So a friend of mine who looks at my short stories as an unbiased third party just got back to me and said he enjoyed reading my succubus story and he thought my writing had improved (thanks, Marc!). So before I started the next chapter of Snake, I went over the story one last time, made some minor adjustments, and now I think I’m ready to send it off. I don’t know any magazines off the top of my head that might publish this sort of story, but hopefully I can find a publication that will be interested and maybe they’ll publish it.
That’s the hope, anyway.
Now that that’s over and done with, I’m going to start working on the next chapter of Snake. It’s a sex scene though, so I have a feeling that my writing will be slowed down my sheer awkwardness and embarassment! Wish me luck.
Well, I’ve finally come up with an idea for a story that features a black dog spirit, and it came from the most unexpected place. You see, I was writing the latest chapter of Snake while listening to some Native American meditation music on YouTube. I paused to go and take my medication, and while I was taking it, I had epiphany: why not bring together the black dog spirit–normally a harbinger of death and occasionally an emissary of Hell–and meld it somehow with a Native American ceremony? It might require a lot of research, but the payoff would be enormous.
After I took my medication I went and filled out a sticky note, which I then put on my tackboard, bringing the new total to fifteen ideas on that tackboard. As you can tell, I’m going to be extremely busy when I’m done with Snake, but I finally figured out what I’m going to do with that idea for a story and I’m very happy with it.
Now, I know very little about Native American myths involving dogs. I know some of the Plain Indians equate the coyote with evil spirits and sometimes the Devil or King of Darkness. I’ve also heard of something called a “manitou”, but I think that’s some sort of shapeshifter. That’s all I really know, to tell you the truth. However one of my two majors is History, so we’re trained to do research. In addition, I’m at Ohio State, one of the biggest and most diverse schools in the country. More likely than not, we have a department that deals with Native American history and culture, and I’d be more than willing to ask them for help. And if I have to make a trip to our humungous library, all the better; I like to read, and I love that library (if you’ve seen it, you know why).
So before I go, I thought I’d embed the video that inspired me in this post. You should listen to it, and since it’s a long video, you should listen to it when you’re working on something and you need a little background music; you might find yourself inspired, or at the very least you’ll feel relaxed while you work. Enjoy.
Yesterday I wrote how I’d read a TIME magazine article and it had given me hope. After I’d posted that and started getting ready for bed, I thought about how some self-publishing writers made enough sales that they were noticed by the traditional publishing houses in New York and signed lucrative contracts for their books. It made me wonder, is starting independent and then signing up with a traditional publishing house once one presents an offer a smart move?
Well, let’s weigh the pros and cons. Some former indie authors have said that they’re happy they don’t have to manage marketing their books or paying for illustrators/copy editors/advertisers/possible print orders if you make enough money for it. There’s also the security and old prestige that still comes with being associated with a publishing house, and with a publishing house backing you, they can get your books into stores, help negotiate movie/audiobook deals, and the occasional lawsuit where someone says something absolutely ridiculous about your book and what it’s doing to young people or how a single character is a slanderous caricature of them. Your books can read a wider audience, and who like a publishing house can garner you a good review or get you on Ellen?
However, there are some negatives: You have to submit to the publishing house’s rules, aka write what will sell, and the publisher ends up taking a large amount of the royalties from print sales. You lose a lot of control over what you have, and if you decide to break your contract with the compnay over creative differences, not only will the company retain control over most, if not all, of the work you published with them, they’ll badmouth you throughout the industry for being a sore loser. Also, if you’re name’s not J.K. Rowling and you don’t continue to give them amazing work, they can ask for your advance from your previous work back or impose other such penalties or even drop you (or so I’ve heard).
I guess it depends on the writer, his/her circumstances, and how s/he feels about traditional vs. independent publishing. For me, I’d only sign up with a publisher if they gave me a lot of rights and incentives over my work. But of course, I first have to get the work out. Let’s hope that’s soon.
My dad called me last night and told me to get my hands on a copy of the latest issue of TIME magazine, saying there was an article that ran 5-6 pages on the ever-growing industry of self-publishing. I asked a friend of mine in my dorm if I could borrow his copy, and this evening I sat down to read it. What I saw encouraged me; there were so many stories of authors who had found success in the self-publishing industry, and even those who’d sold only a few hundred copies or less were finding ways to increase sales. It made me think: I hope that when Reborn City comes out, it’s a success.
Of course, I’m a bit far away from that at this point. I’ve only gotten three chapters finalized, and I’m waiting for the next one. At this rate I’ll probably be finished sometime between March and June. But I’m already gedtting ready, spreading the word as much as I can. Soon I’ll start up my own Facebook page as a writer, and see about creating a fan page for RC. I’m also getting a lot of work on Snake done and I hope to have that done by the end of the year, God-willing, and then I’ll start planning publishing that (and seeing if there’s someone who can look at it and give me an opinion before I put it out). And if I have the energy, I may just put out a small collection of horror short stories. With the power of e-publishing and the author as the marketer, the possibilites are endless.
So let’s hope I can get RC soon. If I can sell 1000 copies of RC, I’ll consider this all a success.
By the way, question for the other self-publishers who read this blog: how are your books doing? And what’re you doing to increase your sales and exposure (besides blogging a lot, of course).
The British may have Bond, but America’s got John McClane, the no-nonsense, tough-as-nails cop who always finds himself in the middle of a terrorist plot and shooting up every bad guy in a mile. At some point in the film, he shouts “Yippe-kay-yay, mothefucker!” before blowing something up. He’s been in four films, each time played by actor extraordinaire Bruce Willis, and all but the third was fantastic. And wouldn’t you know it, he’s returning in a brand-spanking new film!
The teaser poster for “A Good Day to Die Hard”. Looks pretty awesome, especially with the pun.
A Good Day to Die Hard, the fifth film in the franchise, will be released Valentine’s Day 2013 in the States, and it’ll be the first film in the series to take place outside the United States, this time in the heart of our old-enemy-but-now-somewhat-friend Russia. Apparently McClane goes to Russia to see his son Jack (played by Jai Courtney) and somehow, though McClane’s wierd luck, they end up getting involved in a terrorist plot, which makes me wonder what McClane would do if he ever met the people who writes the movies he’s in–you know what, let’s not finish that thought; I just had a bad vision of all my characters from every story I ever wrote coming to get me.
Anyway, the film’s coming out in three months or so, and two trailers have already been released. The first is mostly musical and contains a Bond joke:
The second is less Beethoven-y and more traditional trailer, with hints at the story but not enough that, beyond explosions, we can guess what happens:
Hope you’re as excited as I am, and I also hope the filmmakers can live up to the hype, because I don’t want a repeat of the third Die Hard film, Die Hard With A Vengeance. Let’s face it, even with super-star Samuel L. Jackson, that movie was way too campy for its own good. And that opening! Oy guvalt, that was way too chipper opening music, even if interrupted by a bomb blast!
It’s December 1st, so that means National Novel Writing Month is over. I was in it, then I was out, and then I was in again. I got over 30,000 words written of Snake written, which is not bad at all, especially when you consider all the breaks I had to take for class work and for my part-time job. But hey, I think next year I could make 50k. Who knows?
In the meantime, I’ll work on finishing Snake and publishing Reborn City; I’ll keep my grades up and do well at work; I’ll work on several short stories after Snake is finished; I’ll work on losing some unwanted weight I’ve accumulated over the semester; and I’ll just try to be a better person, I guess. Also, National Short Story Month is in May, about six months from now, so that’s something to look forward to.
And to the people who participated in NaNoWriMo, whether you reached your goal or not, congratulations and I hope you get 50k next year! Let’s work hard as writers and do our best.
Well today we had our last meeting in my English 2265 class, Introduction to Creative Fiction. I don’t think it’ll surprise that many people, but I did very well in this class. Still, it could be difficult at times, especially since I had to write a literary short story with only genre elements. That was rough. Luckily the second draft went very well, so I think that one I could potentially get published.
Well, we did our final critiques and revision exercises in class, someone passed around candy, we filled out some papers meant to grade the teacher (God I love that), and somehow at the end I managed to convince the entire class to join me in a singing of “Hallelujah” by Jeff Buckley. It was pretty funny, actually. After the class I had to listen to that song on my iPod.
I also turned in my final portfolio for the class, which included my initial draft of Doll’s Game, the revision exercise I had to turn in and read to the class, the global revision (or as I call it, the rewrite) and an essay where I went over how I incorporated the material from the critique session into my short story. I think I’m one of the person to turn their portfolio in, so hopefully my teacher will get to it first. I really would like that to be the case, because I want to send Doll’s Game (or as I renamed it, Animal Child) to a certain new magazine I’ve heard about.
This evening at my dorm, we had a program about how Disney might’ve affected our worldviews in a number of ways when we were children. The discussion wasn’t so much to bash Disney as an evil organization that brainwashes children (though that might actually be the case, for all I know), but so much to sit back and tak as educated adults about how Disney may have incorporated certain things into their works, willingly or unwillingly, that changed our outlooks on life. The discussion went through all sorts of topics, from the princess mentality (you saw that coming), sexuality, the villains all are ugly and wearing black, the good looks of the main characters and the sometimes stereotypical ugliness of the villains and minor characters, the differences between men with power and women with power, and it encompassed all sorts of works, from the early Disney films that were obviously about women in traditional roles and love at first sight, to Disney’s current attempts to be more modern and accepting at the expense of the princess of Brave being called a lesbian and the popular TV show Once Upon a Time, which is owned by Disney but takes it old classics and turns them upside down in an interesting fashion.
What we discussed was really interesting and I learned a lot more than I thought I would, and I think everyone else feels the same. Heck, we brought up major criticisms of Aladdin involving stereotypes and mishmashed cultures, and that’s something I haven’t thought about. If you go back and look at some of these old films, you may find yourself seeing things you didn’t see as a kid (I went to Youtube to look at some songs brought up at the discussion, and Good Lord, there were lyrics with more significance than I remember).
Oh, and for those of you wondering how much Disney may have affected me (and consequently my writing), you don’t have to worry; when I first saw those films, I was at an age where I had pretty pictures and sounds to occupy me. I didn’t absorb much beyond that. It wasn’t until I was older that I started absorbing stuff from what I watched, and by then I’d moved onto animes like Sailor Moon and Ronin Warriors. Trust me, it showed in my early writing: when I was ten I tried writing a pirate novel, and a princess ended up joining the crew after they boarded her ship (why she was on the ship or what happened to the crew of said ship or why she joined the pirate crew as an alternative to a dungeon on a magic island or why she was automatically made first mate, I never explained, but I was 10, so go figure), and for a while she was only interested in being a good first mate. Romance didn’t develop till later (or it would have; I never finished that story to tell you the truth).
What about you? Has Disney films affected you in any way?
That includes wondering if your kids should be watching this sort of stuff with all the themes you’re noticing in the storyline and animation, by the way.
Oh, and who in the discussion group said that in the Aladdin song “Arabian nights” there was a lyric about getting ears cut off for ugly faces? I looked, but it’s not in the official movie. It’s in another version though. Look:
Last night before I went to bed, I came up with another idea for a short story. It didn’t involve black dog spirits, but it did strike me as an interesting idea, so I got out a sticky note, wrote it down, and tacked it to the tackboard above my desk. The idea was someone who had an unusual addiction (I’m not going to say what this addiction is, for obvious reasons) and what happened to him when he tried to get clean (again, I’m not going to say what happens to him, just to be mysterious). I considered saving it for my creative writing class next semester, where the teacher has a bigger emphasis on literary fiction than my previous teacher, but I felt this story would be better written with some dark, supernatural elements, and besides, I wouldn’t know how to make the conflict interesting if it was just getting over his addiction (there’s enough stories out there, real and otherwise, that are like that).
This makes fourteen stories if you include the black dog idea that’s still forming in the mess that is my head. And yet with my school and work schedules and trying to write Snake in a timely manner (I started Chapter 68 last night), it’s difficult to find time to write them. I probably won’t even consider starting one of these stories until after I finish the first draft of Snake. So until then, I’ll just have to keep them on the tackboard till then.
But after Snake is finished? Well maybe I’ll do some short story writing. It’ll be fun and good practice for me. And who knows? I could get some of them published in magazines, or I could create a short story collection and put it online as an e-book for $1.99. I really won’t know until I start writing.
Until then, I’ll keep collecting ideas as they come to me. When Snake is done, I’ll have plenty of work to keep me occupied until Reborn City is published and I’m ready to tackle its sequel and editing Snake. And keeping busy is a good thing in my book.
I’m a huge fan of Paradise Lost, ever since we read some of it for class last spring. I enjoyed it so much, I asked my mom to buy me my own personal copy for my birthday, and she did, one with essays and critiques on Paradise Lost and its author John Milton. And this semseter, my documentary teacher gave us two assignments: the first assignment being we had to do a Powerpoint slideshow based on research we did concerning a particular work of literary fiction, and then afterwards create our own book based on pages taken from the book we used for our Powerpoint project (yeah, wierd for a doucmentary course, I know). Since the book we used had to be something that’s a great piece of literature, something that has been looked over by many scholars over the years, I ended up doing PL just because I wanted to break it out again (though thankfully the second assignment hasn’t involved me ripping out pages from my personal copy of PL).
And now I have some free time on my hands, so I’m going to do some editing, and then if there’s time after that before my next class, I’ll work a little bit on Snake just to relax. And guess what? I got Paradise Lost on audiobook, so I’ll be able to test whether audiobooks make great background noise for writing like political debates, hypnosis tracks, and spirituality lectures do. Here’s hoping it works, and that I don’t absorb some of the poetry subconsciously when I thought I hadn’t been paying attention and start to act too proud and pompous.
Rami Ungar The Writer 