Archive for the ‘Progress Report’ Category

Some Thoughts on “Dodi Li”

Posted: October 18, 2012 in Living and Life, Progress Report, Reflections, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
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For those of you who have no idea what that title means, Dodi Li is a short story that I started this summer and that I’m rewriting before National Novel Writing Month starts in two weeks. It means “my darling” or “my beloved” in Hebrew and should not be confused with a popular Jewish song that is sung sometimes on Friday nights by Jews everywhere.

Dodi Li features a succubus, a demoness who visits men at night as a beautiful woman and steals their sperm in order to create demonic children or steal pieces of their soul through fornication, depending on what myths you believe. However my succubus, who I’ve named Umuruk (sounds like a name a succubus would have, right?) is not the antagonist of the story. Instead, she struggles to protect the other protagonist, a male she’s fallen in love with. Succubi have fallen in love with humans before, according to the folklore and stories I found by people who say they’ve had experiences with succubi (it’s on the Internet, so I can’t be sure if the writers are crazy or not, but I try to keep an open mind), and I decided to tap into that for this story.

The first draft was very plot-oriented, and sucked immensely. I decided to leave it alone until I could think of a way to make it better, and if I couldn’t, then it’d make a great learning experience. But yesterday in creative writing class, my teacher gave me an idea on how I could improve the story. So I went back and started to completely rewrite it, going until half-past ten last night, and then resuming for a little while this morning before class.

As I was heading to class, I realized something about my story: the main character, whose nine years old, and the antagonist, a 40-something with some mental issues, are the only male characters. All the rest are female: the doctor, the head nurse, the head of neurology, a possible detective character, and of course the succubus Umuruk, are all women, and all are women in positions of power that they use to help people.

I started to wonder if that might mean something, if my psyche was trying to tell me something through my writing. If it’s that I respect women in positions of power and that I think there should be more of them, that doesn’t surprise me at all; I grew up in a house full of women, my mom’s a rabbi, my boss is a woman, her boss is a woman, and I took a Women’s Studies course my first year at Ohio State, which I did very well in. So no surprise that powerful women show up in my story.

However, if it has something to do with the fact that Umuruk is able to help the main character more than these women, then I wonder what that might be saying. Perhaps even if women are educated and in positions of power, if they don’t occasionally open their minds to the impossible, then a mentally unbalanced man will hurt an innocent nine-year-old? That’s also a possibility.

In any case, once I finish the story I might understand more, and if I manage to get it published, you might be able to read it and give me some suggestions on what my Muse is trying to tell me.

Anyway, I’ve got some homework to do before I go to work, so I better get that taken care of right now. Have a nice day.

Oh, before I forget, something funny I have to tell you: I was talking to my history teacher after class today, and we had a really great discussion on the way out the building. You see, at the beginning of the semester, my teacher, whose focus is African History, told us that if any of us intentionally failed his class, he’d used magic he learned from tribal priests to enter our dreams and scare the heck out of us. Ever since then I’ve been trying on and off to get him to agree to teach me how to enter people’s dreams (can you blame me?).

At some point during our conversation, my teacher revealed he’d been joking, but I thought he’d been serious because he said it in such a serious way. This led to a discussion on witchcraft in different cultures, which led to a discussion on using magic and summoning stuff. That led to a discussion on spirits and possessions, and in the end, I ended up recommending my teacher to go see The Possession, which I reviewed back in September. Turns out, he agreed to see it. How about that?

Anyway, I think it’s funny, I have no idea what you think.

Edits and Construction

Posted: October 17, 2012 in ideas, Living and Life, Novel, Progress Report, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
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Well yestereday I edited two short stories. One was Doll’s Game, the short story I’m writing for class, though I might decide to edit it again if I can get this idea I got today for the story to work somehow. I also edited Hunt in the Slaughterhouse, a short story I wrote back in April based on a dream I had. I’ve been trying to get around to editing it for a while, but I’ve had some trouble doing that. But yesterday I had the chance and I have to say, it loooks much better. I’ll have to figure out whether or not I want to send it to a magazine right now or if I want to wait and show it to someone else beforehand.

I also had an idea for Dodi Li, the succubus story I wrote over the summer. Although the plot for that story was really bad and I ended up deciding this story was best left as a learning experience, I decided to rewrite it after my teacher in my creative writing class gave me an idea. You see, she had been discussing the story we were critiquing today, and how the author was able to make it difficult to tell what was reality and what was delusion in his story. Listening to that, I just had a burst of inspiration for Dodi Li, which I plan to get to work on as soon as possible. Got to say, those workshop critiques can do wonders for you.

On, and before I forget, remember how I rewrote the outline for my serial killer novel Snake and that I mentioned I’d set a scene in a construction site? Well today I finally reached the man who could help me get onto the site. We’re going to try and find a time that works for both of us so that I can tour a site and ask some questions. This is a big oppurtunity for me because I want my readers not to have to suspend their disbelief too much and what’s better than actual experience?

Well, hope to have more good news for you later. In the meantime, I’ve editing to do.

The Edits Are Done! Yahoo!

Posted: October 15, 2012 in Novel, Progress Report, Writing
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To get why I posted this picture, read below.

Ladies and gentlemen, get out of your chairs, and start dancing in front of your computer or while holding whatever portable electronic device you are reading this post on! I’ve finished the edits on Reborn City! I thought the editing would take a couple of months, but instead it took a couple of weeks. I wonder if my idols in the world of writing literature have it this easy with their novels when they do the final edits.

So, RC‘s at 24 chapters, with each chapter averaging about four edits total. The longest chapter is the first one, with thirty-four pages, and well over 10,000 w0rds. The epilogue is definitely the shortest, with less than a page and barely two-hundred words, if even that. All told, the entire novel, in 8 1/2″ x 11″ pages, with a 12-point font and double-spaced, is 313 pages (whistle-whistle!). The word count, which requires no calculating of page sizes or anything, is 90,850. To which I say, holy crap.

Well, now I plan to go take a nap, because it’s close to midnight right now. Tomorrow I’ll send this baby off to a friend (his email address is conveniently in the emails I got when he commented on previous posts; expect an email saying “rami ungar reborn city” in the subject line), then go to class. At some point I’ll work on editing and writing some short stories, and when November rolls around get to work on Snake for National Novel Writing Month, or as we writers like to call it, NaNoWriMo.

And what happens after I get Reborn City back from my friend? Well, I’ll do the edits he suggests, and then I’ll get to work on doing everything else that needs to be done so that you all can read Reborn City.

You know, I’ve seen this process of self-publishing Reborn City sort of like a train, and every time I get to a new milestone in the process, I’ve reached a new station. When do I get to the final stop? I’m not sure; I’m certainly ahead of schedule, but who knows how long that’ll last?

Anyway, I hope for some more good news soon. That way I can share it with you as soon as possible.

To all, a good night (or if you just turned on your computer and you’re reading this with your morning coffee, good morning. Some weather today, huh?). Sweet dreams, and happy blogging to you.

300 Comments!!!

Posted: October 15, 2012 in Living and Life, Progress Report
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Well, it’s a week of milestones. Five-thousand views, and now 300 comments, thanks to my friend Matt Williams of the awesome blog, http://storiesbywilliams.com/. Maybe I’ll get 100 followers on Thursday. Are there twelve people who like horror, thriller, following aspiring writers in college and don’t mind the occasional post on how much I support the Democrats and how I am confused by Republicans and the things they say and do?

You know, when I first started this blog, I found it inconcievable, when I was barely getting five views a week, that I could get a single comment more than once a month. Now, I’ve got 100 more comments after posting about getting 200 less than a month-and-a-half ago. This is just so incredible, I’m geeking out a little while I write this.

Thanks for all the reading and all the commenting, folks. It means a lot and it means you’re sticking with me through all my trials and tribulations. Hope to hear good news soon. Maybe I’ll finish editing Reborn City and hand it off for some edits from a third party this week. Wouldn’t that be awesome!

Talk to you later.

Chapters Rise, Chapters Fall

Posted: October 15, 2012 in Novel, Progress Report, Writing
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Or to be more precise, the number of chapters fall and the number of chapters fall.

I wrote a couple posts back that I’d decided to change the way the main characters of Reborn City met up with the big bad guys, so that meant tacking on another chapter. I wasn’t sure if the number of chapters would rise again or if it would drop. Wouldn’t you know it? I ended up deleting a chapter that was unnecessary with the new course of the story (which I’m glad I went with; the story’s much better this way). So I’m back to twenty-four chapters, including a nice little epilogue.

And speaking of which, I’m in the middle of editing chapter twenty-one. I’m in the home stretch, and much sooner than I expected. Who knows, if my friend who’s agreed to look over RC after it’s done (you know who you are) gets through it quickly, I might be able to get the e-book out…December or January. Either way it works out wonderfully, because RC takes place in mid-summer. When we’re freezing our butts off in the middle of winter, it’ll be nice to sit back with our e-reader and read about a gang war with a conspiracy behind it in the middle of July, right?

Hope to have more soon. Wish me luck as I do the final edits.

A Nice Change to Reborn City

Posted: October 13, 2012 in ideas, Novel, Progress Report, Writing
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Yesterday before the Sabbath came in and I became cut off from all electronic devices (including anything I use to edit my stories), I had a great idea on how to edit Reborn City‘s final act. I realize that the original scenario was a little unrealistic, a little in need of suspension of belief. Or maybe a lot in need.

So this new scenario will be much better. I’m not sure if it’ll increase or cut the number of chapters I have, but that doesn’t matter, when it comes to producing a quality story, right?

I’m excited to see what this produces, so I’l write you again when I have something to write. In the meantime–on to the editing and rewriting!

Reborn City: Halfway on the Edits

Posted: October 11, 2012 in Novel, Progress Report, Writing
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I just finished editing chapter twelve of Reborn City, officially putting me halfway through the editing process before I hand it off to someone to look at. Most of the chapters have already had three or four drafts, but as I look over each and every chapter, I see pieces that could be polished a little, where the phrasing is a little awkward or where something doesn’t make sense. It’s been something fixing these over, but I’ve been able to make some improvements and I’m seeing the story I started in high school slowly becoming better and better.

Speaking of which, Reborn City was written from my sophomore year to my senior year of high school (I took long breaks as necessary for school work, short story projects, a summer in Israel, and sometimes when I was just too exhausted to write and just wanted to enjoy someone else’s work for a change). I can still see some of my writing style from when I was in high school in the words I wrote then, and it’s pretty different from my current voice. I guess you can attribute that to the fact that I’ve gotten some life experience, so of course my voice changed a bit.

But anyway, I’m happy with the progress I’ve made. I’m still not sure when Reborn City will be available for download as an e-book yet,  but I hope it’ll be by mid-March by next year, if I can get these edits done quickly and I can get my publishing press set up without too much trouble.

I’ll let you guys know when chapters 13-23 and the epilogue are edited. Stay tuned for more!

The Snake Outline Reborn

Posted: October 4, 2012 in Novel, Progress Report, Writing
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Creepy, right? It looks like it might come off the drawing.

Did anyone else see the joke in that title? Anyone? Bueller?

Alright, you guys are more concerned about what this latest post is about. I’ll tell you: I finished redoing the outline of Snake, with new scenes and even a few new characters. I may have increased the parts of the story to eight (including the prologue and epilogue), but the chapter count is down to a little over a hundred, and let me tell you, I like this new version!

For one thing, everything’s much more exciting now. For one thing, the climax of the story is much more exciting, bringing the Snake, his allies, the mafia family the Snake is hunting, and the police and FBI together in one big fight! And at the end, the Snake confronts the boss of the mafia family he’s been up against this whole time! It’s like The Dark Knight meets the end of Daredevil in some respects, at least in my opinion, but I still think it’ll be exciting to read and visualize in your head.

I also did some work on the characters, their actions and their motivations, and believe me, it was worth it. In the first outline, some of the things the characters did might’ve made you go, “huh? What the heck just happened? Why’d they do that? I wouldn’t do that if I were in that situation.” So I tried to make things more believable. I realize that I need to place less emphasis on plot and more on what drives the characters, so I’l have to work on that from now on.

So now that the new outline is done, what next? Well as much as it pains me, I will be taking a break from writing Snake to finally get to work on publishing Reborn City. It’s something I’m looking forward to, and when you guys read it, I hope you enjoy it as much as I do.

Just be patient on the sequel, because I’ll have to finish Snake first and I don’t like doing two projects at once that way.

All for now, stick around for updates on both Snake, Reborn City, and anything else I feel like posting about (including a review of Daniel Craig on SNL, which will probably be my last SNL review for a little while). Post on you later!

Snake: Onto The Outline Edits

Posted: October 2, 2012 in Novel, Progress Report, Writing
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I love this image, it is so unique and reminds me of an Algerian love knot.

Well as you know, I’ve been wanting to do some change-ups to my serial killer novel Snake, including changing a big part of the outline. So I went over what I’d already written, edited the heck out of the chapters to make them a better read, and just now I finished chapter 34, which is the last chapter of Part II of the novel. I did plenty of cutting, taking out an entire chunk of the opening of the novel (among other things), adding some important details and bits of action that I forgot to add to certain scenes, and even changing one of the characters and his motivations in order to make more sense not only to the reader, but to myself as well.

The strange thing though, is that while I took out a lot of unecessary stuff so that some chapters got much shorter in terms of pages and word counts, others got much longer. Remember how in one post I listed all the pages and words from the Prologue all the way to the end of Part II as 138 pages and 25,346 words? After the edits, it came out to 148 pages and 37,082 words. Talk about an increase, right?

So while I’ve done that, I still have some more to do. I’m going to edit the outline to make the story more exciting, and then I’m going to get to work getting my other novel, Reborn City, out to the public in a timely manner. So you know with all this, a job, and college, I’m a very busy boy. But hey, I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Look out for my next post on Snake, I’ll be giving a few clues as to what’s changed with the story and then I’ll get to work on Reborn City. Later.

The Biggest News I’ve Ever Written About On This Blog

Posted: September 30, 2012 in Living and Life, Novel, Progress Report, Writing
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The Jewish New Year recently came to pass. And with new years in any culture, we wish to make changes for the coming year so that hopefully, this year will be a good one. Well, I’ve decided to make a change.

As you well know, I’ve been trying the traditional publishing route for some time now (write and publish a bunch of short stories; write a novel; get an agent who can refer you to the best publishers; company publishes your novel). This process has been the norm for several years, but it does have its flaws: for instance, the big publishing companies are ruled by the need to make money, so they only publish work that they feel could be profitable, which can lead to numerous rejections for authors whose work doesn’t meet one criteria or another. Not only that, but the companies themselves have a lot of control over the author’s work, having the author edit it fifty different ways so that it can be more commercial or more profitable or whatever. All so that the author can reach the highest number of people possible.

But, self-publishing is on the rise, and people who have been reading Rami Ungar the Writer for some time are probably aware that I’ve been toying with the idea of self-publishing. Self-publishing allows an author to have more control over his or her work, recieve more profits from sales, and not be obligated by big corporate contracts. The pitfalls include that most self-publishers don’t make a lot of money off of self-publishing, and when they do it’s usually because a traditional publisher has made some sort of deal for their novel (this is what happened with Fifty Shades of Grey). Self-published authors also have to do most of their own advertising, and with the power of the Internet, anyone can upload anything, even if the work looks like a kindergartener wrote it.

But still, self-publishing is becoming more and more popular with every single day among writers, and now it’s got a new adherent. That’s right: I, Rami Ungar, have decided to self-publish, and since one of my classes has given me more confidence with computers, I’ll be doing it without the help of a service, instead compiling the whole thing myself and putting out my work as e-books (at least until I have the money and knowledge to do my own paperback).

My first self-published work will be my science fiction novel Reborn City, which I hope to have out next year at some point. I plan to take one more look at it for editing purposes, have someone else look at it afterwards (probably someone really into science fiction) and then, based on that person’s suggestions, edit again. After that I’ll set up my own independent press, one that’ll be dedicated to horror, thriller, science fiction, and fantasy, and which will allow me to have the most control over my work. It’ll be like how Akon has his own label, Kon Live and Konvict Muzik, but uses big labels like Universal to distribute his work (in my case, the Universal will be Amazon and B&N and Smashwords and such). I won’t say what I’ll name my press, but I do have a name for it, which I’ll reveal to you after I get the necessary legal paperwork out of the way to set it up. That, and a website and possibly a Facebook profile (yes, I’m considering using Facebook to get my work out there, please don’t make a big deal out of it).

I will then get a cover made for Reborn City, format the whole darn thing for an e-book, get RC copyrighted (and ISBN-ed; I’m not sure if one of those are necessary exactly but it’d be good to check), and on a release date that I will choose once I’ve formatted RC into an e-book, I will let the whole world read my work for a mere $2.99 per download.

I hope all of you will show me your support in this endeavor, and possibly consider reading RC when it comes out and letting your friends know about it. If you have any tips on how to do all this, please let me know, as your feedback is always helpful to me.

I’ll let you know when my new press is up-and-running, and when Reborn City will be released. Thanks for reading, and I hope you’re as excited as I am!

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