Posts Tagged ‘short story’

My Next Creative Work: Old Sid

Posted: January 20, 2013 in Living and Life, short story, Writing
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As I sit watching Saturday Night Live, I’m also working on my next short story, Old Sid, a short story about a fictional urban legend at Ohio State University. I plan on narrating this story in the fashion of The Virgin Suicides (which means my narrator is a bunch of people talking as one without naming themselves), and I plan for the story to get progressively darker and twisted while keeping the short story within twenty pages, or five-thousand words, as we prefer to think.

I told my Creative Writing teacher about the idea behind me story, and he really enjoyed it. I hope to have it done within a week, even though it’s not due till mid-February. Still, I think I might enjoy this one. At the very least, it’ll be a challenge to write. After all, I’m not used to first person, and this is a very unique form of first person. Well, let’s see what I come up with, okay? I’ll let you know what happens when I finish the short story.

Oh, and guess what? I’ll be doing my famous SNL reviews later tonight. Can’t stop it, there’s Jennifer Laurence, Adam Levine, and Beiber. That last one I probably won’t like, but it’ll be a boost in my stats, no matter what I think of Beib’s performance.

This Coming 3-Day Weekend

Posted: January 18, 2013 in Living and Life, Politics and Leadership, Writing
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Well, it’s the end of the second week of the new semester, and I’m hopefully settling into a rhythm here with classes everyday and work 3 days a week. In the midst of all this I find time to write short stories (such as those that will be in The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones. Coming soon in e-book format), including a short story for class. For this short story, I plan on the plot to center around the subject of a fictional urban legend at Ohio State University, my own school. I plan for the story to be written in the style of The Virgin Suicides, where a group of people narrate the story as it happened to them. I’m pretty sure this’ll work for the story.

I also plan on doing homework, because I have to keep my grades up. I also plan to relax a bit, maybe watch a new SNL with Jennifer Laurence hosting. But most of all, I’m looking forward to the inaguration on Monday. In fact, the movie theater near campus will be showing the inaguration live in one of the theaters, so I’ll go there to watch it. I can’t wait!

So have a great 3-day weekend, and I’ll hopefully write a few more posts as the weekend goes on, especially if I have any news to report. See ya!

Addict: The Post-Workshop Edition

Posted: January 17, 2013 in Progress Report, short story, Writing
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Well, it’s been a very busy day for me. I had two very long classes that had a lot of reading as homework, I had to work a shift today, and of course I had to eat my breakfast and lunch. But you know what? I managed to find time to work on “Addct”, one of the short stories for The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones. I took most of the suggestions that my creative writing class gave me, the ones I felt worked best for this story, and incorporated them into the plot.

I gave my main character a little more to him than the static image I had before, adding in a best friend for the character and showing him actually interacting with people other than his own strange hallucinations. And even better, I managed to give the story a new, rather ironic ending. It’s the type of ending horror fans love: the kind that lets you know that the troubles are far from over.

Can you tell I’m happy with the final version? Sure, it’s a bit more literary than I like, but the very fantastical elements of the story makes sure I don’t get bored.

So this is the first of the five short stories for The Quiet Game to be fully finished. Four more to go, and I’ll be able to put the whole collection out. I just have to wait for my friends who are critiquing the other four to get back to me. At this moment, I’m predicting sometime in March or April I’ll have this out.

Keep with me folks, I’ll be published soon!

After Tonight’s Workshop

Posted: January 16, 2013 in Living and Life, Progress Report, short story, Writing
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Well, I got out of the workshop in one piece. And I’ve been given a lot of feedback on how to improve the story. I have a feeling that since the class is more literary focused, the suggestions will ultimately move the story in a more literary direction.

Oh well, I’m getting what I asked for, and there’s enough fantastical elements to this story to make it genre enough for me.

The story is called “Addict”, and it’s about a guy trying to get over his sex addiction. I wrote it in second person (“you walk into a bar, you see the man flirting with your girl, you snap”) because this story was inspired by the experiences of a friend of mine who battled sex addiction. Not everyone was thrilled with the second person thing, but I’m planning on keeping that. I may add a second character with a third-person perspective though.

I may also do some expanding of the plot to include some other elements, such as more weird hallucinations and a reason why the character tries to get off the sex and porn. This is going into my upcoming collection, The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones, so my classmates won’t know how this story evolved until the collection comes out. I hope they like it, but even if they don’t they’ll get a mention in the acknowledgements section.

I want to get to editing, but first I’ll head home, shower, and then relax a little before I do. Have a good night and wish me luck.

Tonight’s Workshop

Posted: January 16, 2013 in Living and Life, Progress Report, short story, Writing
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Tonight my creative writing class will be workshopping my short story “Addict”, one of the short stories going into my upcoming collection The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones. I’m looking forward to it,  because I want these stories to be of the highest quality possible before I publish them. I also like feedback from neutral parties such as my classmates, because they point out stuff we don’t even see. That’s one flaw we writers have: we’re so proud of 0ur work, we don’t always see the flaws in it that others might see and point out.

Well, whatever the outcome is, I’ll let you guys know how it goes. There’s nothing on TV tonight that I’m interested in, so after class I plan to go on an editing binge. If any of the other short stories I’ve sent for critiquing get sent back to me, it’ll be all the better.

So watch out for my post tonight. Until then, have a nice day.

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.

Done Researching, So Onto The Fifth Short Story

Posted: January 7, 2013 in Progress Report, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
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Today was my first day of class in the new semester, but I only have the one class on Mondays, and then the rest of the day I’m free. So I got my homework done, ran a few errands, put a load of laundry through, and spent the rest of the day doing research for that fifth and final short story for the collection I’ve been writing. The research was specificially about Native American cultures and their belief systems. I focused mainly on the belief systems of the Apache, Mojave, and Navajo cultures, mainly because they are all in the same area, at least two of these tribes share a common ancestral tribe, and because a good amount of myths involving dogs, coyotes, and wolves come from those areas.

This story will be the one I planned involving a black dog spirit. Black dogs, as you may guess, are symbols of death and destruction and usually derive from the myth of Cerberus in Greco-Roman mythology. Of course, the Native Americans probably only first encountered Cerberus in classrooms where they learned the myths of the Greeks, but the fact that they have their own myths involving black dogs, wolves, and coyotes points to how large a role these creatures played in their belief systems. Either that, or Jung was really onto something.

I also learned quite a bit on the Navajo belief of Hozho, or beauty, harmony, balance, and health. Many ceremonies in Navajo culture are meant to restore this in someone who is feeling ill, and there are a variety of ceremonies, chants, and methods to heal someone who is suffering from any number of maladies. If you ask me, Hozho sounds like a very Zen belief, so score another one for Jung.

Well, I’m going to get to work on this short story before dinner. Hopefully I’ll be able to get this all done by the end of the week, though with my school work and my job taking priority and it being the first week of the semester, anything could happen. Wish me luck.

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