Archive for the ‘Writing’ Category

“Old Sid” Is Finished!

Posted: March 17, 2013 in Progress Report, short story, Writing
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Well, it took me a while, but I finally did it! I finished Old Sid, the second short story I submitted to my creative writing class. For those of you unfamiliar with it, Old Sid is about a bunch of students at Ohio State University trying to delve into the truth of Old Sid, an urban legend I made up for the short story (so don’t go online trying to see if Old Sid is a real thing, because it’s only a product of my imagination). The story is narrated from the point of view of several people at once, similar to what Jeffrey Eugenides did with his first novel The Virgin Suicides.

I ended up changing a lot with this draft, and at times I purposely got easily distracted just because it was slow-going and I wanted a break. But the story’s done, and I really like how it turned out. Old Sid has his Boo Radley moment where the characters realize he’s not a legend but very human, but it’s done in such a subtle way that it’s not right in your face. I think my teacher will like it when he reads it, especially since Old Sid is in the vein of literary fiction and I’m barely able to write horror in short story form with any amount of competence.

After I get my grades for the semester and some feedback on Old Sid, I might edit it again and send it off to a literary magazine, preferably one based in Ohio or better yet in Columbus. It’ll probably have a better chance in a local magazine, since a lot of people are very familiar with Ohio State in its home state than outside it (of course). I’ll let you know if I have any luck in that department. Wish me luck.

A Welcome To My New Followers

Posted: March 17, 2013 in Living and Life, Novel, Progress Report, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
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I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting a lot of new followers over the past month or so, and especially during these past two weeks. So with that in mind, I’d thought I’d extend a welcome to my new followers and thank them for deciding to follow me and read my blog. And to my returning followers, welcome back and thanks for continuing to read my blog.

Also, I wanted to clarify some things for the newest readers. Occasionally on this blog, you’ll see words and phrases such as The Quiet Game, Reborn City, or Snake. These are my works-in-progress that I’ll be self-publishing hopefully within the next year or so. Each is very different from the other, and are at different stages of getting ready for publishing. I’d like to take this oppurtunity to tell you all about each of them and to let those who are already familiar with the works in question how progress is coming along.

So without further ado, here’s a look at my WIPs:

The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones

TQG cover

This is a collection of short stories I’ll be putting out soon. I wrote these short stories over winter break and the beginning of spring semester, and it’s almost ready for publication. I’m just waiting for the US Copyright Office to get me my copyright and then I’ll be ready to upload this onto the Internet. Since the Copyright Office takes about two and a half months though, we’ve still got a bit of a wait to go before it comes out. So please be patient, and in the meantime you can read the description for the book on the page “Books by Rami Ungar” or watch the trailer below:

Reborn City

This is a science fiction novel about street gangs in a post-apocalyptic future I wrote in high school and that’s being reviewed by a beta reader before I prepare it for publication. The beta reader, Matt Williams, also happens to be a published writer and blogger, so you should seriously check out his blog here: http://storiesbywilliams.com/. Currently Matt’s halfway through the novel or thereabouts, and since he finished his latest novel Pappa Zulu, he’s been able to get the chapters back to me that much faster. I can’t wait to see what results from our collaboration.

Snake

This is a thriller novel I wrote over six months from June to December 2012 and follows a serial killer in New York who is hunting members of a powerful mafia family, his reasons for doing so clouded in mystery and in murder (how’s that for a description). I recently finished the second draft and have sent off the first four chapters to a beta reader I trust. Hopefully she’ll be able to let me know what she thinks very quickly. In the meantime, there are a few excerpts of Snake on this blog, so if you get bored you can probably go looking for them and find them.

Well, that’s all I’ve got. I hope this piqued your interest in some of my work. Once again, thanks for reading and agreeing to follow my blog. It really means a lot to me. Have a nice day, and I’ll post again soon.

Rami

Where Did The Original Zombie Go?

Posted: March 14, 2013 in Reflections, Scary Stuff, Writing
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We’ve been done one way for too long. Ugh!

In 1968, George A. Romero introuduced the concept of a zombie apocalypse created through a pandemic illness in his famous movie Night of the Living Dead. Although the term “zombie” was never used in the movie itself but was applied by fans who saw similarities between the flesh-eating undead of the film and the zombies of mythology, the idea stuck, and has grown over the years until every zombie novel, movie, and television series out ther either involves a zombie-creating virus or the cause of the zombie pandemic is not explained.

Although I have been horrified and fascinated by this type of zombie like any other type of horror fan, I also feel it’s being overdone in this day and age. It’s like vampires–the market’s too saturated with the same old drivel under different names and different faces. It’s enough to make you get out your stake and you automatic weapon.

It also makes me wonder, does anyone care about the original zombie? And by that, I don’t mean a zombie whose body is so rotted that there’s barely any rotted skin left on the corpse. I mean the zombie that wasn’t created via science gone wrong, but by magic gone right. Remember that zombie? The result of a voodoo curse? Yeah, that was actually a thing, based on actual Vodun mythology, and there were several famous zombie novels and a few films based on that kind of zombie well before Romero came along with Night of the Living Dead. One of the first novels about the supernatural zombie was The Magic Island by William Seabrook in 1929, which is believed to be the first timethe word “zombie” entered our lexicon. Then in 1932, Bela Lugosi starred in the Victor Halperin horror film White Zombie, which permanently cemented the word “zombie” in the English language.

Poster for “I Walked With A Zombie” in 1943

Other films that have included the supernatural type of zombie is 1943’s I Walked With A Zombie and 1988’s The Serpent and the Rainbow, but not much else. The most recent entry into supernatural zombie lore is Drums, a four-issue comic book series that ran in 2011. Unfortunately, almost all of these examples are very old and might not appeal to the SFX and CGI-addicted audiences today. And the series Drums has had mized reviews, with the first issue getting strong reviews but some thinking that by the end of the series, it seems to be “laid out like a bad SyFy movie”. That’s quite the insult right there.

So can there be an original take on the supernatural zombie that doesn’t suck? I should hope so. At the very least I have an idea for such a story that I’ve been saving for a very long time, and I may write it one of these days. However, that might not be for a couple of years, so that leaves plenty of time for other storytellers out there to steal my idea come up with something on their own that doesn’t suck or seem like the same old story retold in a new way.

What would such a movie or novel look like? I’m not sure, but I do know that sort of story carries with it different intricacies and challenges. For example, how does one become a zombie, and can it be transferred to the living? If so, how is it transferred? Can there be a Frankenstein’s monster-twist in the story? How do you defeat a corpse infused with supernatural power, if guns or machetes aren’t enough? Do these zombies need a food source, or is magic enough? And can creating a zombie through magic cause other strange things to occur, whether intended or not? And if other strange things occur, what will they be?

A traditional zombie in a cornfield. Freaky in profile, right?

You see how many questions a storyteller has to wrestle with in creating this sort of story? It’s very different from a virus-type zombie story. And I hope somebody realizes it someday and sees the possibilities and potential in such a story. Whether that’ll be my zombie story or someone else’s zombie story, I hope somebody does. I’d pay good money for that sort of story given a modern take, especially if it’s well done.

Would you like to see a zombie story using supernatural zombies? What kind of story do you think it’d be?

How Prolific A Writer Must You Be?

Posted: March 14, 2013 in Reflections, Writing
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As I was stepping out of the shower last night, I was thinking about all the stories I want to write in the future. Naturally, I thought of the list of ideas for novels, movies, and even video games I keep on my flash drive, with every idea getting a working title and a brief description of its plot. It was at this point I was struck by a thought: how prolific must a writer be?

Of course there’s no real answer to that question, but I feel compelled to examine the issue anyway in this blog post. So let’s take a look:

Many writers write several volumes worth of work for a variety of reasons. Many, like Stephen King or James Patterson, have written huge bodies of work, some of which might not be in their specific genre of interest. Why? Well, I’m sure the income they get from the sales is nice, even if most of it goes to the publisher, but I think it might have something to do with the joy many writers have when working with a story they like and then sharing it with the people. Otherwise, why would they continue writing when they have enough money to invest in several Fortune 500 companies and retire someplace warm?

On the other hand, some authors only feel compelled to write one story and leave it at that. Take Harper Lee, author of To Kill A Mockingbird. She only wrote one novel her entire life, probably got a lot of money and plenty of awards for it, plus a movie adaptation. She never wrote another thing ever. Now, one could argue she enjoyed being a one-hit wonder so much she felt she had no need to write more. If you ask me though, I think the fact that she always lived in the same small town she grew up in and that she seemed more introverted than extroverted argues that she didn’t have anything else she wanted to say to the world. Also, every writer has to do some publicity for their work, especially in these tumultuous times for the writing industry. That whole advertising and promoting gig is not for everyone, so it wouldn’t surprise me if Ms. Lee got tired of it and didn’t want anymore of it after Mockingbird.

But most writers are not Stephen King, James Patterson, or Harper Lee. In fact, most have to continually write, especially if a writer is self-publishing and he or she doesn’t have skyrocketing sales. So as long as someone can sit at a computer and churn out a story, they will, especially if it makes the difference between paying the rent and not paying it. Like I said, many writers fall somewhere in this area, though most are doing a bit better than having to worry about rent payments. Of course, it’s not all about the money. Some just like sharing their stories with the world. I know I’m one of those folks, though I don’t mind a little cash flow here and there.

So how does this factor into how prolific a writer must be? Truthfully, it doesn’t. Writers write, and they write what they want, and how much they write is up to them. Some will keep writing new stories for years, up until the day they’re on their deathbeds struggling to type out one more word, one more sentence, one last story. Others will just write the one beautiful piece of literature and be done with it. They may not even send it to the publishers, though as far as I know that’s very rare. Why they do either of these options is their own choice and you’d have to ask them.

As for me? I’ve got many ideas for stories, and I’d like the oppurtunity to share them all with you and anybody else who might be interested. It might take me a while to get most of them out, but as long as a story keeps me interested, I’ll keep writing it and I’ll keep sharing it with the greater world.

What about you? How prolific do you feel you need to be and why do you feel this way?

Snake: The Second Draft Is Finished!

Posted: March 12, 2013 in Novel, Progress Report, Writing
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Well, isn’t today full of editing pluses! I edited a chapter of my science-fiction novel Reborn City, and I just finished the second draft of my serial killer thriller Snake. I’m not going to go into word counts or anything, mostly because I’m waiting for a phrase or two to be translated into Russian so I can add it in before I add up the latest word counts. However, I will tell you that I took away a few words and I added some, and still I think this novel got a little longer!

Anyway, I’ll be calling my beta reader for Snake tomorrow, tell her that she’s got a new novel to put on her computer tomorrow. I hope she likes it. Wish me luck, and let’s hope she gets through it quick. Wish me luck and if there are any updates, I’ll let you know.

Reborn City: Zahara the Expatriate

Posted: March 12, 2013 in Novel, Progress Report, Reflections, Writing
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Merriam-Webster.com: expatriate–to leave one’s country to reside elsewhere

I’m about to edit another chapter of Reborn City (yes, I’m still editing, but my beta reader’s schedule has freed up a little, so the chapters are coming faster than before). Before that, I read a blog post (read here:http://stevenglassman.de/2013/03/11/grokking-expatriates-in-sci-fi/) about how certain characters in science-fiction are considered expatriates and what category of expatriates they are (yes, there are categories. Read the blog post if you doubt me). The post covered everything from Superman to Futurama to Star Wars to even Buffy the Vampire Slayer characters, and it got me thinking: Zahara Bakur, main character of my own science fiction novel, is an expatriate, or expat for short.

For those of you who haven’t read the novel–which is basically everybody but me and my beta reader and fellow author Matt Williams–Zahara was born and raised until her elementary years in Cairo, which in the RC universe is one of the last remnants of the Egyptian state (don’t ask me why, just read the book when it comes out). However Zahara’s father moves the family to New York City, which is now its own independent city-state, to attend NYU’s law school, and the poor girl has to adopt to a much more liberal and sometimes very Islamaphobic culture. Over the years she gets used to New York and finds friends that don’t judge based on a person’s religious affiliation, but things shake up horribly for Zahara when she’s fifteen.

What happens? Her father has to relocate to Reborn City, which is the Las Vegas of the strange world of RC. There Zahara has to adjust to living in a city that is worse than New York City in how Islamaphobic it can be. When Zahara finds herself coerced into gang life, she finds the whole gangster culture mind-boggling, especially the taken-for-granted hostility between the various gangs and the equating of surviving violence and conquering enemies as being tough and cool. Zahara has to live with this sort of culture and try her best to adjust to it while also integrating the gang culture with the culture of New York, her Muslim upbringing, and her naturally peaceful nature.

Even without all the science fiction elements in this story, you can see how much conflict Zahara has to go through.  But as the story progresses, I hope Zahara can find a new strength that she didn’t have before. I’ll see where the two sequels go with the story and hopefully things will get better for Zahara and her friends.

But before that, I have to see the first book out on the digital bookshelves. I’ll let you know how things go as I get updates. Blog on you later.

Snake: Finished Rewriting A Chapter

Posted: March 11, 2013 in Novel, Progress Report, Writing
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I had to rewrite most of Chapter 91 of Snake, which is a part of the climax of the story. Why, you ask? Because the original scenario for this chapter, and for most of the climax because of this chapter, didn’t make sense in my head when I thought about it during the three months between the first and second drafts. So I rewrote most of it while still making sure that the story ended up going where I wanted it to go, which would be a final battle on the beach near the boardwalk in one of the Russian sections of New York City.

How’s the chapter look now? Well, I added a smidge more Russian to this chapter, I managed to keep some of the elements of the story I really liked (including a chase with a produce truck), and there’s still some battle and some bloodshed. Overall, I like this chapter, though I may add some more fighting and punching and kicking and whatever when I get this chapter back from my beta reader.

Well, I’m almost done with the second draft. Perhaps tomorrow or the day after the whole second draft will be done. Oh, and before I forget, I want to tell you guys that a few posts ago I messed up on how many chapters I had left. Snake has 98 chapters, not 92. So when I said I had 27 to go, I should have said 33. My bad.

I’ll let you know when the second draft is over. Wish me luck and good night.

When Suspension of Disbelief Is Not Enough

Posted: March 9, 2013 in Reflections, Writing
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Suspension of disbelief is when we disregard the unreality of a story and dive into the story anyway. For example, we ignore the fact that you can’t bring a corpse back to life with lightning and funky-looking machines, or we let it by that animals don’t wear clothes when we’re forced to watch The Great Mouse Detective with our younger family members, or I ignore that there are so many people in the cult in The Following that there’s no way that sort of cult could exist in reality, no matter how charismatic a serial killer Joe Carroll may be.

So many sick people follow him, even he has trouble believing it sometimes.

We need suspension of disbelief to enjoy some of the more strange of fiction, and sometimes to even get through the craziness of life. We’re pretty good about this as kids, when most of the shows we watch are cartoons with all sorts of improbable things going on.

But why do I mention all this? Most of the people who read this blog are well aware of suspension of disbelief and what it is, especially the writers who read this blog. Well, sometimes our suspension of disbelief cannot help us with a story, especially when we become adults and sometimes prefer our entertainment a little closer to reality.

But even for those of us who are still able to do suspension of belief like when we were kids, we occasionally find a story that we can’t get past the craziness in. For example, one of the problems I had with Mockingjay, the final book in the Hunger Games trilogy, was that after Katniss (spoiler alert!) killed President Coin for the murder of Prim, she wasn’t prosecuted or killed or thrown in the loony bin or held up as a hero by those who opposed both Coin and Snow. No, she was held in a room for several days and then dumped in District 12 for the rest of her life, with the only punishment being that she have counseling sessions on the phone for the rest of her life. If this were Egypt, China, Venezuala, Ukraine, or the United States (especially the United States!), any of the stuff I listed except what actually happened to Katniss would’ve happened. What makes Panem so different that the murder of the national leader gets you dumped in a coal-mining town that’s literally rebuilding itself from the ashes? Explain it to me, please!

“My country? Well, we’re hungry…and once a year 23 people die on national tV…and…that’s it.”

Another problem I had with the whole trilogy is that Panem had no character besides that of the Games and a capitol that oppressed the districts. Seriously, was that all there was to Panem? We only got brief looks into any sort of a national culture, with some district culture mixed in. And yet most culture is centered around the Games and the Victory Tour during the off-season. Is there anything else to Panem? There is so many questions left unanswered. Plus, what about the economy? It seemed the economy all depended on the Games and the oppressed districts. And did anyone in the Capital actually work, or did they all just party and do things related to the Games? I only know Panem as a nation of oppression and murder, and for Collins’ purposes, that’s all she really needs. But I have trouble believing that Panem could actually exist, especially when most of the nation is defined by oppression and a sick obsession with reality TV and the television in general.

I also have problems with other stories. I have a lot of trouble believing that Superman’s biggest problem in life is his love triangle with Lois Lane and himself (thank God it looks like Man of Steel might deal with that), or that a biologist might shy away from some skeletons of dead Ubermen but be attracted to a strange-looking cobra-worm in Prometheus. I’ve grown disillusioned with some Bond films because the villain’s super evil plan involves flooding the Earth or using diamonds as a laser beam or living in a space-station that nobody noticed until Bond pointed it out (you know I’m right). Why does Anakin go to the Dark Side just because he’s in love? Shouldn’t there be more darkness in him besides a fear of loss? And why in some fantasy films they can only get rid of a monster by sealing it away but hundreds of years later the very same magic used to seal the monster is suddenly able to kill it without any major innovation being mentioned?

I know I seem to be tearing into some very beloved stories, but I have to say, some of this boggles my already messed-up mind. Is there something I’m missing here? Or maybe the story is missing something and I and some others are angry enough or nitpicky enough or something else enough to point it all out.

I bit that guy because he didn’t like the skeletons but for some reason wanted to pet me.

It’s probably why when I write a story and there’s a chance it may get crazy or overly complicated, I try and have something to make it easy to understand and believable. I dumped a whole idea for Reborn City‘s sequel just because I thought it might be disbelieved by more than a few readers. I went through a lot of parts of Snake before I wrote and even while I was writing it just to make sure there was nothing that could be too hard to believe. And with the bajillion stories in my head, I often tinker with them in my inmagination for years just to see if there’s something that could be pointed out as too weird to happen (believe me, even in speculative fiction that’s a lot).

What do you have trouble believing, even in beloved stories that everyone else is cool with? And do those things make you examine your work differently?

Snake: 65 Edited, 27 To Go

Posted: March 7, 2013 in Novel, Writing
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I think this might have been in Harry Potter. What do you think?

I always think the editing process is going to be longer than it actually is. And yet I’m already done with Part III of the thriller novel Snake, which means I’ve only got a small stretch of the novel left to edit. I could be done by the end of the weekend if I don’t let myself get too busy or too distracted (though my homework could lead to some busy-work or distraction, so that’s something to calculate in).

So far, most of the editing has been taking out unnecessary words or changing certain things grammatically so that the story flows better. Also, I’ve noticed sentences that made sense to me three months ago at the end of the first draft make no sense to me now, so I have to do a lot of rewriting when I encounter those sentences, occasionally adding to my word count.

But I’m enjoying rediscovering the story I wrote from June to Decenber 2012, and seeing how fast-paced and at certain times shocking the story can be. I’m going to try to keep this up, and rewrite the final battle scene to be more exciting and less unrealistic, at least to me. But first, I have to get through Part IV, which has sone of the longer chapters in the story (and that’s saying something, considering the longest chapters are between 8 and 10 pages).

I’ll have more updates as time goes on. Wish me luck.

Snake: Editing the Prologue Through Part II

Posted: March 6, 2013 in Novel, Progress Report, Writing
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Since Saturday night I’ve been working on editing Snake, my serial killer thriller that I wrote over a period of six months last year. I took a break from it after I finished the last chapter in December and worked on several other projects, including The Quiet Game, in order so that when I returned to Snake again to edit it, I could look at it with fresh eyes.

So far I’ve been happy with the eyes I’m looking at it. For example, I”m seeing some things I wrote last time that I’m not too satisfied with, particularly in terms of phrasing. I’ve had to rewrite a few sections just to make it sound right in my head. I’ve also realized how disturbing I’ve made that novel, as last night’s post proved. And I also learned how fast-paced my novel is. I mean, the novel takes palce over several weeks, but it seems to be going so fast, going from event to event to event with a rabbit-like swiftness. If you have the free time, you could probably get through Snake in a couple of days.

So far I’ve gotten through thirty-five chapters, and I’m onto Part III, which is the longest part of Snake with twenty-nine chapters. If I can get through it in the same amount of time as I did with the first thirty-five chapters, I might be done with the second draft by the end of spring break, give or take a day or two. After that, I’ll hand Snake off to my beta reader, who’ll hopefully have the time to get through all the chapters in a timely fashion.

I hope.

I’ll let you guys know as things develop. Wish me luck.

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