Rami Ungar The Writer

So I stayed up way too late last night working on Laura Horn, and I’m happy to say that I’ve reached another milestone in the editing process. Now, for those of you who don’t know, Laura Horn is a novel I wrote during my third year of college at Ohio State, and follows a teenage girl with a tragic past who comes across a conspiracy against the US government and finds herself in the position to stop it. It’s kind of like White House Down or Olympus Has Fallen, only instead of some hunky action hero, you’ve got a teenage girl trying to sort through her inner trauma.

Yeah, that’s a story I wrote, and I’m making it work somehow. It’s no harder to believe than a teenage girl taking on a government that kills a bunch of its citizens’ children in an annual death game or forces its youth to choose factions based on their personalities, anyway.

Anyway, the novel is divided into seven sections, including the prologue and epilogue, based on what happens in those sections. Last night I completed editing on the last two chapters of Part III, which means I’m a little more than halfway through editing the novel. To which I say, “Hooray, I’m making progress!”

And I remember thinking that the first draft of this novel might be a little too hard to believe. I don’t mean that like I meant the examples above, I meant that while the story itself would make a great novel, the way it played out in the first draft wouldn’t work. I actually considered rewriting the story so that the story seemed slightly more plausible. But then I decided to take a chance and start editing the first draft, see if I could still make a great story with the material I already had.

Sure, some parts of the story needed to be seriously changed, several chapters have been combined, and one I actually threw out because it became unnecessary, but all in all this story turned out to still be workable and make sense. And slowly, gaining speed as I worked through more and more chapters, I’ve fallen in love with this story and I’m very close to finishing up this draft.

So at this point, I’ve about twenty-four chapters left to work through (assuming I don’t combine any more of them or chuck one or two more out). I think I’ll start on the next chapter after I have lunch, and see where it gets me. If I’m lucky, I can get another two chapters out of the way, and maybe be done by the middle of next month.

So wish me luck, my Followers of Fear. Because this afternoon, I’m going into full editing mode, and I can’t wait to see what I come up with during that time.