read

You must be an avid reader.

A comment I sometimes hear from would-be writers is: “I don’t have time to read.” This comment is most often made by people who want to be published but don’t want to go to the trouble of learning how to write.

If you do not read, or if you don’t enjoy reading, you cannot be a writer. Period. Full Stop. Sure, you can write things down, but the chances that you’ll write something that people who read regularly will want to read are practically nonexistent.

From a practical standpoint, you need to read so that you’ll know what has been done before and how it has been done; this will help you to avoid writing something that has been done before in the same way it has been done before. What makes a story original is not the plot (there are a limited number of plots), but that unique something that the individual writer brings to the story.

Also, you need to read so that you can see how other authors developed their stories, and so that you can develop a sense of how to tell a story. This is crucial.

Reading must not be a chore. You must actually enjoy reading so much that you would read even if you didn’t want to be a writer. Readers not only set aside time in their day to read, but they often carry a book (or e-reading device) with them to fill those dead spots during the day.

Finally, if you read only in one genre, you can become a capable writer. But if you read in a number of genres–as well as a decent helping of nonfiction on a variety of topics–you can become a good writer or even a great writer.

Step 2: Learn the Craft of Writing

This was a lot easier when I started than it is today. The internet is rife with bad writing advice. There was no internet when I started, and not that many books. I read everything I could find at the library. I subscribed to Writer’s Digest and ordered some of their books. I enrolled in a writing workshop at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL).

Keep it simple; learn the basics, learn how to tell a story. Taking a writing class or workshop is an excellent way to jumpstart your craft. Universities, junior colleges, established writing workshops, and classes led by established writers are the best way to go. If you come across an ad for a class that promises to teach you how to write bestselling fiction, don’t give them any of your money. They are being either deliberately misleading, or they don’t know any better–and you don’t want to be associated with either of those situations.

The truth is that you can’t write a bestseller because writing doesn’t make a book a bestseller; marketing makes a book a bestseller. A book can be the next great American novel, but if no one knows about it, it will just sit on the bookstore shelf gathering dust.

On the other hand, a book that is terribly written may become a bestseller if it finds an audience (I know several examples of these, but we won’t go into that here). There is an audience for everything imaginable, even the most horrendously written piece of dreck.

Many of the current crop of internet-based writing teachers will go into great detail about things like archetypal characters and how you must make sure to hit all of the important plot points at exactly the right locations in your story. That’s good advice–if you want to be an English teacher. If you want to be a good writer, learn by reading good writers. Just tell the story and let the English teachers and their students worry about the rest.

Step 3: Write

Write a lot. Write things that you plan to try to get published and things that you write for practice and have no intention of publishing.

When I started out writing short stories, an exercise I practiced–and one I highly recommend to aspiring writers–was to copy, with pen and paper, my favorite stories so I could get a sense of how a good story should flow.

You must copy the story in longhand, not type it, because it’s easier to space off when typing and just see words. Writing in longhand forces you to think about the words, forces you to think about the story and how it is developing. My hand cramped up from copying my favorite short stories just so I could learn how stories were put together.

Also, I wrote reams of stuff that I never intended for publication, just for practice.

Step 4: Seek Feedback

Ask people to read your stories and give you honest criticism. What did they like? What didn’t they like? Why did they like it or why didn’t they like it (if they know; sometimes people don’t like something without really knowing why)?

You need to impress upon them that you want their honest opinion so that you can improve; make sure they understand that you don’t want them to tell you what they think you want to hear. I got lucky. I was just beginning my writing journey about the time I entered college (as an English major, of course), so I was surrounded by professors and other students who were more than willing to give me honest feedback.

Later, after I was married, my wife Cheryl became my first reader. Her critique often began with four words that managed to be both a compliment and a criticism: “You can do better.” Then she would explain where I had dropped the ball and how I might fix it.

That is my writing advice, short and sweet. If I were to write a book on how to write, I would have to come up with 79,000 more words to bulk it up a bit.

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

October 4, 2023

The Last Bus: New Short Story Collection Published

by David Kubicek

I’ve just released a new collection of short stories–The Last Bus and Other Stories. These 26 stories span almost the length of my 50+-year writing career, from “The Park” in 1972 to “Spare Parts” and “An Evening Stroll” in 2021.

As in my first collection, The Moaning Rocks and Other Stories, The Last Bus is divided into sections for Science Fiction and Fantasy, Horror, and Literary/Mainstream. Also, as in my first collection, I’ve included commentary before and after each story giving some background about the story. Some of these stories have been previously published, but for most this is their first publication.

It’s always difficult to design a cover for a short story collection, especially when the collection contains stories ranging through several genres. The first reaction is to illustrate one of the stories. If it can be the title story, so much the better. I tried this, but the covers didn’t work. Since some of these stories contain ghosts and phantoms, I decided to go with a phantom face in the trees as sort of a general statement.

A few of the stories in this collection are:

Games Machines Play—A computer holds a college student hostage until he complies with a peculiar request.

An Evening Stroll—While walking in the fog one evening, a college professor inadvertently turns back the clock on his own life.

Spare Parts—On the eve of his wedding, something odd falls out of Mike Thayer’s ear, and he learns a shocking truth about himself.

Safety First—Not only is William Fawth’s car programmed to help him develop safe driving skills, but it has an attitude that grates on his nerves.

The Last Bus—Local businessman Wilson Brakhage offers tours of the wreckage of the worst tornado disaster in Nebraska’s history.

Blood—Are the cattle mutilations the work of a cougar, or is there a darker, supernatural force at work here?

Obsession—A visit to the doctor makes 29-year-old Chuck convinced that he’s growing old. Judi needs to snap him out of it before it destroys their marriage.

Keeper of the Shrine—A college student who works the night shift in a photofinishing plant learns a life lesson from a dead spider.

The Last Bus and Other Stories (ISBN: 9798861015325) is available as an eBook ($2.99) and a trade paperback ($12.95) from most online booksellers.

To read a story from the collection click here.

For information about my other books, check out my Books page.

May 21, 2023

12 Must-Read Science Fiction Short Stories

by David Kubicek

This is by no means a definitive list of the best science fiction short stories ever written, mainly because I haven’t read every science fiction story ever written, and I’m sure there are many, many of them that would be on this list, but I haven’t read them yet, so they’re not on this list. Also, I’m defining “short story” as anything that can be read in one sitting if one desires, so some of these “short” stories are pushing 15,000 to 20,000 words.

I’ve selected these stories because I first read them years ago, and they stuck with me. In my mind, staying power makes a story classic. Some of them I’ve read several times over the years, others just a couple of times or only once, but they all left an impression on me. The stories are not in any particular order, except for “The Cold Equations” and “Flowers for Algernon”, which are my favorite all-time science fiction shorts, in that order.

There are a couple of omissions that I should acknowledge. One is that there are no Robert A. Heinlein stories on my list. Heinlein was a decent storyteller, but a terrible writer, and it’s extremely unlikely that you’ll ever see him on one of my lists.

The other omission, which I regret, is that there are no women writers on this list. But that can’t be helped; it was the nature of the genre at the time I was beginning my SF journey. In those days there were few women writers in the genre, and of the ones who were writing, none of their stories that I read stood out for me. There is a time travel story, written by Barbara Bartholomew and published in Analog Science Fact/Science Fiction in the mid- or late 1970s, which I’d love to put on this list; however, I can’t remember its title, and I’ve been unable to find it through an online search. It’s a pity because I really liked that story.

Also, the links are for convenience to help you locate the stories. They are not affiliate links–I don’t get paid if you click on them. In fact, you don’t have to buy the books to read the stories as long as there is a library near you. I regret that used bookstores and libraries may be the only source of some of these stories because they appear to be out of print; however, I could not in good conscience exclude them for that reason. Fortunately, a few of these stories were collected in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I, which is available in print and digital.

1. The Cold Equations, by Tom Godwin: This is a difficult story to describe without giving away too much information. It is about the interaction of a teenage stowaway and the pilot of an Emergency Cargo Ship delivering medicine to a group of researchers. The ship has enough fuel to take one person to its destination, but not two. The story revolves around the pilot’s efforts to save the stowaway’s life–she stowed away to see her brother, who is one of the researchers–rather than order her into the airlock and ejecting her into space as regulations require. You can find this story in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I.

2. Flowers for Algernon, by Daniel Keyes: This novelette is about Charlie Gordon, a mentally retarded young man who becomes a genius after undergoing an experimental operation. The problem is that the improvement is only temporary. Keyes expanded this story into a novel, which goes into more detail, but the novelette is short and sweet. You can find this story in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I.

3. The Star, by Arthur C. Clarke: This is perhaps Clarke’s most famous story. It was pretty controversial when it was originally published in the mid-1950s. Many critics called it blasphemous. Rejected by all of the major SF magazines, “The Star” finally found a home at a new, low-paying magazine. But Clarke had the last laugh. “The Star” won the Hugo Award for Best Short Story in 1955.

4. It’s a Good Life, by Jerome Bixby: This story is about a young boy who holds a town hostage because he has the ability to do things with his mind–control the weather, make a rat eat itself, and do things to people who do or think things that he doesn’t like. It was chillingly adapted for the Twilight Zone in the early 1960’s. The novelette is just as chilling but offers a little more depth than the adaptation. Loss of depth is a common problem when stories are adapted to film. You can find this story in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I.

5. What’s it Like Out There?, by Edmond Hamilton: Hamilton is a vastly underrated writer, partly because he wrote lots of space opera novels during the pulp era to make enough money to keep the lights on, but he has written many imaginative and thought-provoking stories like this one. He wrote “What’s it Like Out There” in the early 1930s but couldn’t sell it because the editors thought it was too bleak. Twenty years later the revised story, although still bleak, finally made it into print. It contrasts the public’s romanticized idea about space travel with the harsh realty experienced by a crewman recently returned from Mars.

6. The Pedestrian, by Ray Bradbury: This short little gem is about the consequences of taking a walk in the evening in a future world where everyone stays home and watches TV, and going out at night is considered aberrant behavior. This story is included in Bradbury’s collection The Golden Apples of the Sun.

7. There Will Come Soft Rains, by Ray Bradbury: This story about a “smart house” that has continued serving its occupants long after the occupants, and the rest of the world, have perished in an atomic war can be found in Bradbury’s Mars story collection/novel The Martian Chronicles.

8. The Little Black Bag, by C.M. Kornbluth: This story concerns a 25th-Century medical bag that is accidentally sent back in time to the mid-20th Century. By the 25th-Century, morons make up the majority of the population, and the few remaining smart people are their keepers. So the medical instruments must be simple so the moron doctors can use them–you just set the dials to diagnose and treat an illness. When the bag is accidently sent back in time, it falls into the hands of disgraced Dr. Full, who has been a wino for the past 20 years, ever since he lost his license to practice. Dr. Full wants to use the bag to do good, but his partner has dollar signs in her eyes. This story was also dramatized by Rod Serling’s Night Gallery, substantially rewritten, but both the prose and the film versions are worth checking out. You can find this story in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I.

9. Microscopic God, by Theodore Sturgeon: A story about an eccentric inventor and recluse named Kidder–the owner and sole inhabitant on an island off the Atlantic coast–who creates a race of microscopic people who mirror human beings but have shorter lives and evolve faster than humans. This rapid evolution gives them the ability to invent technology much more quickly than full sized humans–this ability comes in handy when an evil banker attempts to use one of Kidder’s inventions (or, rather, the microscopic people’s invention) to conquer the world. I loved this story when I first read it in high school, and it has held up well over the years. You can find it in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I.

10. Allamagoosa, by Eric Frank Russell: This humorous story knocked me out of my chair the first time I read it. Apparently, it appealed to a lot of science fiction fans, who gave it a Hugo Award in 1955. It seems to be quite scarce now, but you may be able to find a copy of it in one of the early Hugo Award Winners books at the library or a used bookstore. It is also in the sadly out-of-print collection The Best of Eric Frank Russell. The story centers around what turns out to be a typo and the hilarity that ensues when the spaceship Captain, preparing his ship for an inspection by an Admiral, tries to cover up the fact that he has no idea what an Offog is. But the thing that really makes this story great is that it centers around the nuts and bolts and the bureaucracy of operating a spaceship, which one doesn’t often see in SF stories.

11. Dear Devil, by Eric Frank Russel: This novelette is about how a Martian poet named Fander, stranded on Earth long after an atomic war did unfortunate things to the planet, helps the Terran civilization start to rebuild itself. It can be found in the sadly out-of-print collections The Best of Eric Frank Russel and Creatures From Beyond, edited by Terry Carr. Put this on your list when searching for used books online or at your local used bookstore.

12. The Bicentennial Man, by Isaac Asimov: This story, about a robot’s quest to be legally declared a human being was made into a film starring Robin Williams. You can find it in The Bicentennial Man and Other Stories–unfortunately out of print—in a library or used bookstore or possibly in another collection of Asimov stories.

For information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

October 1, 2022

New Promotional Tool For Authors

by David Kubicek

There is a new free promotional tool for authors called Shepherd. This is how it works:

You recommend five books similar in theme to your book.
You write a short, personalized recommendation for each book.
Above your recommendation is printed a short bio and photo of the author (the photo is optional).
Also above your recommendations is a short description of the book you are promoting.
You supply the author photo and cover photo of your book; Shepherd will pull the cover photos of the books you recommend off Amazon.
Shepherd will link to your book on Amazon and Bookshop.

Here is the email I got from Ben at Shepherd when my page for In Human Form went live on September 26:

Last month we had 152,000+ visitors! A new record!
We launched a new recommendation system in August that will help even more readers find your list!
We will add genre and age pages toward the end of 2022. The new pages will allow readers to browse genres like historical fiction or children’s books. We will also add filters so readers can search for things like:
- Show me all books about World War 2 that are historical fiction.
- Show me all the science-fiction books about cyborgs published in the last two years.
- Show me all the children’s books about robots for kids age 8.

Check out my page: The Best Science Fiction About Outsiders and check out Shepherd to see if it is for you.

Learn more about David Kubicek’s books.

June 4, 2022February 23, 2023

Ten Must-Read Science Fiction Novels

by David Kubicek

It seems like everyone and his brother are doing “best” lists of novels, so I decided to get in on the act. Here is my list of ten must-read science fiction novels. I haven’t read every science fiction novel that has ever been written, but of the ones I have read, these are my favorites. Perhaps someday I’ll do my list of the next ten and later the ten after that until I, this blog, or time itself come to an end, whichever comes first.

All of these books are currently in print, and I have linked to Amazon out of convenience; however, I don’t get paid when you click through, so whether you find these books at another bookseller, a used bookstore, or a library, I don’t care. Just find them and read them.

Here are my picks for the top 10 in the approximate order I would rank them:

1) Rite of Passage (1968), by Alexei Panshin

Although there may be some wiggle room as to the order of these novels, Rite of Passage is definitely first. First published in 1968, Rite of Passage, is a coming-of-age story, but it is not a young adult novel. More than a century after Earth has been destroyed, humanity is scattered through the galaxy. Many people live on asteroid-sized ships, and many others are descended from colonists who were seeded on planets. Most ship people look down on the colonists and vice versa. Because space is limited on the ships, every person who turns 14 must be dropped on one of the planets in a ritual called Trial. If they can survive for a month, they are picked up and return to the ships as adults. The story follows Mia Havero from the age of 12 to 14 as she, along with others in her group, prepares for and then experiences Trial. This novel won the Science Fiction Writers of America Nebula award and nearly won the Hugo award (it lost by a few votes to John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar). This was also Alexei Panshin’s first novel, expanded from a novelette called “Down to the Worlds of Men” which was published in a science fiction magazine in 1963 and later adapted (and expanded) to become part three of the novel. It is first on my list because of the depth of its characterizations and its message–what my science fiction teacher in college called the “deeper, inner, secret meaning”. The first time I read the novel, it hooked me in the first page and a half; that had never happened with another novel before, and it hasn’t happened since.

2) The Martian Chronicles (1950), by Ray Bradbury

This is the story of Earth’s colonization of Mars, how the Earth people destroyed the existing Martian civilization, and how the Earth settlements quickly fell into decay after they were abandoned. It is an allegory for atrocities we have committed on one another on Earth. The Martian Chronicles is a collection of Bradbury’s Mars stories arranged in a way, and with specially written bridge passages, to give the collection its larger, more cohesive theme.

3) Fahrenheit 451 (1953), by Ray Bradbury

This book is often simplistically called a story about the horrors of burning books, destroying knowledge, etc. But it is more than that. Bradbury abhorred book burning so he used it as a structure to tell a story about the desensitization of society.

4) Kindred (1976), by Octavia E. Butler

A young black woman of the 1970s finds herself transported to a slave-owning Maryland farm in the early Nineteenth Century. She is “called” by her distant white ancestor whenever he is in trouble, starting when he is five years old. Although she is gone from the present for only a short time, her stays in the past stretch into months.

5) The Time Machine (1895), by H.G. Wells

I’m a fan of time travel stories, especially time travel stories to the distant future. H.G. Wells’ story about a future where humanity has devolved into two distinct species–the vicious Morlocks who feed off the gentle Eloi–is at the top of the list.

6) The Handmaid’s Tale(1985), by Margaret Atwood

Most dystopian stories are set in the distant future after the society has been screwed up. The Handmaid’s Tale captures the screwing. It is a near-future story that shows the society transition from a democratic to a totalitarian state seemingly overnight, and we see how June’s life and identity are stripped away by the new order. In the new order she is no longer June. She is Offred because she belongs to Fred, one of the new society’s head honchos. This story is very significant now because our society is going through the same changes, although not quite as quickly and decisively.

7) 1984 (1949), by George Orwell

People didn’t listen to Ray Bradbury. They didn’t listen to Rod Serling. They didn’t listen to Margaret Atwood. And they didn’t listen to George Orwell. 1984 is Orwell’s portrait of a fascist society (based on Stalin’s Russia) that disturbingly bears some resemblance to where our own society is headed. Winston, Orwell’s main character, works for the Ministry of Truth, which makes sure history is consistent by going back into all of the news stories and videos and making sure they support what the current version of the truth is. For instance, Winston knows he’s in for a long weekend when Big Brother declares that the society is not waging war against one enemy (which they had been at war with for years) but is actually at war with a different enemy and has been for years. Winston and his coworkers will have to work overtime to make sure previously printed or aired news coverage doesn’t contradict this “truth”. Does anyone remember alternative facts?

8) Flowers for Algernon (1966), by Daniel Keyes

Flowers for Algernon was a novelette first published in a science fiction magazine in 1958 and anthologized in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Vol. I. Keyes later expanded it into a novel, which was made into a film, which won Cliff Robertson a best actor academy award. It follows Charlie Gordon, a young man with an I.Q. of 70 at the beginning of the story, who, after undergoing an experimental operation, becomes a genius.

9) The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003), by Audrey Niffenegger

This is a short respite from some of the terrible things that happen in other novels on this list. It is a love story between Clare Abshire and Henry DeTamble who has a genetic disorder that causes him to take sudden, uncontrolled journeys in time. One serious drawback is that he can’t take anything with him, so his first order of business on arriving in a new time period is to find clothes.

10) Parable of the Sower (1993), by Octavia E. Butler

This may not technically a post-apocalyptic novel, but things are pretty bad. Set 31 years in the author’s future (the story starts in 2024), Butler did a pretty good job of predicting where current trends in American society would lead, but the timeline is a little short–in 50 to 75 years, if we don’t get our act together, I can see our society reaching this state of decadence. There is something about Butler’s stories that makes for easy reading. I don’t know if it’s her style, the way she told a story, or her characters–it’s probably all three. I would say that it’s a pleasure to read her stories, but “pleasure” seems to be the wrong word here because she wrote (at least in the two books on this list) about some seriously awful things that people do to people.

For information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

December 21, 2021December 22, 2021

Two New Nebraska Writers Guild Anthologies

by David Kubicek

Stories from the Heartland, the fifth volume of the Nebraska Writers Guild’s (NWG) annual Voices from the Plains series, was released the first week in December. The anthology contains short stories, poetry, flash fiction, nonfiction, novel excerpts, and memoirs written by NWG members.

My story “A Place of Their Own” is included in the short story section. I wrote this story for a writing workshop at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) in the summer of 1976. The story is set in my first apartment. I polished the prose because I am, I hope, a much better writer now than I was 45 years ago. I also updated it, giving my characters cell phones and increasing the rent slightly. For instance, in the story Chris and Jennifer pay $100 a month for the apartment; when I lived there, I paid $67.40. Why it was $67.40 is something known only to my landlord and God. Why not $65 or $70, or even $67 or $68. What was the 40 cents for?

The Kindle eBook of Stories from the Heartland is $3.99 and the paperback is $18.99. It can be purchased from Amazon and Barnes & Noble and may be available from other online dealers.

About a week after Stories from the Heartland came out, the NWG released Flashes on the Plains, the organization’s first flash fiction anthology. For this collection, flash fiction–what we called short short stories in the olden days–are stories of 1,000 words or fewer. There are 18 stories in this book, which makes it no more than 18,000 words of fiction, which makes it a slim volume–67 print pages counting Margaret Lukas’s introduction but not counting the index of stories and authors.

I have two stories–“An Evening Stroll” and “Spare Parts”–in this anthology, and I wrote both of them in the spring of 2021. I called on my subconscious to write “An Evening Stroll”; by thinking about it intensely before I went to sleep at night, my subconscious turned it over while I slept, and when I woke up I had the story. Your subconscious can be a great tool if you put it to work.

The eBook of Flashes from the Plains is $1.99 and the paperback is $8.99, and it can be purchased from Amazon .

The NWG is one of the oldest continuous writers organizations in the United States. It was founded in 1925 and counts Mari Sandoz, Bess Streeter Aldrich, John G. Neihardt, and Willa Cather among its first members.

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

October 30, 2021December 19, 2021

When Martians Invaded Earth

by David Kubicek

I was in elementary school when I first read about how the Orson Welles radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds scared the bejesus out of everyone. Or at least that’s what my young mind got from it–Welles did this radio show about Martians invading Earth, and everyone thought it was real, and widespread panic ensued. I learned many years later that, like with most legends, the size of the panic has been greatly exaggerated over time.

This Saturday, October 30, 2021, marks the 83rd anniversary of that Mercury Theatre on the Air broadcast . The show began with an announcer breaking into a music program with a series of news bulletins about astronomers seeing flashes on the planet Mars, objects landing at Grovers Mill, New Jersey, and Martians emerging from said objects to zap people with death rays. The theory goes that listeners who tuned in late did not hear the announcement at the start of the program that it was fiction, so they believed the “news bulletins” were real.

There was even a 1975 TV Movie, The Night That Panicked America, about the making of the show and the panic that ensued. I’ve seen estimates that one million or more people were panic-stricken, but this seems unlikely since the listening audience wasn’t that big to begin with, and those who listened from the beginning of the program knew it was fiction. On that fateful Sunday evening the C.E. Hooper ratings service survey of 5,000 households found that only 2% were tuned in to Welles’ program, which was competing with the extremely popular ventriloquist Edgar Bergan and and his main wooden man, Charlie McCarthy.

The reason the producers decided to go with the news bulletin format was that the writer, Howard Koch, came to them in distress because he couldn’t make an adaptation of H.G. Wells’ book interesting. So they used news bulletins. They also updated the story from 1897 to 1938, moved it from England to New Jersey, and used real names and slightly modified names of places to give it more of a real and immediate feel.

The show apparently caused a bit of a ruckus, mainly in New York and New Jersey. Shortly after the show began at 8 p.m., CBS’s switchboard lit up like a Christmas tree with viewers asking if it was real. Reporters from various news outlets invaded the network’s office because they smelled a good story, and good stories sell papers.

Orson Welles worried that, at the ripe old age of 23, his career was over. He went on the air the following day, Halloween, to apologize for the broadcast and asked the viewers to think of it as a Halloween prank. But, arguably, the debacle may have given his career a boost. He was summoned to Hollywood where he made Citizen Kane.

I asked my mother or grandmother (it’s been so long that I don’t remember which) if she listened to the program. She said that they’d heard about it, and no, Grampa didn’t grab his shotgun and an extra box of shells and usher the family into the storm cellar.

If you want to hear the original Mercury Theatre on the Air production, I have linked to it above, but unless you are a true Martian invasion history buff, you might be disappointed. Because it is dull!

Or Maybe, having been a science fiction reader and writer for most of my life, I’m just jaded.

For information about David Kubicek’s books click here.

August 17, 2021December 19, 2021

Editing Fiction is Subjective: The October Dreams Controversy

by David Kubicek

Editing fiction is subjective. The best stories don’t always make the most money while some seriously awful stories make millions.

An irritating misconception in our society is the notion that the size of one’s paycheck is in direct proportion to the quality and importance of one’s work. Unfortunately, this misconception is often applied to writers, even by other writers and editors, who should know that one editor’s gem is another editor’s piece of crap. Don’t believe me? Check out some rejections of famous writers here.

Many years ago Jeff Mason and I edited a collection of horror stories, October Dreams: A Harvest of Horror (Kubicek & Associates, 1989), because we weren’t happy with the quality of stories being published in the current crop of original horror anthologies. We thought we could do better, and judging from our book’s reception, I think we succeeded, or at least we collected a group of horror stories as good as anything on the market.

After OD was highly recommended by Booklist, major distributor Baker & Taylor ordered it by the carton, making it a best seller for our tiny company. One of the stories–“Mr. Sandman”, by Scott D. Yost–was selected for inclusion in Karl Edward Wagner’s The Year’s Best Horror Stories XVIIL Someone even tried to nominate OD for a Horror Writers of America award, which is where the trouble started.

We were informed that October Dreams was not eligible for an award because the writers were required to have been paid three cents per word or more to be considered “professional.” We’d had the audacity to pay our contributors one cent per word–which actually was per 1,000 copies printed, so with each printing our contributors would be paid again.

This set off a minor controversy. On one side were those of us who argued that work shouldn’t be judged by how much a writer is paid (writers are often undervalued anyway) but by how good the writing is. The other side argued–and these were mostly writers who met the three cents or more threshold–that writers had worked long and hard to be paid three cents a word or more and–God forbid–shouldn’t have to compete with writers who are paid less even if the story is better [my italics].

Professionalism does not have to do with how much writers get paid for their stories, nor does it have to do with how popular a writer is. I know of one writer–who I will not name–who had a huge payday, on the order of $1,000 per word for two words, the words making up his famous name. The story attached to that name was utter garbage and would have been rejected immediately if it had been written by an unknown writer.

Professionalism has to do with having cultivated the skill to tell a good story. It has to do with having learned the writing craft to tell it well. It has to do with having learned how to approach agents and editors when marketing your story. It has to do with how you handle rejection. And, above all, it means doing your best work even when you reach the level of fame where editors will pay you only for your name because your name will sell magazines.

Few writers are able to make a living writing fiction, and many highly-respected literary magazines pay only in copies, and many excellent stories are rejected by many editors before they find a home. Editing is a subjective process and has more to do with how well an editor likes a story than on how well it is written or how much the writer is paid for it. A famous name on a story doesn’t necessarily guarantee its quality; how well the story is written does.

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

December 13, 2020December 19, 2021

Voices From the Plains, Vol. IV, Released

by David Kubicek

The Fourth Volume of the Nebraska Writers Guild’s annual anthology was released in early December, 2020. The list price for the eBook is $3.99, the list price for the paperback is $16.99, and both versions are now available from Amazon

Voices From the Plains, Volume IV, features 42 authors and 75 creative works, broken down into the categories of poetry, essays, short stories, nonfiction, excerpts from novels, memoirs, and flash fiction. My story “It Gets Lonely on the Third Floor” is included in the short story section.

Voices From the Plains, Vol. IV, is dedicated to the memory of Cort Fernald, who passed away in 2020. Cort was a driving force behind the Voices from the Plains series.

One of the oldest continuous writers organizations in the United States, the Nebraska Writers Guild was founded in 1925 and counts Mari Sandoz, Bess Streeter Aldrich, John G. Neihardt, and Willa Cather among its first members.

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

December 22, 2019December 19, 2021

Voices From the Plains, Vol. III

by David Kubicek

Voices From The Plains, Volume 3, the Nebraska Writers Guild’s annual anthology of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry–an annual publication from the Nebraska Writers Guild–was released earlier this month. The list price for the ebook is $3.99, the list price for the paperback is $16.99, and both versions are now available from Amazon. Voices from the Plains, Volume III, features 48 authors–one of them with work under his/her real name and under a pen name.

There are:

Thirty-four poems
Three essays
Twenty-two short stories [including my own Twilight Zone-esque story, “The Last Bus”]
One nonfiction book excerpt
Five novel excerpts

All but two of the authors currently live in Nebraska.

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