Archive for June, 2012

The Health Care Act Upheld: Thank You SCOTUS!

Posted: June 28, 2012 in Politics and Leadership
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That’s right, thank you Supreme Court! I actually never had any doubt that you’d uphold Obamacare, but the fact that you did makes me so happy. It’s inconcievable that people can’t afford a basic right in this country such as healthcare, and it’s even more inconcievable that there are people out there who would have others think that allowing others to have this basic right is a bad thing. So today, I’m happy to say that the law is upheld, people can stay healthy, and progress in this nation is still possible.

How will Mitt Romney, Republicans, and conservatives react, I wonder? It’ll probably be apart of a Jon Stewart joke tonight, I bet.

The Snake Outline: First Draft Finished

Posted: June 28, 2012 in Progress Report, Writing
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Lately I’ve been churning out on average a post a day. This never happened when I first started my blog. My, how times have changed…

Okay, before I go off on a tangent about posting and blogging, I’m going to get into the reason for this post. As you all know (or if you’ve become a follower in the past couple of days, are just learning), I wrote a novel called Reborn City and I am currently marketing it to agents. Not wanting to let my novel-writing skills diminish in the meantime, but not quite wanting to start RC‘s sequel yet, I decided to work on an unrelated novel, and held a little poll for deciding which novel out of two choices I’d work on. Now that the poll is long over, I’d like to announce that the outline for the novel (called Snake, if you haven’t already guessed that from the title of the post), is finished.

Or at least, the first draft of the outline is. Yes there’s a first draft. And it’s longer than the outline for RC, I’ll tell ya. 112 chapters! That’s five less than what I predicted, but still truly a sign that I’m writing a thriller. Thankfully there’s a smaller circle of main characters in Snake than in RC, so I didn’t have to put too much effort into writing out the small bios for each major character.

I’ll probably due a final draft next week. After that I’ll start a timeline so I have all the dates for the events in Snake planned out (trust me, a timeline would’ve been helpful when I was writing RC). After that there will come a little research, and then finally the writing, during which I shall post small snippets of Snake here on Rami Ungar the Writer.

Hope to have something for you soon. Bye!

Spring Quarter Wrap-Up: It’s So Late I’m Apologizing For It In The Post’s Title

Posted: June 26, 2012 in Living and Life
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I doubt any of you were exactly waiting on bated breath for me to send out my end-of-quarter update post, and I know it’s been a little over two weeks since the quarter officially ended, but I’m sending this out anyway now that I’ve remembered it. And if any of you were waiting on bated breath, I’m very sorry, so please take a breath before you die from lack of oxygen!

Alright, so here at Ohio State, this was our last quarter before we officially switch over to semesters (which is both exciting and  scary, so you know I’m looking forward to it some). And what a quarter it was! It just seemed to fly by. Before I knew it, I had to pack up my stuff and get out of the dorms! I’m happy to say though, that I got a 3.24o GPA (not what I was expecting, but I’m still happy about it). I enjoyed every single one of my classes, especially my English class, where I discovered that I have a fondness for early English literature, particularly Paradise Lost by John Milton (I enjoyed it so much my mom got it for me for my birthday).

I also saw a few of my friends graduate. I’m a little sad, but I know we’ll have memories, and it’s not as if we’ll never see each other again. Not only that, but my sister is going to be a freshman in the fall! She’s going to be studying to psychology and criminology, with the hopes of becoming a criminal profiler for the BAU (so you know she’s going to like Snake, the novel I’m working on right now). We get along fine, but we’re living on opposite sides of campus, because when we get into an argument, there just isn’t enough nuclear bomb shelters to go around these days.

All for now, besides the fact that I’m working on campus, and living with my dad so I can commute to and from work. I’ll let you guys know about fall semester when it gets a little closer. Bye!

Names, Names, Names

Posted: June 25, 2012 in Reflections, Writing
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You ever come up with a character, give them a background, a personality, give them certain scenes where certain character traits that you just admire and adore in them really shine? And then you realize this character of yours shares the same first name as somebody you know? Becuase it’s happened to me twice that I can remember.

The first time was in my early years of high school, when the vampire craze was still in full swing (or was it just taking off?). Anyway, I was writing this great character, a vampire desperately trying to find a cure to become human again and kill the vampire who’d turned him, but I realized he shared the same first name as a friend and classmate of mine. When my friend found out, he kept saying whenever the subject was brought up that I’d named the character after him, and when he found out they both had brown hair (but different shades and styles), that conviction only got stronger. Well, I decided to hold off on the story until vampires were in an in-between-bursts-of-popularity period so I wouldn’t look like some hack trying to hitch a ride on a bandwagon, but for a while it was annoying.

The second time involves Snake, actually. I had this wonderful character in mind for the female lead. I’d already planned out her role and her character traits, and wanted to find a name that began with an A to match her (she just seemed like an “A” person to me). It must’ve been three weeks after I’d settled on a name that a girl in my dorm whom I’m friends with shares the same name. Luckily, she hasn’t found out yet, creating no misunderstandings, and I’m not sure if she has my blog’s address, but it’ll be interesting if she finds out and asks if I based the character on her. To which I’ll reply, “Are you eighteen and a redhead?”

Has this ever happened to any of you? Please let me know if it has.

Ripple: Getting Published!

Posted: June 24, 2012 in Progress Report, short story, Writing
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Oh my God! Big news, ladies and gentlemen! I don’t know how many of you remember, but a while back I wrote a short story involving alien visitors to Earth called “Ripple”. This evening I got on my computer and saw that the editor of Nth Degree, a science-fiction magazine, had emailed me. He wrote he was going to publish “Ripple” as a featured story in the magazine’s online edition and would be letting me know soon when the story would go up.

Well, as soon as I read that, I started dancing in my room! I put on disco music on my computer and started boogie-ing down! I’m so happy write now, it’s hard for me to stay calm. Thank you to Michael Pederson, editor of Nth Degree, for accepting “Ripple”. I cannot wait to see it online!

If you want to check out the website–maybe submit something to it–the link is down below. Oh my God, so excited right now. I still can’t stop dancing! I’ll give everyone a heads-up post when the short story comes out. Have an awesome day, just like I’m having!

http://nthzine.com/

The “Snake” Outline

Posted: June 22, 2012 in Novel, Progress Report, Writing
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Okay, I’ve mentioned this before, but this summer I’m working on a new novel called “Snake”, and it’s about a serial killer. Right now, I’m working on the outline of the novel, becuase I prefer using an outline before starting a novel. I have to say, I’m not even done with the outline, but it’s already proven itself to be a learning experience:

For starters, while I’ve thought about Snake and what I wanted to do with him for a while, writing out the actual outline and planning out the rough draft of the plot has been kind of like going down a river: I’ve just gone where it’s taken me. Scenes I had half-planned in my head are becoming fully-formed, while other scenes are being created rifht at the moment I write them down and a few scenes are being dropped completely! It’s hard deciding what to put in, what to keep, and what to discard, but in the end I feel it’s making the story better.

Also, if you read thrillers you know that the chapters are often very short, which is because the authors want to keep the suspense up as much as they can. Learning how to do that myself has been very intersting, and I think I’m getting the hang of it. I mean, I’ve just finished Part III (these novels always come in parts) and the story is already 60+ chapters! That’s at least three times “Reborn City”! I wouldn’t be surprised if the final chapter count is in the hundreds! Oh, and did I mention that if this novel were a movie, the end of Part III would probably be about two-thirds of the way through the film?

I hope to have the outline done within the next week. By that time I’ll know what I want to do with my story and how I’ll go about doing it. So wish me luck! I’ll give you another update when I’m done with the outline.

Review: Prometheus

Posted: June 22, 2012 in Review
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The film poster for Prometheus. It’s huge in this post for a reason.

OH MY GOD! I FINALLY SAW IT! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Ok, spazz-out done. Let’s get down to it without giving away any plot points or whatever. Wow. What a movie. I was put into suspense, I got scared a few times, and I couldn’t stop putting my hands on my face at every scary or gruesome part. Yeah, I liked it. It was so much fun learning about the origins of the Xenomorphs and seeing their evolution from simple to close to what Sigourney Weaver fought in 1970. The characters have been criticized by other critics as being “too two dimensional” but I felt they were real enough, especially considering that it’s a slasher film with sci-fi bio-warfare as the killer. And I was left with more questions than when I came in, so I guess that means there’s going to be a sequel! In fact, I’ll be disappointed if there isn’t.

My one qualm is that the beginning might move a little too fast and be a little more confusing if you can’t adjust too quickly, but it becomes easy to follow after that.

I give this movie a 4.3 out of 5, for showing me the evolution of the Xenomorphs and for scaring the crap out of me at some points.

Looking At Old Posts

Posted: June 21, 2012 in Reflections
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You know, I always find it interesting when I see that someone has been reading an older post. And you know, this happens a lot, to tell you the truth: not a week goes by that it doesn’t seem like someone’s been reading one of my Saturday Night Live reviews, and it’s either the bad one I gave Lindsay Lohan or the good one I gave Jonah HIll.

And just yesterday, someone was reading one of the earliest posts I’d ever written, back when only my parents and a few friends knew I’d set up a blog. I can’t help but wonder how people stumble across these posts and what they think of them. And if they’re from a non-English speaking country, what do they think of the post, whether or not they speak and read English? To me, it’s an unsolvable mystery, but it’s one I enjoy contemplating very much.

Oh, a few updates for you readers, before I go:

1. I’ve heard from some magazines and an agent recently, and they all say they’ll have their answer to the work I submitted to them soon. So excited.

2. That short story I came up with while meditating? I finished it last night after Jon Stewart. I won’t get to editing it for a while, but I think it has potential. After all, I put psychic phenomena and the 2012 End-of-the-World theory into it. What’s not to like?

3. This afternoon, after I leave work and volunteer for a little while at the Obama campaign, I’m going to go see Prometheus! I’m almost bouncing in my seat, I’m so excited. I’ll write a review about it later tonight if I have the time.

All for now, blog to you later.

Review: Book Girl series

Posted: June 19, 2012 in Review
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The Japanese cover for “Book Girl”, featuring Tohko Amano on the cover.

Remember a while back I wrote a post about a Japanese book series called Kieli? If not, I’ll leave a link at the bottom so you can check out the exact post, but I want to talk about another Japanese light novel series: Book Girl by Mizuki Nomura. It’s very different fromKieli, but it’s still one heck of a series. The books follow Konoha Inoue, a teenager who wrote a highly successful romance novel in junior high under a girl’s name. However, the success of the book came at a steep price, and Konoha does not want to ever write another novel, or anything again for that matter.

Then one day in high school, he meets Tohko Amano, an upperclassman (or upperclasswoman, though I don’t think that’s a word) who eats books. No, she really does eat books! And when Konoha discovers the secret, he become’s the second member of the literature club, forced to write short stories as snacks for Tohko. Even worse, Tohko keeps getting him wrapped up in strange mysteries that always seem to resemble different famous novels (sometimes Japanese, sometimes not). What’s a guy trying to move on from trauma and shame supposed to do?

Te novels are very interesting, as I’m kept guessing at every turn, especially when it’s a Japanese novel I’ve never heard of that’s being used for the plot. Even when it’s a novel I’ve heard of, seen an adaptation of, or read though, I can never guess how the mystery will be resolved or how the story will end. It’s perfect for mystery fans with a knowledge of literature, and the characters feel very real to you, especially Konoha, who every moment struggles with his past. Interspersed throughout each book, we can find pieces of the literature used in the novel or the dark musings of characters as they struggle internally, adding a bit of spice to an–as Tohko might say–an already delicious piece of storytelling.

I give this book series–and it’s story-writing and story-eating main characters–a 5 out of 5 for excellent writing and excellent characters.

Oh, and before I forget, here’s that link for the review of Kieli:

https://ramiungarthewriter.wordpress.com/2011/08/14/review-kieli/

The Lucky 7 Meme

Posted: June 17, 2012 in Novel, Writing
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Alright, here’s the latest on the blogosphere: apparently quite a few blogs are doing this thing where if you’re writing a novel or short story, you take your 7th or 77th page (depending on what you’re writing) go to the seventh line, and pull out 7 lines or paragraphs. A few of the blogs I follow did that, so I figured, what the heck? Why not?

So right now, I’m posting lines 7-14 of page 77 of Reborn City, the novel I’m currently trying to market to agents. At this moment of the story, my main character Zahara is getting a tattoo, even though she doesn’t really want to get one. Why does she have to get a tattoo she doesn’t want? I can’t reveal that here, but if you’re an agent and you’re interested, let me know and we’ll talk.

So here’s my Lucky 7 meme:

“Um…yeah, sure. Go ahead.” said Zahara. As soon as Frimms had turned his glance away from her, Zahara closed her eyes. Allah, the Most Merciful and Understanding, please forgive me for this transgression. When I leave the Hydras and return to New York I swear in the name of the Prophet that I will get this tattoo removed, she thought in Arabic. Tattoos weren’t considered cool things to have on one’s body in Sunni Islam; the Shi’ites were allowed to get tattoos, but for Zahara it was much more preferable to get henna tattoos. Zahara figured that if she asked these guys if she could get a henna tattoo they’d probably just laugh or give her a queer look and ask her why she’d want that.

Well, there you go, ladies and gents. I hope that at least whetted your appetites and made you a little more interested in Reborn City. All for now, so bye.

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