I’ve been meaning to write this post for two days, but Sunday was nuts, and Monday wasn’t much better (though I did see Iron Man 3). In any case, I wanted to talk about something I noticed while working on Chapter 47 of Snake. In that chapter, the Snake gains an unlikely ally, and she goes out of her way to help him escape from the police. As I was looking over the chapter, I was puzzled by some of the things I was reading. I couldn’t figure out why I had written a character doing or acting a certain way, so I had to go back and explain in detail why the character had taken that action. As I did this, I realized something: this wasn’t the first time I’d done this.
I have this bad habit sometimes with my writing. I’ll forget that unlike me, my readers don’t know everything about the story or the characters. So what makes sense to me won’t make sense to the readers because they don’t know the same things I know. What’s worse is I sometimes do this with my characters as well: I’ll have my characters think about what a character did or is doing right now, not realizing that I hadn’t planned on revealing that until later, so it’s weird that the character should know that.
I’m sure this has happened to all writers, but it’s still embarrassing for me (and I’m sure for many others) when it happens. In fact, while writing this post I realized another moment in that same chapter that I have to fix up because of one of these instances occurs there and I totally didn’t realize it until just now. I hate having to admit it, but it’s true, so as soon as possible I’ll get into that chapter and fix that little problem up.
I guess the important thing is not to let these moments bog you down or make you think you’re a terrible writer. Just go back, fix it up, and try to keep these instances in mind so you don’t repeat them in the future. That’s what I’m going to do, anyway.
Has this ever happened to you? How do you feel about it?
It’s been a while since I’ve had anything to really write about, but I have something now. While I moved out of the dorms on Tuesday afternoon, I did not recieve my final grades till just now, so I’m writing this post now which some of you may have been eagerly anticipating. Others of you may also care less, but I hope you read this post anyway.
So anyway, a whole semester went by a little too fast if you ask me, but I did very well. I got a 3.3 GPA, an improvement by 0.1 from last semester. I didn’t get all the As I wanted, but I’ll work for that this coming semester. I did very well in Creative Writing with an A and American Literature with an A-. I also met some really awesome professors and learned a whole bunch.
I also worked hard on finishing up The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones and I’m now waiting for the copyright. Also, thanks to my friend Matthew Williams, Reborn City is close to having its final draft finished, and Snake is getting its 3rd draft. I’m a busy guy, but with all this effort I’m putting in, I should have RC out by the holidays and Snake by summer 2014 (hopefully).
In the meantime, I’m going to be working in the financial aid office at Ohio State like I did last summer, and I’ll be writing when I have the chance. Plus I’ll probably be seeing plenty of movies and reading a lot of books, so expect reviews. And let’s not forget I’ll hopefully be getting a Kindle, so if you want me to read your books, better start bribing me now.
So here’s to the start of summer. Let’s hope it all goes well.
I’ve always wanted a snake in a basket. Yes I’m strange, but you already know that, right?
I’ve been busy lately. Exams, preparing for two summer jobs, and a recent addiction to Doctor Who, plus all my normal writing and editing obligations. I’ve been one busy guy, but I wanted to take a break to share with everyone how the editing job for the third draft of Snake is coming along, especially since the main aim of this draft was to add more depth and history to some of my characters.
So far, mission accomplished. I’m about halfway through the draft, I’ve written one of the two new chapters I meant to write, and I’ve gone into some depth into the characters’ personalities and history. I’ve definitely had some fun working on Allison, my heroine, exploring where she got her feisty attitude and seeing how it’s been affected by her ordeal. At the same time, I’m still searching for the right place to insert some more back story between my killer and the heroine, because there’s a lot there that I need to add in for the relationship to make sense.
Oh well, I have 54 chapters to go. I should be able to figure something out and insert those parts (and for those of you with your mouths open right now because I said 54 chapters, don’t worry because most don’t make it past five pages). And by adding all this character history, the characters become more real, their actions make more sense, and their struggles make them that much more endearing.
Except in the case of the killer. In that respect, you find the Snake more creepy and fascinating at the same time. At least that’s my take on him. He’s changed so much from when I first created him. He’s definitely not the same character I created back in June last year.
Well, there you have it. I’m going to hopefully do some more work on Snake tonight, but first I’m going to grab some dinner. Can’t edit on an empty stomach, am I right?
As most of you are aware, I have three works of fiction on their way to publication, and at various stages of that progress. Since there has been significant progress made in all three works on their roads to publication recently, I thought I’d give you all an update of each work, in the order they’ll most likely be published in. So here we go:
The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill YourBones
The last time my collection of short stories came up in a post, I think I’d sent it to the copyright office so that I could sue anyone who used it without permission after publication. Getting a copyright through the US Copyright Office takes about two and one-half months, so I’m about a month and one-half of the way through the wait. When I do get the copyright, I plan to do a month-long countdown, and then upload The Quiet Game onto Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, and other sites. It’ll be available for about $1.29, which is about the same as an iTunes song, but better because you get five short stories in one neat little package.
If you want to like the Facebook page for The Quiet Game, you can follow this link:
And if you want to watch my home-made trailer for The Quiet Game, please watch the video below.
Reborn City As I’ve mentioned before, my friend Matt Williams (author of the phenomenal novel Whiskey Delta, now available on Amazon) is critiquing each chapter of RC and giving me feedback. Just yesterday in fact, Matt sent me Ch. 17, leave less than ten chapters left. After I’ve finished editing the entire novel based on Matt’s evaluation, I plan on creating a cover, a Facebook page, and a trailer, just like I did for The Quiet Game. Plus of course the whole copyright process will be repeated for RC.
And for those of you who don’t know what RC is about, it’s the first novel in a trilogy taking place several years in the future and follows a street gang whose leaders have strange abilities and their strange connection with a shadowy military company. I hope it’ll gain an audience, especially given some of the themes in the story.
Snake My thriller novel about a serial killer hunting members of a certain New York mafia family is in the middle of a third draft, the point of which is to go into deeper character development and character history for the main characters. Once that’s done, I’ll probably put it through one more draft before I get ready to copyright it and publish it. And by the way, I think this novel is some of the scariest work I’ve ever done, and also some of the best.
I hope your interests are piqued by what you’ve read here today. I hope to publish The Quiet Game soon and to have RC ready soon, so wish me luck and keep reading the blog for updates. Thanks and I’ll write another post later. I’ve got an errand to take care of.
This is a rather unique question, and one that came up very unexpectedly for me. You see, I heard from some friends and teachers–all published writers as well–that James Patterson, author of the famous Alex Cross books and a few YA books whose names I tend to forget–that Patterson uses ghost writers to help get all his work done, which is how he’s able to publish 9 books a year. At first, I didn’t want to believe it, but then I did some research and sure enough, I found a NYT article about this “collaboration”. And it broke my heart.
Should he work alone or should he work with ghost-writers? Most would say “no”.
Now, collaboration isn’t always a bad thing. Technically speaking, my friend Matt looking at Reborn City is a collaboration. Dave Berry and Ridley Pearson wrote a children’s reimagining of Peter Pan together, and it is certainly not a “technical” collaboration. And who can forget the legendary meeting of the pens of Stephen King and Peter Straub?
But those were collaborations that everyone knew about, everyone agreed to, and the fans were fine with. Most fans are still unaware of these Patterson collaborations, who he’s working with, and he gets all the credit. And it explains why the last couple of Alex Cross books haven’t been exactly up to par.
And we, the fans, are the ones who hurt the most. After all, we expect that the writing is original and from the author. And it’s…not. It’s a ghost-writing collaboration that is making the rounds on the Internet and that nobody really wants. We feel a little betrayed. And yet I still want to read his work, with hope that Patterson will someday return to writing on his own and doing what he does best, even if it means he’s not putting out nine blockbusters a year.
I’m not sure why Patterson does this–though I think money has something to do with it–but I hope that he cuts it out soon. It’s not what the fans want, it’s hurting the quality of his work, and honestly, if I were him I wouldn’t want this. I wouldn’t want to be working with several different ghost-writers and spending less time on the actual work just so I can be prolific and get a ton of money in. I mean, I plan to be prolific, but I plan to be prolific on my own, not with the help of other writers. Why can’t Patterson do the same?
What’s your take on these collaborations? Is it a good thing or a bad thing?
Is that the creepiest title I’ve ever written for a post or what?
Today while editing Snake, I thought I’d listen to some music off of YouTube (I’ve still no handle on Pandora or Spotify, if that’s what you’re wondering) when one of those three-minute ads came up. Normally I skip those ads, but I decided to check it out once I heard that the man speaking in the beginning of the ad was a forensic sketch artist for the FBI (guaranteed to get my attention, right?). The ad is below, and I strongly encourage you to watch it before going any further.
Let’s go over something very interesting about this ad: when the women in the ad described themselves to the artist, they tended to focus on the features they disliked about themselves. The resulting sketches then embodied those aspects and didn’t really match the actual women. But the people they’d become friendly with prior to the sketching, when they described these women to the sketch artist, they tended to focus on what made these women beautiful, what these newly-made acquaintances liked about these women. The portraits therefore were very beautiful and more closely resembled the women.
This is the guy who talks to his mirror image. If you’re familiar with his anime, you know he’s got a lot of work to do on himself.
Now despite being a Dove commercial (and not even Dove chocolate), I found myself really liking this commercial. I also found myself remembering something from an anime I’d watched years ago, where a character had a discussion with a mirror image of himself while trapped in another world (typical of anime, right?). The character was told that he represented how he saw himself, while his mirror-image was how others saw him. They were very different representations of the same character, but they were still the same person.
And that got me to thinking. Yes, dangerous activity, but I think anyway. We all focus on different aspects of ourselves and aspects of others. When we focus inward and look at ourselves, we often see what we don’t like about ourselves. For me, it’s my constant battle with zits and keeping off the weight I gain because I can’t resist those sweets. However when we focus on others however, we tend to focus on what we like about them, especially when we like them. When I think of a couple of friends of mine, I usually think about their height that I’m so jealous of or their smiles, and that twinkle they get in their eyes when they do smile.
So what does that tell us? Perhaps that we focus on ourselves and point out what keeps us from attaining some measure of perfection that society expects from us, and that we look for the good in others because that’s what we want for ourselves. It’s a possibility, although it’s not a nice one. Perhaps it also tells us that while we’re critical of ourselves, we love seeing the good in others, because it reminds us of the good in others, or the good we’re working to attain. That’s certainly a better take on things, right?
It’s also very true of some of the characters in my stories. Take Reborn City, for example: my heroine Zahara Bakur sees herself as a timid girl who gets easily scared when violence rears its head and can’t be relied upon when the chips are down. Her friends however see her as a very innocent but very strong girl, close to her faith and resourceful when the chips are down. Who’s right? Both actually: Zahara is nonviolent and doesn’t like to get herself into conflict, but she’s also quick-thinking and her faith supports her when times get bad. In addition, she likes to see the good in everyone, which can be a real comfort when you’re in a gang and people tell you that you’re a waste of space. In her own way, she’s helping people, all without a gun.
In addition, the titular character of Snake is also very multifaceted, though he and the people around him are more aware of that than Zahara is. The Snake is certainly gentle to those he cares about and is capable of compassion, but to those who pose a threat to him or those he loves he can be very dangerous. He’s also aware that he’s mentally unbalanced and that he’s also quite possibly evil, but at the same time he wants to at least use his evil for a good purpose. My heroine Allison Langland, who knows the Snake very well, is aware of his evil, but is also aware that he’s actually a very good guy. He’s sociable, he’s self-deprecating, and he’s responsible. She has to reconcile this with the fact that the main character is also a vicious killer capable of torture and murder, but she prefers his good side, because that’s the side she sees as the real Snake, and it’s the side that she thinks is the true hero.
To put my metaphor better, we are all something like this. Good or bad, our own perceptions or other perceptions. We just have to act on those to really get to know who we are.
So what does this say about all of us? For starters, we are not the sum of our features or our flaws, and we are not the sum of what others see in us. We are a combination of those ideas of ourselves, and we are what we use all those ideas about us for. For Zahara, she is the girl who can bring light to people living in the dark, even if she hates anything involving violence; for the Snake, he’s a monster doing good in the only way he knows how, even if it damns him; and for me, I’m trying to lose the weight, wash my face at least once a day, and write stories that people empathize with. We’re all combinations of our own perceptions, the perceptions of others, and what we use those perceptions for. Once we figure all that out, I think we can achieve a level of peace and live our lives in a way that’s conducive to us and those around us.
I’ll try to keep that in mind the next time I’m getting ready for bed and I see that one zit on my nose or how much weight I’ve gained this semester.
I’ve seen two comedians live at Ohio State these past two weeks, plus one episode of Saturday Night Live. One of those comics was Max Brooks, author of The Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z. When he came to Ohio State, he talked about how he put the former of those two books in the humor section. Why? Because people will think it was funny, but as they start reading it, they’ll realize it’s a serious guide to suriving zombies and what not to do during a zombie apocalypse, even if it seems obvious. And he did it all by presenting his work as a stand-up comedy show.
Max Brooks uses comedy to get works about us sold. How weird is that?
People tell me I’m a funny guy.
Or that sometimes I tell good jokes.
Okay, they tell me I can tell a good joke every now and then.
Occasionally.
Once in a blue moon.
The point is, I’ve seen enough stand-up comedy to know how to do it myself. Occasionally I’ve even done my act in front of friends and fellow dorm residents. Usually I get some laughs, and that encourages me. In fact, last night I invited a few friends to my room and put on a show for them based on my own angry sarcasm and my experiences writing horror and how troublesome selling indie horror can be.
Did they laugh? Yes! They laughed, and offered me some good advice that I proceeded to act upon. The result: plenty of laughs.
Could this be the key to selling my work? Through laughter.
So I’m thinking, if I can’t use the horror persona of a creepy but brilliant writer to sell my work, why not be a disgruntled comedian on a stage? It could work.
So this summer I’ll practice, and then I’ll take the stage. Maybe I’ll even get a few laughs and some sales, especially if I use YouTube. One can hope, at the very least.
What do you think? Do you think comedy can help me with my writing?
Happy Birthday to the true home of the Jewish people. May you last for ages to come.
Oh, and before I forget…Happy Israeli Independence Day. The State of Israel was founded 65 years ago today, becoming a beacon of hope for Jews everywhere. It is also one fo the most prosperous, green, technologically advanced and democratic nations in the Middle East (and in Israel, you can say otherwise without getting jailed for it) and I hope it lasts for another 65 years or longer. Happy Birthday, Israel. You’re doing great these days.
I know what you’re thinking: He got another award? But that’s not the case. You see, I made up my own award! I thought it’d be interesting if I created my own Internet meme and saw how far I went. Hence, the Black Dragon Award, an award for any author who has written any form of fiction that’s got something scary in it.
So here are the rules for the Black Dragon Award:
1. You must have written something scary or featuring something scary in the past year. (This can range from being a simple murder mystery to a full-on zombie novel with a wizard and serial killers mixed in for variety). Note that whatever work you’ve created will be the subject of several of the questions below.
2. You must thank the person who nominated you and then link back to their blog.
3. You must answer the 10 questions below on your own blog post.
4. Finally, you must nominate at least 5 other authors for the award and then notify them of it.
Okay, time for the questions. Enjoy:
1. What is the premise of the novel you’ve written? My novel Snake, which I spent half of 2012 writing, is about a serial killer hunting down members of a certain Mafia family in New York. Why is he doing this is for the reader to discover as they read. It’s pretty scary.
2. How long did it take you to write it? I spent six months from June to December 2012 working on Snake. It was a lot of fun, but I’m still on the editing phase, and that can be a pain in the ass sometimes. I’m about to start on the third draft (God help me) and I’m going to be adding a lot of material for character history and character development. It’s going to be hard work.
3. Which character(s) are you most like? I think I’m most like the Snake (he’s somewhat based on me, after all). But at times I wish I was like the female lead, Allison. She’s a tough girl, but she’s got her nice side to her. I can’t help but fall for her.
4. What’s the scariest thing you’ve read/seen lately? Honestly, it was that ghost I saw the other night. That was freaky! I wish I could show what I saw to the Ghost Adventures crew.
5. What’s something you’re reluctant to write about? I’m not sure. Perhaps rape scenes. Those are tough, and they really touch a chord that even veteran writers don’t want to touch. If I ever do write a rape scene though, it’ll probably be for the purpose of showing the horrors of rape and the attitudes around it.
6. If you could take characters from other works and insert them into an original story of your own design, who would you take and what would you have them do? I’d like to take Dr. Hannibal Lecter and Jason Voorhees and have them become reluctant allies. I’d probably kill off Clarice Starling early, though (I prefer Will Graham to Clarice Starling). Hey, that’d be the impetus for the events of the story. Jason could fall in love with Starling, and when she dies, Lecter and Jason could go on a revenge-fueled killing spree. That’d be interesting…and fun to write.
7. Do you envision a sequel to your novel? I’d like to write a sequel for Snake, but not for a long while. I like to take breaks when I’m working on a series, put some time between each book in the series. It’s good for my noggin that way.
8. What first got you into writing? And what got you writing scary subject matter? I think Harry Potter got me into writing, but it was Stephen King and Anne Rice who got me into writing scary stuff. I think my mother was happy that I loved those writers so much (we read a lot of the same things) but I think my dad was (and still is) probably worried about some of the subjects I write about.
9. What scares you personally? Spiders. Not the tiny ones, but the ones where you can make out the details on their faces. Close-ups of spider faces I saw back in 4th grade gave me nightmares for ages.
10. What are your future plans? Finish editing Snake, release my collection of short stories The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones, and also finish editing and release Reborn City. After that, I’d like to work on RC‘s sequel, if you don’t mind.
Okay, and now for the nominees:
1. Stories by Williams.
2. A Portia Adams adventure
3. nightmirrors
4. Pat Bertram’s Blog
5. self-publish bible
Let’s hope this award takes off–with your help, anyway. Congratulations to the winners and good luck with your own posts.
I had a bit of a revelation last night, but I haven’t been able to share it until now. So without further ado, here’s my revelation:
Last night I was watching the second episode of the new TV series Hannibal, which for those of you who don’t know is a prequel to the Hannibal Lecter novel Red Dragon. As I watching it I was seeing all these little things they were doing to develop the characters that the author of Red Dragon, Thomas Harris, hadn’t done when he originally wrote the novel. It struck me then that I had committed a grevious error in my own serial killer thriller, Snake: I hadn’t gone into any sort of character development whatsoever.
I hadn’t gone into the pasts of any of the characters, only focusing on the events of the story and what immediately precipitated those events. I had not gone into any detail on why the Snake was so twisted, why the female lead was so defiant and spunky, why the villain was who he was, none of that! I’d left it all up to the imaginati0n of the reader, but now I realize that might’ve been a mistake. I mean, the reasons why we emotionally invest in characters is that we want to know them, not just what they do in a story.
So I’m going to go over the manuscript one more time and see where I can add in more character development. Perhaps then I know it’ll be ready for publication. Heck, my beta reader’s on board with it, so why not?
I’ll let you know how things go after the third draft is done. Hopefully it’ll all go well.
I woke up yesterday morning and was filled with memories of some of my old attempts at writing, the first fiction stories I ever wrote, and how they shaped and defined me over the years, and how I got to this point in my writing.. I wanted to write a post about them, but with all that was going on yesterday, I didn’t have the time. Well, better now than never, right?
The first time I tried to write anything, I must’ve been five or six, eight at the most. I had just seen Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone for the first time and then read the book, which was infinitely better. My mind was blown, and I could only think to myself, “I want to write something like that”. So I did, creating a similar story to HP1 except with the genders of the characters switched (even then, I had a thing for strong female leads, I guess). I called this obvious copyright violation Amanda Robinson, I gave her a cat instead of an owl, and I planned that the cat was a prince in cat form who would be my main character’s love interest at the end of the book, but beyond that same basic plot as HP1. I didn’t finish this work, either because I had the good sense to stop before I got sued or because at that point in my life I couldn’t keep my focus on any one project for very long. But it did spark my interest in writing, which only grew as time went by.
My next major project was a pirate adventure story called Bane Nycroft and the Maelstrom Pirates (I’m not sure if this one was inspired in any way by Pirates of the Caribbean, but it’s a possibility). That story featured a lycanthropic teenage pirate with a stolen Navy ship, leading a band of fellow orphans on the high seas and stealing from rich government banks and fighting monsters and demons. Along the way the pirate picks up a rebellious princess and they discover an island where all sorts of strange and magical creatures reside, and eventually they take on a prince who’s actually a demon in disguise. This one went through several rewrites, each rewrite growing more supernatural as time went by. Eventually I lost interest, but more than Amanda Robinson, Bane Nycroft gave me a taste of what professional fiction writing was like.
After that came the Davis trilogy, a couple of vampire novels that were inspired by the movie Van Helsing. In those novels, which fused a lot of the Buffy mythology to Van Helsing and my own twisted imagination, a teenager commits suicide after seeing his crush with her boyfriend. The teenager makes a deal with the Devil to become a vampire and take over the world and make the girl his vampiric bride. The girl, on her way to becoming a vampire, must band with her boyfriend, her older brother, and her best friend, who happens to be a witch, to stop this horrible vampire from turning the world into permanent darkness. I actually got to the third book with this one, but at that time the slow realization that nobody would want to publish such a confusing story that ripped off so many works came over me. Plus as I got further along the story got more and more sexualized, which sort of corresponded with where I was at that point in my teenage years.
I wasn’t entirely finished with the vampire mythology though, and almost immediately afterward I began work on Mahiro, which in my opinion had the first inklings of the style of writing I have today. In it a teenage boy travels to an alternate universe inhabited by vampires. While there, he is found by Mahiro, the queen of vampires, who takes a liking to him and turns him into a vampire. But before she can finish the ritual and take his soul, he escapes and finds the human resistance, where he assembles a team of crack fighters to help him take on Mahiro and perhaps find a cure for vampirism. At the same time, he must deal with a romantic triangle, being drawn both to his girlfriend, whom he left on the other side of a dimensional portal, and an equipment tech with some terrific sharp-shooting skills. It was promising, but at that point Twilight was hugely popular and was gaining more fans everyday. As a consequence the number of vampire books out there was astronomical, and I didn’t want to compete with that. With that in mind, I shelved Mahiro until a time I could bring out the characters again and rewrite the story. Until then, no vampires for me.
There was also a poorly-researched caveman story and a Frankenstein-esque horror story I wrote in between Bane Nycroft and the Davis trilogy, plus some attempts at zombie literature. Other than that, those were the main works that preceded the creation of Reborn City, which I’ve stuck with up until now and I’m happy to say will be published as soon as the beta reading period is over, I can create a cover, format the whole darn thing, and get a copyright.
Over the years, I’ve written a lot. My writing style’s changed drastically since I started writing fiction, and I’ve incorporated new elements to my work with every author I’ve read and every experience I’ve gone through. I wonder what the kid who sat in front of the old Windows 97 computer hen-pecking out a Harry Potter rip-off would say if he saw me now and what my writing’s like (probably “Why aren’t you living in a mansion yet?”). I hope to continue to grow in my writing and to create awesome and scary works. And perhaps, unlike my previous work, the characters will be college students or even full adults instead of teenagers. That’d be a break from the past!
Rami Ungar The Writer 