Dave’s Blog – Page 42

Beyond Lovecraft Update

October 13, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

I’ve described why I’m supporting Jasper Bark and Rob Moran’s Beyond Lovecraft Indiegogo campaign here, so if this is the first you’ve heard of it, please click the link to learn why you should get excited about the project, too.

Or, better yet, see what Jasper himself has to say.

This is where we are with funding so far:

As you can see, we’re still building momentum. To bring it home, though, we need more: more exposure, more backers, more funding. That’s where you come in.

For just $25.00 you would not only get an electronic copy of the graphic novel, but also a 100 page behind the scenes Beyond Lovecraft e-book and have your name on the honor roll of contributors to an extraordinary project. That’s a damn good deal.

For 25 bucks you can be this guy, figuratively speaking

The perks get better from there. Check them out.

Even if you can’t provide funding now, please share the campaign link: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/beyond-lovecraft/x/12314422#/

Thank you, and I hope to see you browsing the shelves of the Library of Yith soon!

An Unpleasant Side-Effect of Being the Boss

September 30, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Nothing in particular has elicited this post; it’s just something that I’ve been thinking about for years and I want to get it out there so it no longer has to take up space in my intellectual attic.

When I worked in the video production department of a small but notorious publishing company, the department had a staff of two: the Video Production Manager and me. My job title changed depending on the mood of the manager: sometimes I was a Video Production Associate, sometimes a Video Producer.

Sometimes something unprintable.

We worked closely with many authors to develop video projects. With a staff of two, we did everything: contracting, set design, lighting, sound, camerawork, video editing, marketing, still photography. We shot video in the studio and on-location across the country (and sometimes in Canada; remind me to tell you about the Canadian carnet). I enjoyed the work. We went to all sorts of places and met all kinds of incredible people with remarkable skills.

Eventually I became the Video Production Manager. My workload increased tenfold, but I still enjoyed it, and it showed in increased sales and production quality. I wasn’t a parent at the time, so the travel and longer hours weren’t so much a problem. (If you’re reading this, my beloved wife, I did miss you on those on-location shoots!) There’s no such thing as having a bad day on a limited-budget video shoot: you have to be 100% mentally and physically all day long and into the night. Great stuff. I learned that any limits I had were entirely self-imposed, a lesson that will stick with me for the rest of my life.

However, there was one troubling aspect to the job: it changed my relationship with certain people, and not for the better. Some of the authors whom I’d worked with as a Video Production Associate were markedly nicer and more friendly once I became Video Production Manager. Not all, but some. To some extent, this is natural: you want to be close to people who can do more things for you. Still, I had worked closely with these people through production and post-production and thought that I’d had them figured out.

I noticed this difference of attitude early on, made a note of it, and didn’t let it affect my decision-making. But it did teach me another very valuable lesson: determine who your real friends are. It’s a thing you have to experience for yourself. Learn how to separate people into categories, as unpleasant as that sounds. A real friend is someone who doesn’t want anything from you except your presence in his life. The others, the ones who will call you friend but just want things from you, they’ll fool you. It takes time and life experience to determine the difference. Some people never do.

I still retain some very good friends from my time in publishing, men and women I’m honored to know and speak with. So I have no complaints. And I make new friends in my new endeavors all the time. I’m very fortunate.

Is this cynicism, or experience?

New Short Story Published!

September 23, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Revised, expanded, updated, and more relevant than ever, my short story How to Fix a Broken World has been published by Liberty Island!

A blackly humorous tale of creeping insanity, of social media and obsession with current events, it’s a short, punchy read. And, best of all in these harsh economic times, it’s absolutely free! What are you waiting for? Click over and get reading!

Everyday Horror

September 21, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

Living in Florida, one thing you have to get used to is the bugs. We have a lot of them out here, because the whole state is basically a swamp resting atop a gigantic slab of limestone. Mosquitoes, spiders, slugs, you name it, we got it.

Cockroaches are particularly common. We call them Palmetto bugs or water bugs, but stripped of euphemism, they’re roaches. There are two kinds of roaches: the massive black ones that are horrible to deal with and the slightly smaller brown ones that are horrible to deal with. When we first moved out here, the house we rented occasionally burped out a big, black roach that our cats wanted nothing to do with, so I’d usually have to get rid of it in some fashion.

The problem is that if you step on one, it squirts out sickening bug guts everywhere and the disgusting hairy legs come off. If you try to pick one up with a paper towel it might squirm out onto you because it’s a boneless, wriggling monster. There’s nothing about roaches that doesn’t inspire loathing. My favorite way to eliminate them is to suck them up with a vacuum cleaner’s wand attachment: you don’t have to get too close to it and if you’re quick and get it from behind, it won’t run under something you can’t reach.

Seeing one in your space is a gut check every time. I know few men who are blase about such vermin. Exterminators excepted, of course.

They come up through plumbing, through cracks in walls, through anything. You can keep your house as immaculate as an operating room and you’ll still find one every once in a while.

Geckos, of which there are many in Florida, will occasionally kill a roach if they’re hungry enough. I saw the aftermath once in our back patio: the gecko had torn the roach’s head off and splattered its guts everywhere. It looked like a murder scene in miniature. Fascinating and disgusting all at once. Hannibal Gecko Lecter and one of his victims.

When I dropped my son off at preschool today and we put his lunchbox in his cubby, one of his teachers came up to me and asked, “How good are you at dealing with roaches?”

Terrible. I’m really, really not good at dealing with them at all.

“Let’s see what you’ve got,” I said.

It was one of the big black stripy ones, clinging to the wall over the toilet tank in the kiddie bathroom. Damn it. Damn it, damn it, damn it.

I went over to the paper towel dispenser and got a wad of paper towels. Then I looked at it, figuratively girding my loins. Despite my fairly high comfort level with violence, I just didn’t want to be there right then. I wanted to be home.

And then, of course, the teacher said, “Oh, that’s okay, I’ll have Ms. C take care of it.”

I knew exactly what she was doing: shaming me into action. It worked.

I made a grab for the roach. It fell, scuttled, threatened to escape under the fixtures. I stomped on it just enough to hurt it but not squish its sickening bug guts everywhere, picked the twitching thing up with the paper towels, crushed it, and threw it away.

After the teacher thanked me for my heroism, I said, “Oh, that’s okay. It’s actually good. I’ve already done the worst thing I’ll do all day, so the rest of the day’ll be easy.”

I gave my little boy a hug and a kiss and sent him off to learn in a roach-free environment.

Then I went home and took a Silkwood shower.

A Few Thoughts About Editing Your Indie Book Plus Book News

September 16, 2015 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

(This post is not intended to point fingers at individuals, nor is it a reaction to a particular book.)

After having read dozens of indie- and self-published books over the last year or so in several different genres, I’ve found some common threads that link them together as indie fiction and separate them from traditionally-published books.

Most prominent is the lack of editing. The vast, vast, vast majority of writers need an editor, or, if nothing else, a competent, experienced proofreader to make their work ready for prime time. There really is no acceptable number of typos or grammatical mistakes allowable in a published work. The expression “the perfect is the enemy of the good” doesn’t apply to publishing.

There are, of course, more subjective elements to your book that may or may not benefit from a story editor: character arcs, plot arcs, dialogue, a clearly-defined antagonist, etc. They’re important, but their very subjectivity puts them up for debate. (The subject of a later post will cover the relative value of having a book editor review your book.) I’m talking about having everything spelled properly. No wrong word choices like “vocal chords” or “it’s” when you mean “its.” Microsoft Word doesn’t fix run-ons, comma placement, and subject-verb agreement, and if you can’t do it (most writers, remember, cannot), you must find someone to fix these errors for you.

Yes, I know it’s expensive. And time-consuming. And a pain in the ass and a gut check and you still have to do it because if you don’t do it you’re putting out marginal work. These things count. We’ve all read traditionally-published books with grammatical errors, yes. But just because some people put out substandard work, it’s no excuse for you to do the same. Do you want to be good for an indie, or just plain good?

Get it professionally edited, and if you can’t, get it proofread. It shows you care about the reader.

My other concern is book formatting. I’ve read some books that were horribly formatted. There’s no excuse for that. If you can’t or won’t have your book professionally formatted, download this invaluable guide, follow the instructions, and you’ll have formatted your book properly. Mark Coker is my personal hero for writing this guide and making it available for free.

The bottom line is that publishing is all about being detail-oriented. Including self-publishing.

In other news, The Nephilim and the False Prophet has been sent to educated, literate readers I trust to sanity-check it. The end is nigh!

A Horror Cliché to Be Eliminated

September 9, 2015 by David Dubrow 1 Comment

Inspired by this excellent article by Kayleigh Marie Edwards, I will discuss a cliché that I would like to see go by the wayside, as it’s become such a tiresome theme in not just horror, but genre fiction in general: the cliché of the Hypocritical Christian.

For reasons that go beyond the scope of this piece, modern culture has elevated hypocrisy to the unofficial Eighth Deadly Sin, despite how common it is. We are all hypocrites in some fashion or other, but when it comes to religious hypocrisy, where the sinner has the guff to quote Scripture to explain the basis of his beliefs, that’s somehow a bridge too far. This has an element of gotcha in it, as the rulebook for Christians is so widely available: the Bible. It’s easy to point out sections of the Bible that aren’t followed and demand that the offending Christian follow them or be damned as a hypocrite. That this all-or-nothing approach is never required anywhere else in modern life is immaterial: the accusation is what counts. Religious hypocrites are, to some, particularly galling, and must be denounced. Especially in fiction. More especially in horror fiction. Even two of horror’s most famous authors have indulged in it: Clive Barker and Stephen King.

I’ve mentioned this at length in my review of Clive Barker’s The Scarlet Gospels: “If there is one central theme running throughout The Scarlet Gospels, it’s explicitly anti-Christian. Every time Christianity is mentioned, it’s linked to hypocrisy, abuse, and evil. Carston Goode, the ghost who brought both Norma and D’amour into the events of the story, was one such hypocrite. Despite ‘a deep-seated faith in the generosity of the Lord his God,’ Goode is a sorcerer with a secret life of sexual deviance.”

In Stephen King’s Carrie, The Mist, and The Shawshank Redemption, the greatest (human) antagonists often quoted the Bible as a motivating factor in their menace.

Films like The Last Exorcism also carry this theme forward; indeed, it’s difficult to find a positive representation of Christianity in contemporary horror movies at all, and you’ll have to go back to the 1970’s and 1980’s to find examples. In The Exorcist, Father Karras sacrifices himself to save the possessed Regan, and in Omen 3: The Final Conflict, we see a vision of Jesus Christ at the end, when Damien is sent back to Hell. It’s a safe bet that if there’s a pastor in a horror movie made within the last thirty years, he’ll be a bumbling incompetent at best, or if he’s wearing a black cassock and white collar, a sexual deviant.

There are occasional exceptions, of course: From Dusk Till Dawn‘s Jacob Fuller, for example (note that this movie is almost twenty years old). Graham Hess in 2002’s Signs. The Rite. Nevertheless, Christianity has been used as a punching bag for writers either looking to plant an ideological flag or are too lazy to find a more interesting antagonist. For the sake of that ever-elusive originality, if nothing else, it’s time to put this cliché to rest.

It’s no longer daring or trendy or cutting edge to see a sinning priest. The pendulum’s swung so far that way that it’s rare to see, in genre fiction, a priest who isn’t a criminal or idiot or hypocrite.