David Kubicek’s Blog

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Voices From the Plains, Vol. IV, Released

Voices From the Plains IVby 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.

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How to Recognize Scams

by David Kubicek

I have written many articles on fraud and cybersecurity for the Midlands Business Journal over past 20 years. In researching these stories I picked the brains of lots of fraud prevention experts. Here’s a rundown of how you can recognize scams.

Scammers are like cockroaches–when you see one on the kitchen floor, you can be sure that there’s a nest of them in the wall. Scammers will take advantage of any situation to trick people into sending them money. When COVID-19 first hit,  scammers began hawking phony cures.

The Credit Card Scam

Years ago, a source told me about his client who started seeing suspicious charges on her credit card bill after she returned from a Florida vacation. Upon investigating, she learned that a waiter had taken her card to pay for her meal and had brought back a card that looked like hers, while he kept her card for his own use. Ever since then, whenever my card leaves my sight, I look at it when the server returns it–I check that it’s my bank, that my name is on it, and that my signature is on the back.

Email Swindles

Beware of phishing emails. I get at least one and sometimes several of them each day. They bear logos of legitimate companies like PayPal, Netflix, and Amazon. Usually they will say something like “Your account has been inactivated until you update your information,” and then they will generously provide a link for you to click on where they will either ask you to input credit card information, or just the act of clicking the link will allow them to access your computer.

Usually, these are easy to spot. One time, while checking my email with my phone, I found a notice from Netflix that they had deactivated my account because their attempt to collect my payment had failed. Setting aside the fact that I make Netflix payments by auto withdrawal and it was the wrong time of month for them to be taking money, I was standing in front of my TV at the time so I turned it on and accessed my supposedly deactivated account.

Recognizing Email Scams

An easy way to identify a phishing email is to hover your cursor over it, and the address from whence it came will be displayed. If an email that purports to be from PayPal, for instance, was sent from a long address made up of random characters, numbers, and symbols, it is most likely phony. Occasionally, the legit company’s name may appear somewhere in that mess, but not always. An actual message from PayPal (or most legitimate companies) would be very simple, and would end in something like @PayPal.com.

If you have a few extra minutes , you may want to go to your account in question, just to make sure that everything is hunky-dory, but DO NOT CLICK ON THE LINK THEY SEND YOU. Access your account the way you normally do, such as typing it into the browser bar.

The “You’ve Been Charged” Scam

Another popular phishing email tells potential marks that a certain amount of money will be charged to their bank account within 48 hours, and if they want to cancel it, here’s a link. Various emails have informed me that anywhere from $30 to over $6,000 was set to be withdrawn from my credit card or bank account (they usually aren’t too specific about which financial account). I delete them all, and I have yet to be charged a penny.

These are usually fairly easy to spot. If you haven’t set up an account with the company, haven’t ordered anything from them, and don’t have your credit card listed with them, they are phony. The problem is when scammers pretend  to be from a legitimate company, such as Best Buy’s Geek Squad, and their victim is actually doing business with that firm and thinks the communication is legitimate.

Keep a Firm Grasp of Your Financial Information

If you keep a good watch over your personal financial information, scammers should not be able to get ahold of it. Banks also are good about detecting fraud. They have software that look for patterns, and if it notes things that don’t fit a customer’s pattern–such as an exceedingly large expense, or charges in a geographical area where the customer usually doesn’t spend money–the bank will check with the customer before releasing the funds (I actually wrote an MBJ story about how banks detect fraud).

Once I went to North Carolina without telling my bank, and when I tried to use my debit card in that state, it was declined.  When I called my bank they said that North Carolina was flagged as an area of high fraudulent activity, so they locked my card. Once I properly identified myself to the bank and told them I was traveling in North Carolina, they unlocked my card.

Also, be careful about displaying your credit card number and ATM pin in public. I block the keyboard with my body when entering my pin, and in restaurants where the server is the cashier, I put my card under the receipt with just the end showing and receipt covering the number so no roving scammer can snap a picture of it.

A Warrant for Your Arrest

I occasionally get a call informing me that the IRS has issued a warrant for my arrest, but if I pay them a certain amount of money, they will make it go away. There are many things wrong with this scenario:

  1. If a warrant is issued for your arrest, they don’t call and warn you so you can run–the first you’ll hear about it is when the police come pounding on your door.
  2. If they were inclined to announce it, it would be via a letter or a process server (although that’s usually if you’re summoned to court; an arrest warrant would be served by the cops pounding on your door). And they certainly wouldn’t inform you by robocall!
  3. If an arrest warrant has been issued, it’s probably too late to pay a fee and get out of it. You would be in the system, which would mean arrest, arraignment, and bail.

Anyway, I’ve been receiving these calls–and ignoring them–for over a year, and the cops have yet to break down my door and drag me to jail.

Ransom Demands

One of my sources told me about a company whose system got infected by a virus, which shut down their whole network. The scammer demanded that they pay him $250,000 and he would “unfreeze” their computers. They contacted the FBI, which recommended that the company pay the blackmailer. They knew about him but had been unable to track him down; however, they considered him to be a “good” criminal, meaning that he would probably release their system if they paid him.

For that same article, I talked to a lawyer who specialized in fraud. He said that this is common–occasionally, law enforcement catches a hacker, but not very often.

I’ve had my own brush with ransomware. One email declared that the hacker had access to my computer. In fact, he was watching me RIGHT NOW (he must have been a sorcerer since I was using a desktop computer without a camera or microphone). He even provided me with one of my passwords as proof (an old password that I don’t use anymore). He demanded that I pay him $800 in bitcoin or he would spread my information all over the web. Well, I didn’t pay him, and I’ve been out to the web, and my information isn’t all over it, so I assume he was fibbing.

This is by no means an exhaustive list of scammer tricks, and every day scammers are inventing new ways to separate you from your hard-earned money. Just remember that scammers are out there, and they will target you, but if you are diligent about keeping your private information private, have a good firewall protecting your computer, are careful about who you allow to access your computer, and above all have–as Hemingway put it–your personal, well-maintained sh*t detector turned on, you should be able to avoid difficulties with grifters.

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

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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.

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COVID: When the Immune System Goes Haywire

by David Kubicek

If you become infected with COVID-19, you could die. That is the ultimate price you would pay; however, most people who are infected survive. But many COVID survivors end up with permanent health problems, such as organ damage that could plague them for the rest of their lives.

As I write this, there are 5,016,537 confirmed novel coronavirus (COVID-19) infections in the United States, 162,830 deaths, and 2,471,229 people have recovered from the disease. But providing these statistics is like taking a photo of a bird in flight–the picture freezes the bird in time, but after you snap its picture it has moved on. These statistics are growing and will be significantly higher within a week.

The reason I’m revisiting this subject more than three months after my first post is that since  then this nation has been hit with the stick of stupidity so many times that it has raised a huge purple welt. The serious drubbing with the stick of stupidity has raised the level of foolishness to an unprecedented height, which has prevented us from grappling effectively with COVID-19 and returning to a semblance of normality like other countries that  are cautiously beginning to reopen. Instead, the U.S.A. is forcing a reopening without even addressing the problem.

Health Crisis

Some folks predict a second wave of infections, but I don’t agree with them. We can’t have a second wave because the first wave hasn’t run its course yet–the infections, and deaths, just keep climbing.

The foolishness, of which I spoke earlier, is to politicize this pandemic. COVID-19 is a public health crisis, not a political football. “Being told to wear a mask violates my Constitutional rights!” may not be the most stupid words ever uttered, but they certainly rank in the top 10. If hell exists, Satan is preparing a special chamber for those who make COVID-19 about politics.

Survivors

The rapidly rising number of COVID-19 deaths is tragic, but I don’t believe enough media attention is paid to those who survive. Although some survivors will experience milder symptoms and easier recovery (although “easier” is a relative term), many others will have health problems for the rest of their lives, which may be shortened considerably by their encounter with this insidious disease. This is because the coronavirus triggers a cytokine storm, or in layman’s terms, it causes the body’s immune system to have a spaz attack.

I won’t get technical here because plenty of information about precisely what happens during a cytokine storm can be found online. But basically, the immune system senses an invader in the body and overreacts, sending a battalion of defenders to do a platoon’s job. In its panic, the battalion attacks not only the invading virus but also the body’s cells, producing a “storm” of tiny blood clots that swarm through the body damaging whatever organs it finds in its path.

Popular Targets of COVID

The most popular organs are the lungs, the heart, the kidneys, and the brain. Although these are the coronavirus’ favorite targets, they aren’t the only ones that can be affected, and the damage usually will be permanent. This can cause a range of problems, including breathing trouble, heart attacks, strokes, kidney failure, and decreased cognitive function,  A cytokine storm doesn’t happen to everyone who is affected, but there’s no way to predict who will experience it, so taking chances of getting COVID-19 is like playing Russian roulette.

Safety

Remember, you can be infected with COVID-19 for up to 14 days before you show any symptoms, but during those two weeks you are contagious. If you infect 10 people, and each of those people infects 10 others, and each of those infects 10… You see how this spreads? You can infect tens of thousands of people before you even know you are sick.

I don’t wear a mask because my community requires that masks be worn in public places (at this time, Lincoln has such a mandate, but Nebraska’s governor has vowed to fight it). I wear a mask and social distance to protect myself and other people.

Wearing a mask doesn’t guarantee that you won’t be infected, but it greatly improves your odds of not catching this hideous disease, especially if everyone is wearing a mask (if you interact with an infected person who isn’t wearing a mask, even if you are wearing one yourself, you are at greater risk of infection). Combined with social distancing (at least six feet), frequent hand washing and disinfecting of surfaces, mask-wearing provides you with the best chance of staying safe and not infecting others.

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

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American History Trivia: The Other First President

by David Kubicek

When I was in my mid-teens, I teamed up with my sister in a local radio station’s American history trivia contest to win a $40-assortent of fireworks for two years in a row. We also learned the identity of America’s other first president.

A local radio station ran a contest where the announcer would ask a trivia question about early American history, and the caller who had the right answer won an assortment of fireworks valued at $40–and in those days, $40 could buy a lot more fireworks than it can today.

Today, radio stations announce that the fifth caller, or the ninth caller, etc. will be given the opportunity to answer the question. But in those days, before radio stations got wise, they took the first caller.

I was probably 15 or 16, which would have made Maxine 10 or 11. When the radio personality announced that a question was coming up, I headed for the phone (there were no wireless phones in those days, either), and when the DJ started to ask his question, I dialed all but the final digit, having faith that we could pull the answer out of thin air.

The question was asked, and I dialed the final digit. I don’t remember how they phrased the question, but it was something like: “How did the settlers and the Indians [this was before “Native American” came into practice] refer to making peace?”

Both of our minds were blank. On the other end, the phone was ringing. So, under pressure, Maxine grabbed at the first thing she thought of: “Bury the hatchet!” That proved to be correct, and we collected our assortment of fireworks.

The following year, the question was: “Who was the first president born in the United States?” We were about to give the stock answer that every third grader knows: George Washington. But before I dialed the last digit, we pressed pause on that answer.

Washington was the first president, but he had been born in 1732 when the colonies were under British rule. The question was: “Who was the first president born in the United States.” In other words, who was the first president born after the colonies declared their independence in 1776.

Back in this primitive time not only did we not we have wireless phones, but we didn’t have Google. We did, however, have a crude predecessor of Google. It was called the World Almanac. 

Maxine looked up a list of presidents while I waited by the phone. I had hung up and would have to redial–another annoying thing about that era was that if you didn’t complete the number you were dialing in a certain amount of time, the system broke the connection, and it was dial tone city.

We were hoping that everyone who was calling in had not listened closely to the question, and they were triumphantly exclaiming “George Washington!” when the station answered. That evidently was what happened, because when I finally redialed–after what seemed an excruciatingly long time–no one had won the fireworks, so I gave what Maxine and I hoped was the right answer: Martin Van Buren, who was the eighth president but  the first to be born (in 1782) after the colonies had declared their independence.

That answer proved to be the one they were looking for, and we collected our second assortment of fireworks in as many years.

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

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Battling the COVID-19 Pandemic

by David Kubicek

What is the new coronavirus, and how can we survive it? Here’s what we know so far about COVID-19 and battling the COVID pandemic.

I can remember a time, not long ago, when if you walked into a store wearing a mask, the clerk would immediately press the silent alarm to summon the police.

Those days are gone. Even in the relatively quiet–so far–coronavirus (COVID-19) town of Lincoln, Nebraska, it is common to see people with masks and gloves pushing their carts around grocery stores or picking up their take-out orders at restaurants.

But the relative inactivity of COVID-19 in Lincoln may be ending. A spokesman for Bryan Health said last week that the city is beginning to see a surge of COVID-19 cases. And 90 miles west of Lincoln, Grand Island is one of the hottest spots in the nation for COVID-19 because the meat processing plant there is a fertile breeding ground for this nasty little bugger.

And it  is a nasty little bugger. I’ve been following this crisis for two months, and here is a summary of what I know.

What is COVID-19?

  • Although coronaviruses are not new, and there are many of them, the 19 in COVID-19 does not stand for the 19th coronavirus as an idiot radio personality (Rush Limbaugh) told his audience. COVID stands for coronavirus disease, and 19 stands for the year it was discovered–2019.
  • COVID-19 is much worse than the seasonal flu.
  • COVID-19 is a tricky bastard. Many people who are infected have only mild symptoms or none at all. Others are hit hard. The folks who are hit hardest usually are over the age of 60 or have other underlying health conditions like diabetes or high blood pressure–but other seemingly healthy people, young and old, have succumbed to this wretched creature. Also, the disease may at first be mild, then the patient takes a sudden turn for the worse. Or a patient who was in critical condition seems to be recovering, then suddenly the patient is struggling for his/her life. The disease makes the immune system of some patients go into hyper drive–in other words, cause the immune system to have a spaz attack–which can damage their lungs.
  • This thing can gestate in your body for up to 14 days and is very contagious–you can infect others even if you don’t have any symptoms yourself.

How do we protect ourselves?

  • Wear face masks and disposable gloves in stores. It’s unlikely that you’ll be infected if you touch something an infected person touched–unless they coughed or sneezed in their hands and then touched it. But it’s better to be safe when touching something where, as my mother used to say, you don’t know where it’s been.
  • Stay six feet away from other people. The reason for this distancing guideline is that water droplets from a sneeze or cough travel three to six feet before gravity pulls them to the ground.
  • Wash your hands often–for 20 seconds (if you’re bored with  the standard count of one Mississippi, two Mississippi…, try reciting, with feeling, the Star Trek opening: “Space, the final frontier, these are the voyages…” etc.)–and use hand sanitizer when a source of running water isn’t available.

What are the symptoms?

  • Fever
  • Cough
  • Sore throat
  • Shortness of breath or difficulty breathing
  • Fatigue
  • Chills
  • Shaking with chills
  • Muscle Pain
  • Headache
  • Loss of taste or smell

Not everyone who is infected will have all of these symptoms, but if you have any two of them, call your doctor for a consult. Go to the emergency room only if your doctor tells you to or if your symptoms are critical–like if you have difficulty breathing or have pressure or pain in your chest–to avoid overwhelming hospitals with non-critical cases.

The Good News and the Bad

  • Good News: Lots and lots of companies and organizations are working on a cure and/or vaccine. You can find more detailed reporting on the search for a vaccine here.
  • Bad News: It may be a year and a half before a vaccine is available and FDA-approved. Even after the drug is developed, manufacturers must ramp up their capabilities to produce sufficient quantities to vaccinate everyone–billions of doses.
  • Bad News: There is no federal plan for getting us through this crisis; the feds are leaving it up to the states.  From the beginning there has been a shortage of personal protective equipment (PPE) for medical personnel, a shortage of COVID-19 test kits, and a shortage of ventilators for patients who need help breathing. The federal government has the authority to solve shortage and distribution problems but so far has chosen not to. The problem with an “every state for itself” approach is that some governors and mayors are doing a good job, while others are not, and states must compete with one another for supplies–a federal plan would make the supply chain run more efficiently.

How Will We Be Changed?

We will eventually come through this thing and out the other side, but the question is, what permanent changes will it leave on our way of life? Here are some of my thoughts:

  • First, some things won’t change. When it is safe, we’ll begin congregating in groups again. We’ll go back to the bars, movie theaters, restaurants, sporting events, concerts and other places where people gather.
  • Some people like the rush of going shopping, so they will return to the stores, but others may have grown used to online shopping. We were already moving toward more shopping online before the pandemic hit, but COVID-19 is introducing it to others who used to depend mostly on brick-and-mortar stores for their supplies. I don’t think there is anything that you can’t buy online–at least I’ve never run across anything yet–and in many cases it’s much easier.
  • Many people will find, in preparing for self-isolation, that they can order almost anything from local stores, which they can pick up at the curb or have delivered. I think many folks will continue this because it saves time. After all, the neighborhood grocery store morphed into the superstore because people wanted to do all of their shopping in one place rather than hitting several specialty stores; moving to more of an online model is just another instance of morphing for convenience.
  • More people in many different industries will find that they can work from home just as easily as from an office. We’ve already been moving toward this model for several years, but the pandemic has forced other businesses to try it. My hunch is that they’ll find it works well. In the age of technology,  video conferencing, email, texting, and the cloud make it possible for many industries to work remotely.

That’s all I have to say for now. This is a summary of what I know about COVID-19, which I learned from listening to doctors and scientists. Right now, the federal government and some states are making a big push to re-open the economy. All the experts agree (the doctors and scientists I just mentioned) that returning to normal too quickly would be a mistake and probably would result in a second wave of infections this fall, most likely one that is worse than what we have now.

The bottom line is that COVID-19 will be a serious threat until 1) we have a cure/vaccine, or 2) most people have been infected, which would significantly reduce the number of new hosts for the disease to jump into because, so far at least, the consensus seems to be that you can’t be re-infected once you have had it. For now at least the scientists are going for number one, and the federal government apparently is going for number two.

The problem with number two is, as more and more people become infected, we will have to seriously increase our supply of body bags.

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

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Be a Reader First, Then a Writer

What will the future of reading look like?

Self-described writers who don’t have time to read are just fooling themselves. You must first be a Reader before you can be a writer.

First, we need to understand the difference between a Reader and One Who Reads

I saw a statistic years ago that the average person reads one book per year (and the number of readers is still shrinking). These folks don’t make time to read every day. They read when they have time, usually a book that caught their interest, but they aren’t driven to read–they can take it or leave it, and in some cases it may take them a year to get through one book.

Readers, with a capital R, are on a mission. They make time to read every day. They always have books in their queue, so when they finish one, another is ready to go. You see them reading while they sit in waiting rooms, while they sit in their cars waiting to pick up their kids from school, and while they wait in lines at stores.

Readers know they will never be able to read all of the good books that have been published, and they know that many more good books are being published every year–and this idea frustrates them if they dwell on it.

Readers read. Period. If they didn’t have books, they would read condiment labels (like Burgess Meredith’s character in the Twilight Zone episode, “Time Enough At Last”).

I’ve also encountered people who describe themselves as writers but claim that they don’t have time to read. The bottom line is: in order to write something that anyone will want to read, you must first be a Reader, capital R.

Writing teachers may point the way, but reading will propel your journey. It will teach you the basic themes, it will teach you how to use the language to create emotion, it will teach you how to use technique, and it will teach you how to cut and revise–to write uncluttered prose and, as Elmore Leonard put it, “to leave out the parts that people skip.”

There are only 36 dramatic situations, and everything that has ever been written fits into one (or more) of them–if you’re not widely read, you most likely will write stories that have been told before in the same way that they have been written before. Writing is more than just telling a story. It is putting a new spin on an old idea–all writers do it. Self-described writers who don’t read can’t put new spins on old ideas because they don’t know what the old ideas are.

But there is one kind of writing nonreaders can do. They can have a fair amount of success writing labels for condiment bottles.

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

 

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The Most Important Writing Lesson I Learned

by David Kubicek

This is the most important writing lesson I learned: Don’t be afraid to stop for a moment to examine things in your story, whether they are physical wounds or the characters’ actions and emotions.

I learned this in a summer fiction workshop at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln more years ago than I care to count. I had turned in a story called “Clinical Evaluation” [pause for shameless self-promotion–it’s in my collection The Moaning Rocks and Other Stories]. A petty crook is shot during a liquor store robbery gone wrong, and his body is taken to the morgue where Willy, an inebriated custodian cleaning the morgue during the graveyard shift, imagines that this guy isn’t dead but only paralyzed and is trying to alert someone before the pathologist starts cutting on him in the morning.

The manuscript I turned in described the victim’s wound as a “gunshot wound to the head,” and that’s all. My teacher, Charlie Stubblefield, said he wanted to see a more detailed description of that wound. He wanted me to really get into that wound. So I did that in the revision.

“Clinical Evaluation” was the first story I sold, to an anthology of fiction, poetry, and artwork called The New Surrealists. But the lesson I had learned was not only about being specific with my descriptions. The lesson is: Don’t gloss over things, whether they are one-paragraph descriptions or entire scenes, if they are relevant to the story.

 I follow Elmore Leonard’s rule—“I try to leave out the parts that readers skip”–so I sometimes find myself wanting to skim over something or cut it out entirely because I think it will slow down the story. But one thing you must keep in mind is that it will take you much longer to write a scene than it will take your reader to read it. So even if a scene seems to be moving slowly for you, your audience may zip through it quickly and enjoy reading it as much as you enjoyed writing it.

Just remember that each scene must have a reason for its existence. You are giving the readers information they need, or you’re moving the story forward characterwise or plotwise. This doesn’t mean that every scene that has a reason for being should be in the story. That’s something for you to judge in the second draft and for your beta readers to judge before you unleash your brainchild on an unsuspecting public. I always ask my beta readers to tell me what parts of the story they didn’t like and why–in particular, what parts of the story they wanted to skip.

You may think I’ve diverged quite a bit from describing that simple head wound, but I haven’t. The lesson I took away, the most important writing lesson I learned, is to not be afraid to stop for a moment to examine things in your story, whether they are physical wounds or the characters’ actions and emotions. Don’t summarize elements that may be important to your story, even if you may have doubts while writing the first draft. If something doesn’t work, you’ll find out soon enough, and you can fix it in a later draft.

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

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Voices From the Plains, Vol. III

by David Kubicek

Voices From The Plains, Vol. 3

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.

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.