Posts Tagged ‘publishing’

Now I’m On Twitter

Posted: January 11, 2013 in Living and Life, Progress Report, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
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If the me of a year ago knew what I was doing these days, he may have a heart attack. Or possibly slap his future self. Or some combination of that.

Yes I, Rami Ungar, resistant to new technology and social media crazes, have gotten a Twitter. Why? For the same reason I got a Facebook: to spread my writing to those who may not be on this blog but may be on other social media websites. This twitter account of mine, @RamiUngartheWriter, will focus exclusively on my writing. Already I’ve published a couple of tweets advertising my upcoming collection The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones. I’m very excited and I hope I gain a followship soon. You’re welcome to follow me if you like. Just know this: I’ve got a scary picture as my profile pic and it may cause some nightmares.

And no, it’s not of my face. Much scarier than that.

Also, I don’t know if any of my blog followers got a notification (do they send notifications for pages?), but I set up a new page that lists my upcoming books. Which means of course at this point only The Quiet Game is on that list, without even a picture, but I plan to rectify that soon. Check it out if you like, and have a great weekend.

“The Quiet Game” Page Is Now On Facebook

Posted: January 10, 2013 in Progress Report, short story, Writing
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Ha ha ha ha!

I’ve set up a page on Facebook for my upcoming collection of short stories, The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones. Granted, it’s not much yet since I only started advertising today, and I barely have anything to speak of. Hopefully soon though I’ll have plenty of updates to give and I’ll be able to spruce up the page a little bit. In the mean time, I hope you’ll all log onto Facebook and perhaps check the page out. Perhaps press the Like button if you’re sincerely interested. It would definitely make me happy if you did.

Oh, and for those of you wondeirng about the picture of the mask of comedy, that’s relevant to one of the short stories in the collection. You guessed it, the titular one.

“The Quiet Game”: Coming Soon!!!

Posted: January 10, 2013 in Progress Report, short story, Writing
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I was reading an article on promoting your published work last night before bed, and one of the things it mentioned is that you should promote your work as much as possible, even before the actual book comes out. A year would be best for this. However I’ve got anywhere from 3-6 months to get my collection of short stories out, so I’ve got some work to do. And I’d like to start here on my blog, where everyone’s been so supportive and kind to me. So here goes:

Coming soon to a digital book store near you, The Quiet Game. A tentative subtitle would be: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones. I’ve got five short stories that I’m definitely putting into this collection of short stories, and a few I might add in as bonus material. You’ll be able to download each short story individually, if you’re so inclined, but if you download the entire collection, you’ll be able to read notes I’ve put at the end of each short story, thoughts of what was going through my head while writing this short story, and special illustrations I’ll have commissioned for each story.

Not only that, but the collection won’t be much more expensive than an iTunes song, so it should be pretty affordable to you. I hope I can count on your continued support, and I hope to have more on this as time goes by and the final product comes into being. Wish me luck and thanks for being there for me all this time.

The Fifth Short Story For The Collection

Posted: January 9, 2013 in Progress Report, Reflections, short story, Writing
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Oh, my winter vacation assignment is done! Sure, it ended three days into the new semester, but I blame that on the fact that I had to wait until I got some research materials. Either way, Step 1 of creating this collection is done, so I’ll have to get to work on the next step in publishing a collection. But first, let’s talk a bit on this final short story:

The story is called “Enigma”, a title with many different meanings. For example, the main character, whom I named Jason, is a young boy with autism, and if there’s a medical disorder that can be called an enigma, autism qualifies. Current estimates suggest that 1 in 88 children might have some sort of autism-spectrum disorder, and yet the causes of autism, while most likely genetic in nature, are still unidentified. And every person with autism is unique in what they react to, how to treat them, and how they develop with or without treatment. It’s an enigma just figuring out all that!

There are other reasons why Jason is called an enigma, but I’m not going to get into that because it’ll reveal too much of this story, and we don’t want that. I will say though that this story draws a lot on Native American belief systems, especially Navajo belief systems, and uses a black dog spirit, or more specifically, a wolf spirit, which was believed to be an emissary of death in Navajo culture. According to the Navajo, death entered the world when mankind killed a wolf, so it made sense that wolves were associated with death. And I get to work that belief into the short story, so I’m definitely happy I did the research.

I’ll probably give this short story another look before I send it off to a friend who knows quite a bit on autism and other related disorders to look at and critique. I want to make sure that the story is being told from the perspective of a child with autism, and I want to see if I can heighten the tension during certain scenes. Maybe I’ll also work on the ending a little more.

Well, I’m done writing short stories for a little while, at least ones that won’t be used for creative writing classes. I’ll let you know how my collection is coming along, and hopefully it’ll be out by the time I start editing Snake in March. Wish me luck.

Taking Risks According to Anne Rice

Posted: January 6, 2013 in Living and Life, Reflections, Writing
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Ever since I decided to skip the traditional publishing route and go into self-publishing, I’ve had people in my head and people I’ve known for years telling me that it’s a big risk, especially since depending on how I do it I could end up spending a lot of money and not get a lot out of it. Sometimes these voices do worry me.

But I stay optimistic, I stay strong, and I plug ahead without hesitation or fear. And I think things will work out for me. Sometimes you just got to take risks and say “F**k it, I’m going to do it.” Which is definitely my intention.

And if you don’t believe me, believe Anne Rice. She’s taken her own shares of risks in her lifetime, and she’s willing to talk about them.

Getting Ready For A New Workshop

Posted: January 6, 2013 in Living and Life, Progress Report, short story, Writing
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I signed up for another creative writing course this semester, though this one you have to apply and submit a portfolio to get in. The teacher was worried that I’d be unable to do well in the class because the focus of the class is literary fiction and genre fiction, which I prefer. But hey, some of my ideas straddle the border between literary and genre, so I might just survive.

In the meantime, I’m looking forward to the first class. I volunteered to write a short story and submit it to the class to be workshopped on the first day. The short story I’m submitting is “Addict”, one of the short stories I wrote during winter vacation. “Addict”, for those of you who don’t know, is based on some of the experiences of a friend of mine who was addicted to sex and pornography, and I plan on adding it to a collection of short stories I hope to put out by the end of the semester.

“Addict” is literary enough that I can submit it to the class and have them take a look over it. Just earlier today, I decided to take one more look at it before I submit it. I’m hoping they like this story; I wrote it out in a day, and it’s rare for me to be able to write any short story that quickly with that sort of flow. Whether they like it or not, I think it has potential, but I’m glad I’m having somebody look at it beforehand, because then I get an unbiased opinion.

I’ll let you know what the class thinks when I’m done with the workshop. Hopefully I won’t have to do too much editing, though that’s usually easier than the writing.  At least I’ll get the workshop out of the way rather quickly, and on the plus side, I’ll be able to set the tone of the class for a bit with this short story.

All for now. Blog on you later.

Another Short Story Idea Has Come To Me

Posted: January 1, 2013 in ideas, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
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Too bad I can’t add it to the collection of short stories I’m writing and assembling.

I just recently read The Dibbuk Box, the book by the current owner of the haunted box of Jewish origin that was the basis for the film The Possession, and then somehow had the good fortune to enter into contact with him. After that I started watching a scary movie or two involving possessions and watching a video on YouTube that was about an exorcism. During this time I started thinking about possession, and then a great idea occurred to me: what would happen if the possession was turned on its head? What if the demon ended up needing the exorcism? Needing it?

So I have a new short story idea that I’ll begin to write soon, possibly tomorrow since I can’t work on the next story for the collection until I’ve finished my research. I’ll probably write the story from the point-of-view of the demon, and I’ll also have to figure out what I want to do once the possession begins. Of course, I can’t add this to the collection; I’ve already written a dybbuk story for the collection, and two stories involving possessions is one too many.

Perhaps I’ll send it to a magazine. Or perhaps I’ll make it available online for ninety-nine cents. Depends on my mood and what I think everybody would like. Of course, I’ll have to write it first.

But seriously, I have to ask, would you guys buy the story if I put it online for less than a dollar? Let me know if you’d like that.

Anyway, got another scary movie to watch. Once again, Happy New Year.

2012 in Review

Posted: December 31, 2012 in Living and Life
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Awfully big, isn’t it?

Like a lot of people, I got my report from WordPress on how I did this past year. Let’s just say I got a lot of views, and a lot of comments. My highest grossing article was–you guessed it–my review of The Wolf Gift by Anne Rice, which got 580 views on July 6th, 2012. My highest commenter was my friend Matt Williams with 57 comments, followed by my Uncle Joel with 28 comments. Of the 99 countries that had people visiting my blog, most of my views came from the United States, with Canada and England close behind. And my biggest referrer was Facebook, specifically Anne Rice’s Facebook (I’ll be forever grateful to her for that little bit of recognition).

But besides blogging, I did a bunch of other stuff; I finished my first year of college and finished my first semester of college (OSU just switched to semesters, in case you didn’t know); decided to self-publish; had two short stories published, with a third in June; wrote a ton; finished a novel in six months; and a whole bunch of other things.

I’m hoping for some good stuff next year as well. I hope to publish a collection or novel soon; possibly be Freshly Pressed; more comments and followers; and some other stuff I’m not going to list here.

Thanks for a great year, and I hope to update you with a whole bunch of other great stuff soon.

Happy New Year,

Rami Ungar the Writer

I’ll Write A Collection of Short Stories

Posted: December 17, 2012 in ideas, Progress Report, short story, Writing
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“Doth quoth the raven, ‘Write some short stories. CAW!'”

With the first draft of Snake done, I want to work on short stories for a while. And since Reborn City is taking a little longer than expected. I don’t want to work on RC‘s sequel until RC actually comes out, and I won’t get to Snake for a while, I’ve decided to take the short stories I write during this period and make them into a collection, which I’ll release as an e-book for a $1.29 download fee–the same price as a song by a popular artist on iTunes. In addition, I also plan to publish each short story individually, though if you get the whole book there will be extra goodies that don’t come with the short stories alone.

What sort of extra goodies, you may be asking? I’ll let you know another time. First, I got to get to work on the five short stories I plan to include in the collection. Then I have to have the short stories critiqued and edited, then I have to come up with a name for the collection, get some illustrations, purchase copyrights…you understand where I’m going with this, right? Publishing is never easy, even with free e-book creation and distribution.

Oh well. That’s the price we pay, and I’m certainly happy to pay it. Wish me luck and I hope to have more news soon.

Stephen King and e-books

Posted: December 15, 2012 in Living and Life, Writing
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Presenting the King of Horror!

While I was trolling the Internet, looking for something to listen to as a background noise, I came across these videos that feature my idol, His Royal Highness Stephen King, discussing various topics, including the power of e-books and how it’s changing the industry, with the folks at CNN Money. It was very interesting, not just because his voice is higher than I thought, but because King has some very good wisdom to share, and he was one of the first authors to get on the e-book wagon, publishing his famous novella Riding the Bullet as an e-book (and I recommend it for anyone who hasn’t read it; it’s available in print format too, if you’re interested). Now all his books are probably available as e-books, but he still says there are drawbacks to this new innovation to reading, namely what happens when you drop a Kindle in the toilet.

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