Posts Tagged ‘short story’

I’m In A Bit Of A Slump

Posted: March 31, 2013 in Novel, Reflections, short story, Writing
Tags: , , , , , ,
12

You’d think I’d do something a bit more festive for my 400th post. But no, all I got is some bad news.

Truth is folks, I’m in a little bit of a slump. I have two short stories that are not coming along like I want them to, and I feel absolutely no desire to work on either of them while I’m drained. Every time I sit myself down in front of a computer with the intention of writing, I find myself instead watching crime shows online or reading or playing Angry Birds on Facebook. Not only that, but I’ve been neglecting one short story I’ve been meaning to send to some magazine or another, but when you’re a full-time student with homework and a part-time job, you sometimes don’t feel like doing the research.

What I’d rather be doing is working on novels. I’d rather write or edit them or even research them. But the only novel I’m going to write anytime soon is Reborn City’s sequel, which I won’t start on until I’ve put out RC on the Internet, and my beta reader for RC is only halfway through the novel at this point. And although I have plans for a sequel to Snake, I want to wait a little while before I even think of starting the sequel to that, and besides, my beta reader for Snake’s been busy herself, so she hasn’t had a chance to start on it yet.

So what do I do in the meantime? Work on short stories, but those are harder for me than novels. Novels I can stretch out, go deep into the character’s history and identities and personalities, do all sorts of interesting twists and turns and create a whole mythology for. Short stories are compact, usually less than 10,000 words, and we writers have to fit a whole story into that amount of space. You can see where a guy like me, who grew up on a steady diet of novels, usually novels that were part of series, might encounter problems. The joke is that the short story is the novel’s neglected younger sibling, but really, it’s the sibling that requires more skill to handle.

So I’m in a slump. I have no idea what to do at the moment, with no novels t0 write, only the occasional chapter to edit, and two short stories whom I can’t seem to fully finish. Even when I come up with new ideas for novels, which I do a lot, I can’t work on them anytime soon, so that’s not helpful.

Any suggestions would be most welcome. They could be anything from tricks or strategies to help me finish the short stories to suggestions of something else I could try doing while I wait for inspiration and chapters to edit and whatnot.

And if you feel the same as me or have felt the same as me, please let me know. It’d make me feel better.

I’m A Semicolon Addict

Posted: March 20, 2013 in Reflections, Writing
Tags: , ,
12

semicolon: a grammatical tool of punctuation used to indicate two interdependent statements.

If anyone has read a good deal of my writing, they’ll know I like using the semicolon a little bit too much. I didn’t realize how much I liked using it until recently though, when my friend Matt Williams, who is editing Reborn City, pointed out how many semicolons I use and started taking them out of the stories. And then the other day, while critiquing a classmate’s short story for our creative writing class, I noticed how often she used semicolons as well, and how periods or different ways of phrasing the sentence can really affect how the sentence and the paragraphs flows.

With all that in mind, I realized how much I used the semicolon, and how I was really better off not using it as I had. So I decided to get rid of it, and to come out here and admit that I’m a semicolon addict. However, I am working on getting over this habit. For instance, during the editing of Snake I started cutting out many of my semicoloned sentences and phrases, changing them so that they were either all one sentendce or two independent sentences. And on my latest short story, which I’m naming Vile, my aim is to write the entire story without using the semicolon once. Hopefully then I’ll be able to get over this habit that my writing can do without.

Oh, and speaking of habits, here’s one writing habit I picked up recently that I’m unsure of its origin. In a few short stories I’ve written, I’ll describe something in a sentence that manages to encompass the development of something over a long period of time into a few words. For instance, when writing about a character’s relationship with his girlfriend: “They first connected over their biology projects, then over their mutual interest in Gothic literature, and then finally they connected with their bodies”. Or in Vile, the main character describing what his wife had done while he’d been dead: “She had continued to live and thrive and undergo plastic surgery that allowed her to look like a college student again.”

You see those two sentences? They encompass so much, but say it in so little. I like it, but I can’t help but feel that I picked it up recently from some author I read either over winter break or in my American Lit class. Any ideas whom I might’ve picked it up from? Because I have absolutely no idea at all!

The Next Short Story Idea: Overcoming the Death-Barrier

Posted: March 17, 2013 in ideas, short story, Writing
Tags: , ,
29

Well, I’ve been a busy little blogger today. This makes for the fourth post on this lovely Sunday, and the third in so many hours. But this last post for March 17th is one that I’m especially eager to share with you. Since I’m finished editing Old Sid and I’m not working on any novels except to get them ready for publication, I’ve got some short story writing to do. And this next short story is a strange but rather compelling one. When I told my dad about it over dinner, he was nodding like, “Yeah, that I can see as pretty interesting”. Now that was a motivator.

How many of you have heard of the death-barrier? For those of you who haven’t, this refers to what keeps us from becoming immortal, the inevitability of death. Everyday we hear about advancements that are meant to keep this barrier at bay, but every now and then we hear about people trying to remove the barrier altogether, essentially granting immortality. And not only that, but there has been talk of bringing back the dead.

Yes, bringing back the dead. Not through corpse bits and lightning though, but by regrowing healthy tissue and restimulating the brain to reanimate the dead. If you do your research, you’ll be able to find companies that will cryonically freeze your corpse after you die so that when this barrier is no longer an issue, you can be brought back to life…for a hefty donation to scientific research. Yeah, sounds a little like it’s out of a sci-fi novel, but it’s true. And if you’re interested, there’s a Castle episode where the whole plot of the story revolves around a murdered doctor whose body was cryonically frozen. It’s a ton of fun.

Assuming you could resuscitate the dead, what would happen? How would a revived person react? Would they enjoy being back? Or would they feel that being brought back was unnatural?

This is my short story. I plan to follow around someone who has died and been brought back and how they react to the world. It should be interesting and very challenging to write. I’m not sure what I’ll call it, but it’ll be interesting to see what results from it. I’ll let you know when I finish it. Wish me luck, especially with coming up with an appropriate title!

Have a good night, everybody.

“Old Sid” Is Finished!

Posted: March 17, 2013 in Progress Report, short story, Writing
Tags: , , , ,
0

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

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

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

A Welcome To My New Followers

Posted: March 17, 2013 in Living and Life, Novel, Progress Report, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
0

I’ve noticed that I’ve been getting a lot of new followers over the past month or so, and especially during these past two weeks. So with that in mind, I’d thought I’d extend a welcome to my new followers and thank them for deciding to follow me and read my blog. And to my returning followers, welcome back and thanks for continuing to read my blog.

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

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

The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones

TQG cover

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

Reborn City

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

Snake

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

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

Rami

The Quiet Game: On Its Way To Get A Copyright

Posted: March 4, 2013 in Progress Report, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
Tags: , , , , ,
2

TQG cover

Well, it’s been a busy Monday for me, but I have some good news: in addition to editing another chapter of Reborn City after recieving said chapter back from my friend/beta reader, I sent The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones to the US Copyright Office for legal protection. Thus, I’ve initiated the final phase of the publishing process for my collection of short stories, which will culminate in publication.

Of course, the first thing I sent over to the US Copyright Office, I’m still waiting for them to process. This was about four weeks ago, so I’ll probably be finishing my finals when I finally get these oh-so important legal protections from plagiarism and illegal sales.

Oh well. In the meantime, please enjoy the tailer I created last week. It’s absolutely eerie.

The Quiet Game: The Final Edits Are Done

Posted: March 2, 2013 in Progress Report, short story, Writing
Tags: , , , , ,
2

TQG cover

This evening I looked over the last two short stories in the order I’ll put them in the final book, and I had to smile at myself: In a little over two-and-a-half months, I’ve written five short stories, had them edited and critiqued, created a book trailer, and now I’ve gone over all five of them and done my final edits on them. In addition, I wrote some notes after each short story, explaining some of what I wanted to accomplish when I was writing the short stories and where the inspiration for each of them came from. It was thrilling thinking about the journey I’ve taken since December when winter break started, and seeing myself here and now.

The only thing left to do is to turn all the files into PDF format, and combine them so that I can send them to the US Copyright Office (and the sooner the better for that one; it seems that the US Copyright Office takes a long time to get your submissions processed and issue you a copyright, even when you do it electronically). After I get the copyright, I’ll upload The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones onto the Internet as an e-book, and share it all with you!

At this point, I’d like to once again thank those who inspired my work–Caitlin Kelly, my friend J, the people who created the film The Possession, and the Ghost Adventures crew–along with the people who critiqued my work–Marc Neiwirth, my creative writing class, Jason Alan, Enjie Hall, and Rabbi Wendy Warren Ungar–and along with all those whose encouragement has helped me to create this collection. You’ve been keeping me going, and you’ll keep me going until I run out of ideas for things to write, which probably won’t be anytime soon.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’d like to take a break to work on a certain serial killer novel that’s been waiting for me. Have a good night, everybody.

Fugue: First Draft Finished

Posted: February 27, 2013 in Progress Report, short story, Writing
Tags: , ,
2

Well, I finished “Fugue”, and I liked how it turned out. It’s a little longer than I expected, but I’m happy with it and I achieved what I wanted with it, which is the story of what happens when a very shy girl wakes up from a dissociative fugue, totally freaks out, and then finds out what sort of life she’s been living while she was in the fugue state.

The story took me about a week or so to write, with plenty of challenging aspects to it, such as how to put the main character through as much s%^t as possible without seeming sadistic or making the story seem unrealistic. I stuck with it though and had plenty of support. Plus the story itself was interesting to me, so I was able to get through it all without losing interest or getting disheartened.

Now I plan on sending it to two beta readers. One’s my Abnormal Psychology professor, who expressed an interest in the story when I told her about it. The other is an old teacher of mine, whom I think might be very interested in the story and may have some suggestions for me on how to improve the story. I hope he says he’ll read it, I have a feeling he’ll like it.

Wish me luck with all that’s coming. In addition to editing “Old Sid” and starting the second draft of “Snake”, I’m going to be working on getting “The Quiet Game” out on the digital bookshelves by April 30th, when the semester ends. Add in school and work, and Rami Ungar’s a very busy boy. Thank God spring break is coming!

Old Sid: The Critique

Posted: February 27, 2013 in Progress Report, short story, Writing
Tags: , , , ,
0

This evening, my creative writing class critiqued the second short story I submitted tot he class, “Old Sid”, about the subject of a fictional urban legend on Ohio State’s campus (by this, I mean I made up the urban legend). I was praised a lot on how my narrators gathered their testimony, and on how I captured the many apsects of the legend.

However, there were some thoughts on how the story could be improved. The most dramatic but necessary change was something I hadn’t even thought about: making the legend real. You see, every story with a Boo Radley has the Boo Radley character begin a legend and then become human at the end. I never did that for Old Sid, but I see that I can do that in the second draft and have a ton of fun with it while I’m at it.

I’ll also flesh out the narrators of the story and give them a little background as well, and then I’ll see if I can get the story off a tangent it goes on midway through the story. It’ll be awesome! I just have to finish “Fugue” first; I’m so close to finishing that short story, I can taste it on my tongue, and I’m not delaying that when I’m dealing with two really awesome short stories.

Wish me luck. I’ve got a first draft to finish tonight.

The Quiet Game: The Book Trailer

Posted: February 27, 2013 in Living and Life, Progress Report, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
Tags: , , , , , ,
2

TQG cover

I’m very happy to announce that in only two hours, I managed to complete the trailer for The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones. I would like to thank the staff of Ohio State’s Digital Union for answering all my questions on iMovie and for helping me gather the photos and clips I needed.

The video was created using iMovie, and featured clips from YouTube videos, Google Images, and my own book cover. It features music I scrounged up on the Internet, and the sound effects were from iMovie’s sound effects database. I’m very proud of this video, particularly because a year ago I could not imagine myself making this sort of video. Thankfully I learned how to use all sorts of programs last semester, so now I feel a little less helpless using such programs.

So without further ado, I would like to introduce the official book trailer to The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones. Feel free to share it on Facebook or on your own blog or wherever you would like to share it.

The Quiet Game will be coming out soon and will be available for $1.29 when it does. Please wait until then for it. Thanks for watching.

Older Entries
Newer Entries