me me me – Page 3

Paladin Stories: Combat Knife Throwing

May 15, 2019 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

One of the most memorable shoots that I directed as Video Production Manager of Paladin Press was on combat knife throwing. Paladin was a small publisher and we did books and low-budget, high-quality instructional videos; my job consisted of everything from contract negotiation to directing, producing, shooting, editing, and marketing. I kept busy.

I was the only full-time employee in Paladin’s video department at that time, but in a small business everyone wears many hats. For this shoot I took someone from Marketing to do second camera and someone from the print-on-demand shop to help with miscellaneous production tasks. Usually I only had the Marketing rep, but Paladin’s owner/publisher, Peder Lund, wanted me to show the print-on-demand guy the video ropes. We referred to him as FNG until a new FNG came along, as you do.

This shoot took place in late spring on the author’s family property in semi-rural Tennessee. Beautiful country. Hot and humid as all get-out, particularly for us Colorado boys who loved the dry air. Yes, we did make the occasional Deliverance joke, up until we tried to find the turnoff to the author’s place and, after driving up and down country roads for half an hour, had to stop at a ramshackle convenience store to ask for directions. As it turned out, the entrance to his property was a slightly wider gap between two trees that we’d driven past a bunch of times, so we turned the minivan around (Marketing guy hated that I always rented us a minivan, but it was cheap and it fit all the production equipment) and eased our way deeper into the woods.

The enclosing trees spread out a quarter mile down the road to a clearing that provided a breathtaking view; I did the best I could to capture it on video. On a typical shoot, the day we fly in we drop off our personal luggage at the hotel, go meet the author, and plan the next day’s work. The author (Ralph Thorn), however, had different plans: unlike us, he was not an early bird, and wanted to do some shooting in the late afternoon/early evening sun. So we got to work.

As I set up angles to give us good, glare-free shots of both Ralph and the target (a log), I asked, somewhat facetiously, “So, is there any, uh, local flora or fauna we need to be aware of out here?”

“Not much,” Ralph replied. “Just poison ivy. I’m immune to it, though.”

“Ah,” I said. “Is there…any nearby?”

Ralph pointed with his chin at the Marketing guy, who was adjusting focus. “He’s standing in some there.”

The Marketing guy, who wore shorts all the time, quickly stepped out of the patch and we re-set his camera elsewhere.

The next two days didn’t go as smoothly as we’d like because it was so damned hot and Ralph needed a bunch of breaks to rest. I didn’t blame him. It’s difficult enough throwing knives for hours at a time. Imagine having to teach knife-throwing on video and throw and actually get good hits on target in the hot sun.

One time during a break, while we stood under a tree with our cameras, eating Clif bars for lunch while Ralph went inside to take a cold shower and ice his shoulder, FNG said, “Who’s that?”

A little girl in a dress, maybe nine or ten, stood in a nearby meadow, watching us with eyes that wouldn’t look out of place in a Keane painting. She was very pretty, but her appearance felt strange, like she was a ghost, and when I lifted a hand to wave, she turned and ran across the meadow and disappeared behind a shed. Later on, Ralph told us she was probably one of his nieces.

Probably.

Ralph’s knife-throwing style was like nothing I’d ever seen before. The vast majority of throwers fling the knife so that it spins in the air, and you have to accurately gauge distance to hit point-first consistently. Am I close enough for a half-spin throw, or do I try for a full-spin? That’s why it’s such a difficult thing to master, and nearly impossible to do in the chaotic circumstances of an actual fight. Despite cinematic representations of knife throwing, there are no credible real-world accounts of someone being killed in a fight with a thrown knife.

Ralph, however, taught a method of knife throwing that didn’t rely on spins and fine distance calculation: you release it in such a way as to make it sail into the target point first without spinning it. I don’t know if he developed this method himself or learned it elsewhere, but he was not only very skilled, he could teach that skill with some detail.

Over a year later, while shooting a video with some high-speed combat shooting instructors who worked in security management, one man told me that he loved Ralph’s video and had learned how to throw knives from it. So we weren’t peddling bullshit. Still, when we did knife-throwing on lunch breaks at the office, we went with the half-to-full spin technique. Easier to do with minimal practice.

We spent the last shooting day with Ralph doing extra knife-throwing shots, still photos, the introduction, the conclusion, and a bunch of voice-overs. Ralph loosened up a bit at the end; we’re easy to work with, but sometimes it takes a while to fully break the ice. At the end of the conclusion, while we were setting up for the final outdoor shot, he did an Elvis impression that was absolutely hysterical. I got some of it on video, but I can’t remember if I put it on the DVD as an Easter egg or not. It seemed so out of character, but it wasn’t; he was just glad the shoot was almost over. Us, too. A typical shoot day had us working from early morning until evening, then a break for dinner, then sitting and watching footage half the night in the hotel room to make sure we didn’t miss anything or if the equipment crapped out without us knowing. Shoot days were always grueling: during them you have to be 100% on your game for 100% of the time. The author can screw up: no problem. But the crew can’t.

Even though I bitched about it, I miss it, a little.

I looked for it at home, but I think Combat Knife Throwing: The Video is one of those few I didn’t get a copy of, which is a shame.

That Hideous Aztec

April 24, 2019 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

My favorite books are ones I can reread and find something different to enjoy each time, with a few exceptions. I can’t reread John Fowles’s The Magus, for example, because it would be impossible to recreate the feeling of utter shock at the last quarter of the book, the sheer page-turning power of it. If you’ve read it you’ll know what I mean. Others, I can and have, several times: Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha is a classic, as is his Narcissus and Goldmund. Anything from Jonathan Carroll. Much of H. P. Lovecraft’s oeuvre.

One notable book I read in my twenties and had trouble with decades later was Clive Barker’s Imajica, for reasons I described here.

I have a confession to make, however, and I’m embarrassed to admit it, but I must. I’d read C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia many times, and claimed I read and enjoyed his Space Trilogy, but the latter isn’t entirely true. While I read book one of the trilogy, Out of the Silent Planet, and read the second book, Perelandra, I’d had to skim through large parts of the latter because they bored me. As for the third book, That Hideous Strength, I had never made it past the first chapter.

Until now.

It’s such a different story from the first two novels, taking place entirely on Earth instead of Mars or Venus, that I couldn’t get into it. Less adventure, more talking. No alien life. Why bother?

It’s a terrible mistake. That Hideous Strength is the best novel of the trilogy. While Out of the Silent Planet takes place on an un-fallen world, and Perelandra describes the protagonist’s attempt to keep a new world from falling like ours has, this third novel grounds everything right here, delving into the terrible consequences of our world having fallen from grace, and how despite that, we, as flawed, desperate creatures, can do great, even holy things. We’ve fallen, yes, but redemption is available.

It deals with a number of themes: love and marriage, the mistake of equating science with progress, journalistic manipulation, the ethics of today versus yesterday’s, and many others. While it starts very slowly, it grips you hard, if you’re accessible to it, and does not let you go. Some sections are deeply disquieting, filling you with real horror, and others describe sweeping, magical experiences from within. Despite that it’s decades old, That Hideous Strength is relevant today:

When did you meet a workman who believes the papers? He takes it for granted that they’re all propaganda and skips the leading articles. He buys his paper for the football results and the little paragraphs about girls falling out of windows and corpses found in Mayfair flats. He is our problem. We have to recondition him. But the educated public, the people who read the highbrow weeklies, don’t need reconditioning. They’re all right already. They’ll believe anything.

It’s as accurate a description of the chattering class versus the working class as you’ll ever read.

So the novel hadn’t changed. I did.

Contrast that to Gary Jennings’s novel Aztec. This remains one of my all-time favorite novels, and it kindled a lifelong interest in both pre-Columbian history and historical fiction. A gripping account of the Aztec empire at its height…and how it falls at the hands of Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés (with the help of neighboring Mesoamerican civilizations). It’s a book I’ve read many times and continue to marvel at.

But I no longer mourn for what was lost when the Aztecs fell. While the Spanish were greatly evil in their massacre and plunder of the Aztec civilization, the Aztecs were themselves monstrous, engaging in human sacrifice, cannibalism, torture, and casual murder. The protagonist, Mixtli, is a clever man, a funny man, but not at all a good man, and he does things that are oftentimes horrific and disgusting. It’s easy to excuse him when reading his first-person account: after all, he’s a different man living at a different time in a different culture. But even if we’re invited to sympathize, we don’t have to approve. We can understand and still be disgusted. As I am now, reading it again.

The novel hadn’t changed. I did.

Despite that, Aztec was a significant influence on my story Beneath the Ziggurat, and drawing from Mesoamerican culture/myth is something I’m comfortable with.

Tastes change as we get older, and I’m further into middle age than I like to think about. Is this the maturing process, or does one’s brain alter? Does liking one thing over the other suggest maturity, personal advancement, or simply a lateral change in taste? Since becoming a fiction writer I read differently from the way I used to: I dissect, I analyze, I learn more. I’ve become an active reader.

I heartily recommend both books, for entirely different reasons.

Appalling Stories 2 Is a CLFA Book of the Year Finalist!

April 17, 2019 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

The anthology Appalling Stories 2: More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice is shortlisted to win the Conservative-Libertarian Fiction Alliance 2019 Book of the Year award, but it needs your help to push it over the finish line! Not familiar with it yet? Not sure what it’s about? Here’s the 411:

The virulent disease of political correctness has infected the body politic from nose to toes, and even the field of literature isn’t immune. The best way to inoculate yourself against this Social Justice Warrior-carried malady is to read entertaining, old-school fiction that neither pulls punches nor takes prisoners.

That’s where Appalling Stories 2 comes in. The spiritual sequel to the top-selling anthology Appalling Stories, this new collection brings you ripped-from-the-headlines tales of short fiction written to make you laugh, make you cry, and even make you think. Just a little.

In these pages you’ll read stories of humanity’s terrifying First Contact with extraterrestrial life, the horrifying secret behind today’s radical feminist movement, what happens when the wokest man you know discards the last of his White Privilege, and more. From a far-future history of America’s decline to disturbing tales of gun control gone wild, you’re sure to find something that will stick with you long after you’ve closed the book.

And the best part is that you’ll be making an SJW so mad when you tell him/her/zir what you’re reading.

This edition features a foreword by Christian Toto, editor of Hollywoodintoto.com.

It’s a terrific book, if I don’t say so myself (and I do), but don’t just take my word for it (even though you really, really should):

“The dystopian counterpart to Amazing Stories, Appalling Stories 2 takes a grim, hilarious and no-holds-barred dive into the terrible social justice future and its even more terrible present.” –Daniel Greenfield, editor of Sultan Knish

“These are original stories which offer humor that will offend our country’s militant social justice warriors. For that reason alone, every American who cares about freedom should buy this book!” –Jeff Crouere, Ringside Politics

“A quick, entertainingly grotesque and provocative read, with plenty of satiric bite ranging from sharp to subtle as its stories blur the line between the unlikely and the uncanny. Two trigger warnings recommended!” –C. S. Johnson, award-winning author and contributor to HollywoodinToto and StudioJake.

Please click here and vote for Appalling Stories 2. There are only a few voting weeks left, and we need this award!

Dear Dad: The Inside Story

March 21, 2019 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

My short story Dear Dad is available to read free of charge at CinderQ, Taliesin Nexus’s online literary magazine. It shares space with Andrew Klavan’s story Goodfellow, so it’s in great company. Before you read further, you might want to check out Dear Dad if you haven’t already.

CinderQ wanted something connected to one of my earlier works, and at the time I had just published the Appalling Stories anthology. Returning to the strange world I’d created in the short story The Bitterness of Honey was a natural fit. My stories Bake Me a Cake (satire), Melanie’s Becoming (thriller), and Cultural Overtones (science fiction) didn’t leave me with anywhere to go, but Honey was a world I wanted to return to. It posits a bizarre apocalypse scenario: environmental extremists working with the once-vanished, now-returned honeybees to return the world to a pre-technological state. The bees are back, the tagline might say, and they sure are pissed! Beemageddon. Beepocalypse.

I always liked the gray alien science fiction stories: Whitley Streiber’s Communion and other fictionalized accounts of First Contact with extraterrestrials. Are the ETs hostile, friendly, or so alien that we can’t divine their motives? My intent was to do a First Contact story with these apparently intelligent bees: awestruck humans learning that the world’s a lot bigger and stranger than they thought, and how/why they’d work with such creatures to destroy human civilization.

In Dear Dad I didn’t quite get there. Which is a shame, because the story didn’t wind up where I’d planned it, but also a good thing, because the story I still want to write remains to be told.

Instead, Dear Dad became a story about a love triangle, of sorts, with bees and sex and murder. I found it in the black space in my brain that all of my ideas come from, the black space that’s so damned hard to get into and so easy to slip out of. The Muse. The Muse’s womb. The unconscious. The creative process. Whatever.

I enjoy reading first-person perspective fiction as much as anyone, but writing it isn’t easy. There’s nowhere else to go: you’re stuck with the same protagonist, so you better like him. And the readers better like him. Contrast that with my Armageddon trilogy, a very long, epic-style work with multiple protagonists, and you can see how I might find first-person perspective more difficult to write. I always have to have a reason for the narrator to write, a format for writing it, and a way of the account getting to the reader. In the short story Her Bodies, Her Choice in Appalling Stories 2, the narrator is talking to a video camera. In Appalling Stories 3, the narrator scribbles his story on scraps of rice paper.

In Dear Dad, the narrator writes an email to his estranged father. Hence the title.

The protagonist’s relationship with his father is a heartbreaker for me. My son’s still in single digits, so he needs me and we see each other every day and spend time together. He’s my little boy and I love him. Many of my friends have older/adult children, so they see their kids less often. They’re less involved in the day-to-day. It’s part of the maturation process and it’s what’s supposed to happen. The 2019 me doesn’t like to think about how the father-son relationship will become more distant for the 2029 me, but by then I’ll be fine with it. For now, it’s bad enough that my protagonist is in a position to have that adult relationship with his father, but it’s worse that he has no relationship with his father, and is reaching out to send one last message. I wanted to communicate that anger and resentment and longing and foolishness, and I hope I managed it in some small way.

Someday I’ll write the First Contact bee story. Someday. For now, enjoy Dear Dad.

Appalling Stories 2: The Inside Story

January 18, 2019 by David Dubrow Leave a Comment

For Appalling Stories 2: More Appalling Stories of Social Injustice, the book’s subtitle preceded the content. I chose to interpret it this way: my contributions needed to be more appalling in this second volume. I wanted to push the envelope without devolving into a tiresome description of disgusting circumstances, which is typical in so-called “extreme horror” stories. Appalling Stories 2 isn’t extreme horror, though many of the events described therein are pretty horrible.

People like to ask writers, “Where do you get your ideas?” I never know how to answer this question. Even my dental hygienist asked me once. I replied, “In the dentist chair,” which elicited the hoped-for laugh. A novel has to have more than one idea. You can get away with just one in a short story.

For the story Her Bodies, Her Choice, I didn’t come up with the idea myself. Rick Canton, a friend of mine who I used to work with on the website The Loftus Party provided the central concept. On Twitter he asked a prominent feminist, “Why’re you so excited for abortion? Do you eat aborted babies or something?” I’m paraphrasing, but that’s the idea. He’s since been kicked off of Twitter for similar offenses. But his question planted the seed: feminists eating fetuses. Disgusting. Horrifying. Compelling. But I had to flesh it out. It had to make sense, it had to entertain, and it had to fit within the theme of the Appalling Stories anthology. The story I eventually came up with takes this idea and runs with it, turning it into a dreadful, far-reaching conspiracy. It even includes a description of a photo I saw in a book on witchcraft decades ago: a woman’s skeleton, freshly disinterred, with huge, heavy screws at her knees and elbows. They’d screwed her bones together to keep her from rising from the grave. That’s how much they feared her, even in death.

My other story, The Deprogram, came as a result of watching the 1982 movie Split Image, starring James Woods and Brian Dennehy. In it, a young man enters a Bhagwan-style cult and his desperate parents try to get him out. The same author who gave me the idea for the Bake Me a Cake story in the first Appalling Stories anthology suggested I watch it, though I can’t remember the context. The movie wasn’t bad, everyone played to type, and it provided fertile ground for a story: in a social justice future, people would have to be brainwashed to accept ludicrous notions like gender being a social construct instead of a biological fact of nature. Political correctness not just run amok, but extended into its necessarily oppressive and unpleasant future, where certain ideas are criminalized and rebelling against the accepted mode of thinking is punishable by government-issued lobotomy. But it had to be realistic. Like the previous story, it had to make sense and fit the theme.

You, the reader, will have to decide if either story was appalling enough, or even more appalling than the previous volume. And I’m not talking about the writing.

Last 2018 Post

December 31, 2018 by David Dubrow 2 Comments

Between extensive Christmas prep and getting out there and having a good time, I skipped last week’s blog post. Apologies.

2018 was a remarkable year in many respects, both good and…less good. Despite the day-to-day frustrations and unmet expectations that occur in every 24-hour period, I work hard to practice gratitude. Sometimes I’m less successful in the moment, sometimes more. My wife and son are both healthy and active, so as far as that story goes, I could just close the book and say it’s all good. Anything that happens outside of that is gravy. Frosting. Sugar on top. Pick your culinary metaphor.

That’s the story. Here’s the plot.

Over this year I released two books. The first was The Holy Warrior and the Last Angel, the third novel in my Armageddon trilogy. Nobody wants to hear how difficult writing a book was, but still, this one was pretty damned hard. It was so hard I had to take breaks to produce other books while I was writing it. Part of the difficulty was psychological: it was comfortable working on the same project for several years, and who wants to leave the Comfort Zone? The other part was just wrapping up everything in a way that made sense, satisfied the reader, and examined the themes of faith and humanity I wanted to explore. It’s up to the reader to determine its quality or lack of. The second of 2018’s books was Appalling Stories 2: More Appalling Tales of Social Injustice. The sequel to 2017’s Appalling Stories, it continues the anti-PC, ripped-from-the-headlines theme, and showcases a number of authors’ short fiction work. Nobody else is doing anything quite like it, and I’m proud of Appalling 2.

In January, my story A Haunting in Pennsylvania was published in Creators Unite Magazine, the Woman Power Issue. It’s neat when someone illustrates your writing and I’m pretty happy about that. In February, I wrote an evergreen piece on firearms in America. In April I watched the “important” horror film Get Out and confirmed, once and for all, that most movie reviewers are completely full of shit. In May, the horror site The Slaughtered Bird shut down; I enjoyed writing for them. June was a rough month for me: I spent the last week of May horribly ill, culminating in an 8-day hospital stay that I described here. While my hospitalization was a learning experience, it was still less than pleasant. I reviewed The Last Jedi in July, which got some notoriety in certain circles of Star Wars fandom. In August I reviewed David Angsten’s terrific novel Night of the Furies, and when you’re done reading this post, you need to run to Amazon and pick up Angsten’s entire Night-Sea Trilogy if you haven’t already. I tried to go home again in September with a review of Lord Foul’s Bane. October turned out to be a busy month: my story Dear Dad was published in Cinder Quarterly, the literary magazine from Taliesin Nexus, and I reviewed the wrenching film Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer. It’s the hardest film I’ve ever watched. In November I invented the term Thanksgivingtime. You’re welcome.

Not much else happened that I’m prepared to talk about. We got a black kitten earlier in the year. He’s been good luck for us and is a fine little fellow. For Christmas I got a sous vide machine.

What’s coming in 2019? I’m working with Ray Zacek on a satirical book that I hope to have out in the first quarter of the year. Still working on a science fiction adventure series that I’m sure you’ll enjoy: something a bit lighter than my previous fare. I doubt I’ll have it ready by 2019, but who knows?

Thank you, as always, for reading. May the coming year bring you blessings and favor from God, who is all good all the time. May you be as fortunate as I in both family and fortune, and may you remember from where it all springs.