Rami Ungar The Writer

So on Facebook, this thing’s been going around my friend circles where you post one picture of the cover of a book that you love or found influential, no explanation, and then tag someone else to do the same. You do this for ten days in a row, posting a different book cover and tagging a different person each day. I knew that eventually I’d get tagged, so I wasn’t surprised when my cousin Matthew tagged me for his second day. However, because I never follow anyone else’s drumbeat, I decided to do this on my blog and talk about why I love the books so much. Who knows? It may get some people to pick it up and read it.

So with any viral Internet tag/challenge/meme/award/whatever, you have a set of rules. Here are mine for this challenge:

• Thank whoever nominated you with big, bold print. If they have a blog, link to the post where you got tagged there. He doesn’t have a blog, as far as I’m aware, but thanks Matthew! I appreciate it!
• Explain the rules.
• Post the cover of a book that was influential on you or that you love dearly.
• Explain why (because I don’t see the point of just posting a picture of a book cover without an explanation. That goes for Facebook as well as blogs).
• Tag someone else to do the challenge, and let them know they’ve been tagged.

So there we go. We have rules, so let’s start the Ten Day Book Challenge. And with Day One, the choice of book is obvious: it’s Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone.

It’s fair to say that without Harry Potter, I wouldn’t be a writer. When I saw the first film it blew my mind, but the first book, which I think I read afterwards…I don’t know how to describe it, truth be told. Not just the world of Harry Potter, but the words within truly immersed me in the story. I don’t think before then I knew how words could be used like that. The words were the real magic, because they made places and creatures and people and concepts with rules come to life out of nothing. Like God, in a way. And I worshiped JK Rowling for years like a god, rereading the available four books at the time obsessively. But not only that, but I tried to write like JK Rowling. My first attempt at a novel was a Harry Potter-esque story with a female lead.* And even when I stopped working on that story, I still relied on Harry Potter and the works of JK Rowling to give me a basis on how to write.

It sometimes amazes me how far from Harry Potter ripoffs I’ve come since then. In fact, there’s almost no resemblance between my stories and Harry Potter! Still, without JK Rowling’s initial influence, I might be doing something very different today. And I have no idea what that “something very different” might be.

Ooh, there’s a horror story right there!

Anyway, I’m tagging my friend and fellow author Matthew Williams of Stories by Williams. Good luck, Matt! I hope you have fun with this (as well as time for it, what with a new book out and all).

That’s all for now, my Followers of Fear! I’m going to start prepping for tomorrow’s post…as well as possibly Days Three through Ten. Something tells me I’m going to need the prep.

*For more on my early writing projects, click here for an article on that subject.