horror | Rami Ungar The Writer

Posts Tagged ‘horror’

I Shouldn’t Use Present Tense

Posted: January 26, 2014 in short story, Writing
Tags: editing, entertainment, horror, living and life, scary stuff, science fiction, short story, The Quiet Game, writing

I started a short story the other night about a family that moves into a haunted house (yes, that’s been done before a hundred times, but I’m trying to do something new with it. Hopefully I’ll succeed). For some reason I started writing it in present tense, something I rarely ever do. Most stories, especially the ones I’ve read and the ones I usually write, are in past tense. I think I was trying to make the story unique by writing it in present tense, or maybe it sounded good at first to write it in the present tense.

But as this short story’s been coming along, I’m finding it harder to continue going, and I think the tense of the story is a major contributor to that problem. The only story I’ve ever written that’s been in present tense and that I’ve barely had any trouble with is Addict, one of the short stories I included in The Quiet Game, but that was also in second-person, and that kind of made it easier to write. Heck, it was practically begging to be written in present tense as well in second person (“You walk out of the bathroom and you rejoin your buddy. He asks you a question and for a moment you’re not sure what he said”. See what I mean?). But this is third-person, and I think unless you’ve had a lot of training in writing in present tense or you prefer that tense, then it’s just not the sort of tense you write in.

Okay, the TARDIS doesn’t have much to do with tenses, but it does with past, present and future.

Well, I’ve certainly learned my lesson. I can’t write this story in present tense and I’m definitely not going to attempt to attempt future tense (never seen an entire story of any length written that way). So tomorrow (or the next day, depending on the amount of homework I have), I’m going to through the short story and switch it to past tense. Then I’ll go through it again, adding, editing, and deleting where I see appropriate. Luckily I’m only about seven pages into this short story, so I can probably get both tasks done fairly quickly.

For now though, I’m going to go to bed. I’ll let my mind swirl this short story in my head overnight and see if I can come up with any other ideas to improve this short story. I think it could be great, but since I’m trying to do something new with a familiar trope, I really have to work hard to make the story believable and enjoyable to the audience. Hopefully I can do that.

That’s all for now. I’ll post again when I’m done with the short story, or when I have something else to post about (whichever comes first). Goodnight, Followers of Fear.

Secrets of Ohio State University

Posted: January 22, 2014 in Living and Life, Scary Stuff
Tags: college life, horror, living and life, Ohio State University, scary stuff

I love my university, and I find out things about it every semester that are new and interesting. And some of those things I find out are actually kind of cool. Kind of inspiring. Kind of weird. Kind of creepy. And for all those reasons, I want to share them with you. From secrets tunnels to ghost stories, OSU has got it all. I hope you enjoy an expose on some of Ohio State’s greatest secrets.

There are tunnels under some of the buildings. A couple of the buildings on campus are connected on campus aboveground by connecting hallways. Lazenby and the Psychology Building are connected by their first and second floors, Cockins Hall and the Mathematics Building are connected on most of the floors. But there are some buildings that connected underground. Every building in the Fischer School of Business is supposedly connected by tunnels, and one of those tunnels also supposedly goes to the Blackwell Residence Inn, though you might need a key card for that one. And strangely enough, University Hall and Dulles Hall are connected by a tunnel that goes underneath 17th Ave. I’m not sure why that last one exists, but it’s still pretty interesting. I wish there were more tunnels like that: it’s too cold outside to be walking to classes that way!

Some of the buildings have abandoned and empty pools. Pomerene Hall is one of the oldest buildings on campus, and it’s like a giant castle. However only a fraction of the building is used, and the basement is tiny, which is weird considering the size it technically should be. Turns out the back area used to house a pool that’s been nothing but a dry pit for several years. Explains the size. Pomerene’s not the only building with a pool no longer used: I used to live in Jones Tower, which was a graduate housing facility when it first opened. Back then it had a pool for the grads to use, but due to maintenance costs and injuries at poolside it was closed down. If you walk by the pool’s door today, you can still see the places where people would hang up towels and still hear the sounds of the pipes that would carry water to the pool (at least I think that’s what that noise is).

Ohio State has some hauntings. I save the best for last. Apparently in its 144 year history Ohio State has gathered a few ghost stories and possible hauntings (Ghost Adventures, call the university!). Learning that makes me even prouder of this school I go to. Here are the spooky legends on campus, brought out nine months earlier than usual:

–Pomerene Hall, situated right next to the infamous Mirror Lake, has a very special ghost story of love and tragedy. In the 1900s, Professor Clark committed suicide after a failed mining investment, his body found where Pomerene Hall now stands. His wife swore never to leave him, and when she died in the 1920s, her ghost started appearing around Mirror Lake (on it during the winters). Professor Clark himself is said to haunt Pomerene Hall, slamming lockers and doors and doing other ghostly things.

–Hopkins Hall, the art building on the Oval, has a much more gruesome story. At some point a young woman got stuck into an elevator overnight, suffering a nervous breakdown from the stress and lack of response to her cries for help. During her breakdown, she apparently wrote plenty of weird stuff on the walls of the elevator. She eventually got out, recovered, and then graduated, but not too long afterwards she died in a car crash. To this day, students report seeing writing or scratches in the elevator that say “I’m still mad at OSU for what they did to me.” Scary.

–Orton Hall is one of the oldest buildings on campus and is home to the Geology Department’s famous fossil museum. It also has two ghosts. One is Edward Orton, one of OSU’s earliest professors and the building’s namesake, as well as the man who gifted the Geology Department the core of its collection. When he was alive, he used to read by lamplight in the top of the bell tower (the scorch marks are still there). At night you can sometimes see mysterious lights through the slats of the bell tower, apparently Professor Orton reading in his favorite spot. During the day he supposedly chills the air and makes weird noises in order to get students to behave.

If you look at the cover of The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones, you’ll see that Orton Hall’s bell tower is on the cover.

There is also tales of a hairy, caveman-like figure who makes noises and bangs on doors. Some believe it might be somehow connected to the Geology Museum’s vast collection. Others believe it could be a dead football player, though that may be a more humor-filled supposition.

This post is getting rather long, so I’m going to cut it off now. It’ll be continued in another post. Trust me, I’ve got a few other secrets about Ohio State worth sharing, including some other famous ghost stories and OSU’s connection to a famous serial killer. Until next time, Followers of Fear.

The 3 Types of Terror

Posted: January 18, 2014 in Reflections, Scary Stuff, Writing
Tags: authors, editing, entertainment, films, horror, ideas, novel, reflections, scary stuff, short story, writing

I came across this post by Stephen King on Facebook the other day and I thought it’d be interesting to write about. The post goes like this:

The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it’s when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it’s when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It’s when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there’s nothing there…

Words of wisdom from the King himself.

When I read this, it struck a certain chord with me. I realized that a lot of horror writers and filmmakers can easily gain an understanding of the first two, but it takes a long time to get into the third type, and an even longer time to gain a mastery of it. For example, there are a lot of films out there (of varying quality) that utilize Gross-out and Horror. They have serial killers, they have vampires and demons, but they’re kind of low on terror. The Evil Dead films and many bad slasher flicks are prime examples of this (I’m talking to you, Friday the 13th remake). Even I had trouble with this early on in my writing career. I could easily write a story about vampires or demons that had plenty of blood and fight sequences, but I was lacking in the terror department. Even worse, I rarely thought about including the terror factor, and when I did I didn’t really do it as best as I could.

But at that age though, and in that point of my development as a writer, all I thought I needed was a monster, someone’s life in danger, and the rest would take care of itself. I learned later on that adding terror to the story is a process, something that has to be consciously done before you can go about actually adding it in unconsciously. This is something I’ve had to comprehend with lately and which I’ve been working on with some of my latest stories. With The Loneliest Roads, I tried to put in a sense of unreality and strangeness even before my protagonist entered the limo, and slowly heightened it once she got into the limo. with some of the short stories I’m planning on writing now, I’m looking for ways to increase that terror without seeming silly or absurd. And in future novels, I hope to add that factor in with more skill and precision than I have in the past.

Perhaps adding terror in is the most difficult part of horror writing because, as King said, it’s the worst. It’s what really makes a horror story memorable to those who read or see it, and the thing about it is that it’s often an underlying element in the story, something that’s a factor in the scary elements of the story but rarely the main element. That goes to the Horror, which usually causes in one way or another the Gross-out. But the Terror? It’s what hails the coming of the horror, what prepares you for the jumps and scream the Horror will cause. And getting someone prepared for that can be really difficult, all told.

Although I’m still trying to get mastery of all 3 elements, I’m hoping that in the future I’ll be able to get a better handle on them, and to do that I just have to keep writing, to keep practicing and see where it takes me. As I write, I learn, and hopefully I learn how to tell scary stories much better than I have in the past. It’s an ongoing process, but I feel it’s one I must take part in. Wish me luck.

And for those horror writers out there, how do you deal with the 3 elements listed above? Do you have any advice on utilizing any of them? What?

(Don’t say “limit Gross-out” though, because I’ve already figured that one out. Too many horror films rely on Gross-out as it is, and it’s annoying after a while.)

Buried Alive: Published on WattPad

Posted: January 15, 2014 in Progress Report, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
Tags: authors, blogging, college life, editing, entertainment, horror, living and life, Ohio State University, progress report, publishing, scary stuff, self-pub authors, short story, social media, writing

A while back I wrote a short story I titled Buried Alive, about a girl and her mother and younger sister who are buried in a coffin in the backyard by the girl’s abusive stepdad and what happens to them while inside the coffin. It was a very dark and surreal story and I enjoyed writing it.

Since I wanted to publish something original and previously unpublished on WattPad before I write an article on the website for Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors and leave the subject of the website alone for a while, I thought I’d give Buried Alive the publishing treatment. I even gave a creepy little cover when I published it. Look below.

Creepy, right?

If you’d be interested in reading Buried Alive, please follow the link. And if you like it, hate it, whatever, please let me know in a comment, either here on this blog or on WattPad. I’m always happy for freedback from the people who read my work. Even if they think something I wrote totally sucks and they never want to read anything by me ever again.

Oh, and some updates for everyone: besides that article I mentioned above, I also plan to write a short story, hopefully over this weekend, and I plan to submit it to a writing contest through Ohio State’s English Department. Hopefully it’ll get selected. Also, I’ve sent The Loneliest Roads for critiquing to a friend. Actually, I sent the original version and a second version with an alternate ending, but who’s keeping track? Anyway, my friend will hopefully tell me which version she prefers and give me some advice before I send it out to see if I can get it published. We’ll see what happens.

Well, that’s all for now. I’m off to get ready for bed. Goodnight, Followers of Fear. Pleasant nightmares!

My First Short Story of 2014

Posted: January 13, 2014 in ideas, Living and Life, Progress Report, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
Tags: authors, blogging, college life, editing, entertainment, horror, ideas, progress report, publishing, self-pub authors, short story, social media, Video Rage, writing

A model of the limo I used in the story, except it had cow horns mounted on the front and flames painted on the side.

I just finished my first short story of the new year. And for plenty of reasons, it reminds me of a Stephen King story. I’m hoping that an editor will think the same thing if they read it.

The short story is called The Loneliest Roads and it’s about a hitchhiking young woman who gets picked up by a stretch limo (hence the photo). Once she gets inside, she finds herself in for a whole new world of terror. And it’s a different short story than anything I’ve ever written before. Firstly, it’s after I finished the first draft of Video Rage, which I’ve mentioned in previous posts as being a time where I really grew as a writer. I also utilized new techniques I picked up during the past semester. One was to try to ramp up the terror gradually rather than have my protagonist be immediately confronted with pure evil. I started by trying to make things seem only a little unreal at the beginning, and then making that feeling of unreality grow slightly as the story went on, until it was time to make the terror more than just subtle.

I also tried to delve into the psychological factor of my protagonist, whose name is Miracle Jones (yes, I seriously named my character Miracle Jones). I wanted to make her more than just a flat character, and I did that by delving into her past, focusing on her psychology. I thought the way I revealed her character was actually kind of creepy. Then again, I tend to think everything I write is creepy. Whether it is or not depends on your opinion.

Anyway, I’ve a pretty good idea of what I’m going to do with this short story. I’d like to get around to editing it in a few weeks or so, and maybe sending it off to a friend for a critique. I have a second ending for the story that takes a less positive turn than the one I wrote out tonight, so if I or my friend feels that the ending could be different, I’ll go with my second ending. And after all the editing has been done, I hope to submit The Loneliest Roads to a few magazines, see if any pick it up. I would be very happy if they did. And if they don’t…who knows? It could go into a future collection of short stories or on Wattpad, or both. Future’s open.

For now though, I think I’ll try to catch some sleep. Tomorrow if I can I’ll start on an article for Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors, and after that I’ll start on another short story. It’s going to be very exciting this semester for me. Goodnight, Followers of Fear.

A Confession and Some Updates On My 666th Post

Posted: January 8, 2014 in Living and Life, Progress Report, Reflections, Writing
Tags: authors, blogging, college life, editing, horror, living and life, novel, Ohio State University, online magazine, progress report, publishing, Reborn City, reflections, scary stuff, social media, The Quiet Game, Video Rage, weekly exercises, writing

Yes, this is my 666th post. The fact that I’ve been counting up to this post must tell you a lot about me. I just wish I had something scarier to mark the occasion. I guess the picture to the left of this paragraph will have to do.

I want to make a confession to you on this post, and that confession starts with a little story. Today I met with one of my counselors at Ohio State and she told me she’d read Reborn City over winter break, and that she’d enjoyed it very much. In fact, she told me at times she had trouble putting it down because she wanted to keep reading and see what happened, which explained why she read it so quickly. I’d heard this from someone else who’d recently read RC, so it made me feel pretty good. But at the same time, I also felt pretty incredulous. After all, I wrote this book in high school. It took me about four years to get it ready for publication, and I needed a lot of help along the way from friends and family.

The truth is (and this is the confession part from the title of this post), I’m still trying to figure out what the hell I’m supposed to be doing. I may act sometimes like I’m all experienced in the matters of fiction writing and all that’s terrifying, especially when I’m writing a post for Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors, but I don’t know it all. I have no idea how to get more people to read my blog, or how to get more people to purchase or download copies of my books. I tried with the Weekly Exercises to get people interested in buying my fiction writing and just interested in my writing in general, but it didn’t work out so much (this is part of the reason why I haven’t been writing any Exercises recently, in case any of you were wondering. That, and I didn’t have the time or the inexhaustible well of ideas for so many flash fiction pieces). And I’m certainly not the authority on terrifying people. I’m pretty far from it. I’m still trying to learn how to do a better job of scaring than jumping out to yell BOO! or use a big, scary monster with claws or a serial killer with a knife. There are subtleties to scaring people and doing it well. I’m still learning how to do it.

So I ask that you still support me and help me. I’m working hard to fulfill my dreams and to become a better writer. If you want to read my writing, then I’m happy about that and I thank you for it. And if you never want to read my books because it’s just not what you’re into, then that’s fine. Everyone’s tastes are different.

And now for those updates:

–I’ve written a blurb for Video Rage. For those of you who’ve read Reborn City and enjoyed it, I wrote a short blurb for RC‘s sequel that gives a few hints as to what we can expect for the next book. Unfortunately VR is only listed as Coming Soon, as it’s still in the first draft at this point. Still, if you’re interested in the second book, you can read the blurb here.

–I’ve published a few stories on WattPad. Well, one story, to be exact. Revenge for a Succubus’s Beloved was published about a year ago, and it’s still one of my favorites, so I published it again on the site for others to read if they so desired. The other two publications are previews of The Quiet Game and Reborn City. I hope to publish some original fiction in the coming months on the site, and when I do I’ll let everybody know. If you would like to read The Quiet Game‘s preview, click here. If you want to read RC‘s preview, click here. And if you want to read Revenge for a Succubus’s Beloved (and it’s one of my favorites, so I hope you do), click here.

–My Facebook page has reached 100 likes! Growing and maintaining a Facebook page is not easy, ask any author who has one. Ask any person who has one. And I finally managed to get 100 likes on my own page. Took several months, but I did it. I’d like to thank everyone who’s liked my page and stayed with me through the months. Just like everything else, it couldn’t happen without you. And if you’re interested in checking out my Facebook, follow the link here.

Well, that’s all for now. Have a good night, Followers of Fear. Thanks for reading my 666th post, confession and all. I hope nothing demonic results from you reading it.

100 Ideas!!!

Posted: January 6, 2014 in ideas, Living and Life, Novel, Progress Report, Reflections, short story, Writing
Tags: college life, editing, entertainment, films, horror, ideas, Laura Horn, living and life, novel, online magazine, progress report, proper decisions, publishing, Reborn City, reflections, scary stuff, science fiction, short story, social media, writing

I’ve mentioned this before on my blog, but I keep a list of ideas for novels/comic books/films/TV shows/etc. on my flash drive. And over the past semester, that list grew pretty damn lengthy. In fact, I had more ideas than I did in any other semester. And tonight, I got my one-hundredth idea for the list! And having just typed that, I wonder how I will ever find the time to write all of those stories. I probably won’t, but it’ll be fun to try.

Anyway, the idea for number one-hundred came to me quite by accident (apparently that’s how all the best ideas come). I’ve previously announced that before I get back to working on Laura Horn, I wanted to do some short stories. And before I decided to do those short stories, I decided to take one last look at one short story, maybe see if I could spruce it up a little and possibly publish it on WattPad (I’ve published one or two things on there since I got an account on that website. More on that to follow in a future post). The story in question, Resurrection, is about a man who is brought back to life through advances in science, but something goes terribly wrong and his resurrection isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. That story has gone through several different drafts and incarnations, and I thought I’d give the latest incarnation a look over to see if I could make it better. When I looked over it though, something occurred to me midway through the short story. There’s this one scene when my main character encounters a religious leader who is more than a little upset about this resurrection. I was going to have my protagonist call him an old fart, but with the years he’s been dead, the protagonist is over ninety years old. He should be calling the preacher a stupid kid.

And that’s when it hit me. A short story was too short to tell this story. It had to be expanded, to go into a novella or even a full novel! Resurrection had to be resurrected in a new form.

God, that was a bad play on words.

But that’s beside the point. Here is the point: the last time I trotted out Resurrection and sent it to a friend, he told me that it was an interesting concept and that it could be expanded into a novel or into a film. Oh, that sounded nice. The thing is, I couldn’t figure out how to expand it into a novel, and I didn’t have the time to write a screenplay. And even if I did have the time, I wouldn’t know how to go about getting a screenplay sold (though I might try in the future, when I have the time). But at that single thought on how the main character should think about the preacher, I had an idea on how to expand the story into a novel. I stopped looking through the short story, went to my Ideas list, and recorded Idea #100.

My idea is alive! ALIVE!

I don’t know when I’ll be able to write the novel version of Resurrection, mostly because I have a few other projects that take priorities that take place before it. However, I’m sure it won’t be too long before I get around to it. I like the idea, and I don’t want to be working on this story on and off for several years. I don’t want to do that at all. I really want to write this story eventually and do it sooner rather than later. For now though working on it just won’t be possible, so instead I’ll just leave a few hints as to what we can expect from this future novel:

–some of the themes will include aging, adjusting to a changed and changing world, and death and dying.

–the technology aspect will make Reborn City jealous (then again, the point of RC was never the technology, but whatever).

–the resurrection, though scientific in nature, won’t be plagued by problems of the scientific realm.

–and finally, I may release each finished chapter of this novel, once the book has been heavily edited, on WattPad or on my blog. One of them.

I also hope someday to get to many of the ideas I’ve written on that list. A lot of them I feel are really great ideas, and I would love to write and share them with the world. So the hope is that I can get a good number of them written over the coming years, and that as each novel (or in the future, if God is willing, each film or manga or TV series) is released, there will be someone willing to check it out and read it, maybe even a lot of someones. I think that’s why I keep writing, even if I haven’t exactly been super-successful yet. It’s because I know that each story could potentially make someone happy, and I’m still writing fot hose people. Hopefully we’ll find each other someday and they’ll enjoy what I’ve written for them.

That’s all for now. I’m going to take a break and then get started on an original short story. I’ve got close to seventy ideas for short stories as well, so I need to get some of them out of the way. Good night, Followers of Fear.

How To Quickly Take Out The Scary Element In Your Story

Posted: December 29, 2013 in Reflections, Scary Stuff, Writing
Tags: authors, editing, entertainment, films, horror, ideas, novel, proper decisions, reflections, scary stuff, television shows, writing

(The following post may contain spoilers for several movies, TV shows, and books. However, these movies, TV shows, and books all came out several years ago. Some before I was even born. So if you read ahead and you haven’t seen any of these movies, TV shows, and books despite their availability…well, you’ve been warned)

As a horror writer, I use a number of techniques to keep the terror in a story at its most present and powerful in order to keep the reader enthralled in the story. At the same time, there are a number of ways I could very easily lose that terror element. This post is dedicated to one of them: revealing the villain and everything about them too soon.

Let’s take the movie Friday the 13th for example (the original, not the crappy remake from 2009). In that movie, we don’t find out the identity of the killer until near the very end of the movie, when it is revealed to be Mrs. Voorhees, Jason’s infamous mother. And even after she is revealed to the audience, we don’t know much about her or her motivation until she tries to kill protagonist Alice. Then we know why she’s killing everyone, but by then we’re too terrified to really process that fact. We’re just like, “The old crone’s got a knife! Run!”

Another example is the original Amityville Horror, which did not reveal the nature of the house and its hauntings until later films. So when you see the first film, you are thrust into this maze of nightmarish strangeness that keeps you terrified wondering two things: 1) what the hell is going on? And 2) what the hell is going to happen next?

An even better example than these two is The Blair Witch Project, in which the antagonist is never really revealed. All you get is spooky noises and some weird happenings around the three main characters. This lends the film a very intense element of fear of the unknown, which would be replicated in Paranormal Activity, Slender, Entity, and several other films that utilize found footage as a storytelling technique.

Some films however reveal their villain way too early, and thus cannot utilize fear of the unknown in their stories. Sometimes this can ruin a movie to the point where it’s no longer scary or fun to watch and you end up thinking to yourself “Why am I still watching this?” One example is 28 Days Later. Now I know there are a lot of fans of the movie out there, but one of my biggest problems with it is that the villains were revealed very quickly and that I felt I knew everything about them before the movie was even ten minutes in. From that point on, slow pacing made it hard for me to stay interested and I ended up stopping the movie after an hour.

Another film that suffered from lack of suspense and fear of the unknown is most of the sequels to Nightmare on Elm Street. In the first film, we’re really terrified. We don’t know why these kids are dying, who’s killing them, how they’re being killed. All we know is there’s an evil man killing these kids in their sleep, and that somehow translates over to the real world in a very bloody fashion. The sequels though feature the same villain and he’s killing in the same fashion. Loses a lot of its scare when you know exactly what’s going to happen, you’re just there to see how it happens, if they can scare you when they do it, and what joke Freddy will make right before he kills his victims.

Of course, revealing your villain or too much about them isn’t always a recipe for failure. In Stephen King’s Misery, we meet antagonist Annie Wilkes very early on in the story, yet she’s able to terrify and disgust and chill us very easily. Of course, that might be Stephen King’s magnificent, if somewhat strange, storytelling at play, but it is possible to reveal your villain early on, even let us know all there is to know about them, and still tell a scary story. You just have to be prepared to find some element to replace that mystery and fear of the unknown (and for God’s sake, I hope it isn’t excessive sex or over-the-top gore).

What do you think of using fear of the unknown in horror stories? What are some other examples or exceptions you can think of where keeping the villain hidden until the right time or revealing them too early made or ruined a scary story?

Daisy: Amazon Reviews

Posted: December 29, 2013 in Review, short story, Writing
Tags: authors, editing, entertainment, horror, living and life, publishing, Reborn City, review, scary stuff, short story, The Quiet Game, writing

Some of you know about my short story available for ebook, entitled Daisy. I published it well before I ever published The Quiet Game or Reborn City as an experiment to see what would happen if I published something on Amazon and on Smashwords. Even I admit, I didn’t think it was one of my best works. I wrote it back high school after having a very vivid and disturbing dream, and was determined to see it published one way or another. Why would I do that if I know it’s not one of my best? Maybe because that dream was pure gold for coming up with a creepy story, maybe because I wanted the dream to be a prophecy of things to come. Who knows? All I know is I published it and sold about 219 copies, most of them through Smashwords because it’s free-of-charge there.

Well, since it’s publication it’s got a couple of reviews, most of them through Amazon, and to my surprise most of them are good. I’ve posted already about the one review that I got through Smashwords, so I’d like to dedicate this post to the ones through Amazon. The oldest review, entitled daisy-short story, is three stars and written by Richard Warren, who is my grandfather and is not afraid to criticize my work if he feels it’s inadequate. Here’s what he had to say:

Interesting, but could be better. Holds the reader, I would like the story to be longer & a bit more in depth

I think when I wrote this, it was in the days where I was afraid to write short stories over five-thousand words because I was afraid that they’d be rejected for length regardless of the quality of the story. That might explain why it’s not very lengthy or in-depth, Grandpa. Still, I appreciate the feedback. The next review comes from Lorna Dounaeva, another independent author and blogger here on WordPress. Giving Daisy a whopping five stars and entitling her review Scary short story with some great touches of realism, here’s what she had to say:

When a young girl, Marie is abducted by a stranger, she knows she has to figure out a way to escape. She manages to get out of the room where she is being held, but the man, who calls her ‘Daisy’, thinking she is his lost love, has boarded up all exits. Marie is left with a terrible dilemma – should she make a run for it, or hide in the building and wait it out? How long will she have to wait before the man lets his guard down and she gets her chance to escape, and how will she survive in the mean time?

Sounds like the blurb for a movie, Lorna. Thank you for your review. And most recently, we have my cousin A. Frankel, who just gave Daisy a five star review (which makes me wonder if she’s just being nice or if she really feels the way she feels about it). Entitling her review Very creepy, this is what she had to say:

This book is scary! Don’t read it late at night or you’ll be up all night! It was a good book–very well written

I like the idea of being able to keep someone up all night just by my scary writing. And I’m glad you think it’s well-written. I really appreciate it, A. Frankel.

But like I was saying earlier, I didn’t think much of this short story even though I decided to publish it. So when people actually take the time to read it and post a positive review, I not only feel grateful, but I also feel slightly bemused that people think so highly of it. I guess it’s true what they say: every author is the worst judge of their own work. But really, thanks to all the people who’ve post reviews of Daisy on Amazon. It means a lot to me and I always appreciate your feedback.

If you would like to read Daisy, it’s available from Amazon for ninety-nine cents and from Smashwords for no charge. If you like it or hate it, please make sure to post a review on either website and let me know. I always appreciate feedback, as this post has shown. Have a lovely day, everybody.

The Quiet Game: Review No. 8

Posted: December 22, 2013 in Review, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
Tags: entertainment, horror, Ohio State University, publishing, Reborn City, review, scary stuff, short story, The Quiet Game, writing

Another review has come in at Amazon for my collection of short stories, The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones. This one comes from Jeff D., who is a fellow Ohio State student, a coworker, and a friend of mine. He finally got around to reading The Quiet Game, and he wrote a review on Amazon tonight, which he gave five stars (Thank you Jeff D., if you’re reading this!). The review, which he titled 5/5, read as such:

5 wonderfully crafted tales! I purchased this as an eBook originally and put off reading it for quite a while, I really wish I hadn’t waited. Sometimes when one purchases a collection of short stories you expect some of them to be less entertaining or of lower quality than the others, but none of these disappoint. Well worth the money, especially considering after you read each story the author gives you creative insight into what inspired him to write each tale, which is really wonderful.

Jeff D., this is probably one of the best reviews I’ve ever received! I’m glad you think they’re all extraordinary stories. And best yet, Jeff D. says he’s going to buy a print copy of Reborn City when his next paycheck comes in. Oh, I can’t wait to sign that copy!

If you’re interested in checking out The Quiet Game, it’s available on Amazon and on Smashwords in both print paperback and e-book formats. And whatever you think, please let me know by leaving a review. Good reviews, bad reviews, I don’t care. I love getting feedback from readers. And if you like The Quiet Game, check out Reborn City, also available from Amazon and Smashwords.

Rami Ungar The Writer

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