Posts Tagged ‘Video Rage’

As of last night, I’m a little more than halfway through editing Video Rage, the sequel to my first novel Reborn City. It’s been a long and slow process, not helped by work, preparing for the new semester, and the general craziness of life itself. Still, I am making progress. And I have become a bit more cognizant of the fact that I like to make issues that are important to me part of the stories that I write.

I’ve mentioned this before, but RC and its sequel VR have a lot of themes in them that reflect societal problems we face today, including Islamophobia, racism, and drug addiction, among a few others. I thought that these were the only book I’ve written where these issues have become so embedded within the story’s narrative, but then I realized that wasn’t the case. Snake, my other novel, explores the trade in human beings and in flesh, albeit slightly less prominent due to the focus on a certain serial killer.  And Laura Horn, the novel I finished last month, stars a main character who suffers from the trauma of sexual assault. Even Rose, the novel I’ll be writing for my thesis, has a lot of themes reflecting issues that I find important, including gender dynamics and women being viewed solely for their biology, domestic abuse in relationships, and even gun violence*.

*Speaking of which, I have a post about that. Remind me to write about it later this week.

I think I write in all these themes into my stories for a number of reasons. One is because a lot of what I write is taken from today’s world. You look around you, and you’ll see the world plagued by many issues that are not easy to solve and nowhere close to being solved. Often I will write a story and the problem can either be inserted into the story or it just evolves its way in, showing up throughout the story. Another reason is that, as an author, I have the potential to influence plenty of people through the words I write and the stories I tell. If I can do some good through that, then why shouldn’t I? Third, sometimes you feel so upset about the problems yourself you can only vent about them through words on paper, which is something I sometimes do. And fourth, because I can.

In any case, I look upon this habit of mine as beneficial. Like I said, inserting issues such as racism, gun violence, LGBT rights or whatever into my stories has the potential to perhaps do some good in the world and allow for discussion that sometimes is stifled out of fear or because of strong emotions (or because being politically correct can make you feel like you’re walking on eggshells). And besides, I think it makes the plots of my stories much better. Rose originally didn’t have the gun violence aspect to it, but when I realized that it could make things in the story more interesting and allow me to flesh out the main character more, I decided to go with it, and with fantastic results too.

And if the reviews I’ve gotten on my books are any indication, people like my books better because I add in these issues.

Do you insert issues important to you in your stories? What issues and how do you put them in? What have the reactions been like?

I’m about a third of the way through editing Video Rage. And while I was editing Chapter 12 yesterday, I had a bit of a problem that I had to really rack my brains to solve.

Does anyone remember the Kony 2012 video from two years ago? If you don’t, here’s a quick reminder: Joseph Kony is an African warlord leading a terrorist organization that recruits children to be soldiers and sex slaves. The video Kony 2012 exposed many people to Joseph Kony’s crimes to many people in the West for the first time, amassing nearly 100 million views and becoming one of YouTube’s most viral videos ever. However, despite a powerful Stop Kony campaign, a Cover the Night event, and a sequel to clarify points made in the first video, interest in Joseph Kony and Invisible Children, the organization behind the video, waned after questions of the legitimacy of the campaign came up and the video’s narrator/producer suffered a very public mental breakdown.

Maybe it was because I was really impacted by the video at the time, going out of my way to make a Kony 2012 T-shirt and participating in Cover the Night, but when I decided to make an original viral video in Video Rage, I wanted to use Kony 2012 as an example to compare to the viral video in the story. So I wrote it in, ignoring the reservations I had about using such a famous (and infamous video).

Well, perhaps there’s some truth to the phrase “Another year older, another year wiser.” I was 20 when I wrote that chapter, but I’m 21 as I edit the novel. And I decided to cut Kony 2012 from the story. It’s just that a well-known video like that being featured in my novel might do more harm than good, especially considering everything that went on in the aftermath. So I ended up replacing it with a fictional documentary that I made up pretty much while editing. It took me a while to come up with the subject matter behind the documentary and what it did to achieve the level of fame that it would inspire a viral video in the novel’s universe nearly forty years later, but I finally managed to come up with something that I was satisfied with. And hopefully any future reader will be satisfied with it as well.

So what’s the point of this post? I’m not sure there is a point. Maybe I just wanted to tell you all a story while letting you know how the editing for Video Rage is going. Or maybe I was trying to illustrate how something that seems like a good idea when you’re younger or at an earlier stage of a project (or both) can really seem like a bad idea later on and you just have to nix it. (Strange that Stephen King didn’t think of that when he wrote in that scene in IT with the kids all having sex with each other).

In any case, I’ve fixed what I considered to be a great problem with that one chapter of Video Rage, and I think that the rest of the draft will go smoothly…if I can stay on track with finishing the second draft of the book.

Well, that’s all for now. It’s late, so I’m going to bed. Have a good night, my Followers of Fear. I’ll update you on Video Rage and anything else that needs updating as time goes on. In the meantime, pleasant nightmares.

Most of you have read my reviews (and if you haven’t had the pleasure, I’ll probably be doing a review soon, because there are some awesome horror films coming out this month). Since I’ve done so many of them, and occasionally they’ve gotten a lot of views, I decided to do a post for Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors on Writing Reviews.

I’m hoping this post will be helpful to the many authors who would like to try writing reviews themselves. Those things can have so much influence over a person’s decision to buy a movie ticket or place a reservation at their local library for a new book. And I had fun breaking down the process I use for writing reviews and making it into a helpful article.

If you have the chance, please check out the article. And if you’re a self-published author or are thinking of pursuing self-publishing, please check out the rest of the website. There are plenty of articles written by independent authors for independent authors to make all aspects of self-publishing easy and cost efficient.

That’s all for now. If I have time later today, I’ll write another blog post. Until then, I’m busy editing Video Rage. Have a great day, my Followers of Fear.

What an eerie path to take.

Every author has a different metaphor for what it’s like writing a novel or creating a story or even outlining a story. Stephen King said in his memoir On Writing that he approaches writing like an archaeologist uncovers an artifact, finding the top of it sticking out of the dirt and then carefully chipping and dusting away to uncover the rest of it. I guess that means His Royal Creepiness likes to come up with the story as he writes it and doesn’t plan too far ahead, but whether or not he does, he’s almost always brilliant with it.

Another author, I forget who but I’m pretty sure they were Freshly Pressed for writing an article on this, once compared writing to putting together a sandwich. You have a bunch of different ingredients, and it’s up to you as the chef of this particular sandwich to make it into a delicious meal that people will want to savor and discuss for hours to come. Like I said, I can’t remember who this author was, so I can’t tell you whether or not they were brilliant at it, but they certainly can create a compelling metaphor.

And there are plenty of other metaphors that one author could apply to the writing of a novel: mixing an interesting cocktail; building a house; decorating a room; putting together a collage; building a Rube Goldberg device (I love those things!) and then some, on and on, etc. Each author probably has their own metaphor that relates to their own process.

How some people see writing a novel: building one of these.

I thought about this a lot while I was writing the outline for my thesis Rose, especially since during the early stages of writing the outline I had a lot of trouble figuring out where to go with the story after the first chapter or two. And after a lot of thought, a bi of frustration, and finally typing out a sixteen-page outline complete with short character bios, I finally figured it out. To me, writing is like sending my characters down a path in a heavily wooded forest, and letting them find the way to the end.

I think this has a lot to do with the many philosophers, musicians, and others who have said “Life is a road/path/journey”. For me, I’m seeing the path my characters are traveling on as they move through the story, meeting each obstacle, struggling against their own darkness and striving to be better people. And sometimes, this metaphor takes on a much more…I guess literal tone. For example, those of you who’ve read my novel Snake know it takes place in and around New York City (for those of you who haven’t, now you know). In a strange way, I see the path the Snake takes, not just the one in the woods but how he travels from location to location and scene to scene. I see what he does to get from Point A and Victim 1 to Point B and Victim 2, and from there to Point C and Victim 3 and so on and so forth, whether he’s driving a stolen car or walking through a dark neighborhood or using a disguise to figure out what his next move will be. (Right now, someone is reading this post and hears this description of Snake and is either deciding the book’s not for them or they’re strangely intrigued and want to find out more. I hope it’s the latter).

This “path” metaphor gets even more literal in some of my other works. In Video Rage, the sequel to Reborn City which I’ve begun editing, most of the novel is spent on the open road, so those characters of mine aren’t just on a path with many twists and turns in a metaphorical sense. They’re really on that road!

Which to take to get a better story?

Whether in a metaphorical or a literal sense though, writing like my characters are on a road or a path helps me visualize where my characters and the story are going and where I ulitmately want them to go. During the writing of the outline for Rose, there were several paths that the story could have gone on, and in the early parts I couldn’t figure out where to go. Some of those paths I tried, and I ended up not liking the direction the story would’ve gone down if I went down those paths. Thankfully I ended up taking the right path around the third or fourth attempt, and things got a lot easier from there on out. I’m looking forward to seeing what people think of the path I took with this story, and the others I’ve written.

What do you think of this metaphor for writing?

What metaphor do you like to use? What are some others that you’ve heard that you agree with?

Or at least the first draft is. There’s always a chance that my adviser will make me rewrite certain parts of it, but I hope to keep it like it is.

Anyway, late last night I went about finishing the outline, and somehow I managed to do it before it was too far past midnight. This outline gave me more problems than outlines usually do, because up until I started writing the outline I had only a few scenes planned out, so I had to come up with the rest as I was writing. Once or twice I had to actually go back and erase what I’d written before because I didn’t like which direction the story was going. Around the third attempt though I managed to get this story going in the right direction and from there it was just a matter of figuring out where I wanted to go, what would be the logical step to get there, and what sort of events could happen without stretching the limit of credulity.

In the end, I think this story will turn out very well. It’s about twenty-eight chapters, and will probably be around the normal length for one of my books, between eighty-five thousand and one-hundred thousand words. I often wrote the outline looking for plot holes and trying to find good ways to plug them up (I hope I succeeded). And I hope I create an interesting and somewhat scary story about a woman who dies but is resurrected by her stalker through magic and finds herself trapped in his house with not only him, but very malevolent supernatural forces. Thank goodness I have an adviser who will be helping me out with that part. He’s a published writer himself, so odds are he’ll have a few lessons to help me.

And while I’m waiting for my research books to arrive in the mail and for the new semester to start (three weeks from today, by the way), I think I’ll edit Video Rage. God knows it’s about time, and I have time to do it now before things get really crazy! In fact, I’ll start it today! But first I need to run an errand, then I need to vacuum the apartment, then I need to run the dishwasher, then I need to have lunch before I go to work, then I have work, and later tonight I’m supposed to be at a friend’s birthday party…life’s crazy sometimes.

Anyway, that’s all for now. I’ll keep you updated on Rose, Video Rage, and other projects as time goes on and I have news to give. Have a great day, my Followers of Fear.

This morning I started work on my next book, which will double as my thesis for my senior year. Well, that’s not quite accurate. Truth be told, I came up with the idea for my thesis back in autumn last year, and then while searching for a thesis adviser, I fleshed it out a bit more, deciding what would happen in this or that scene or whether I wanted this or that event to happen at the beginning or ending of the story. And after I found my adviser, I had to make some decisions so I could know what books I would order for research and therefore why I was applying for a small grant to afford said books. And after I got said grant and returned from Europe, I worked hard on Laura Horn so I could get that done before I began work on my thesis.

Well, this morning I began in earnest to start researching and outlining my thesis. I stopped by the English Department to make sure everything was in order for the following year, stopped by another department so I could possibly do some more research for my main character, and then started on the first draft of the outline, of which I’ve made a little bit of progress on.

Now, some of you might be asking yourselves, “Is he going to tell us what his thesis is about?” Actually, I’ve decided to be cruel and not tell you at all. You’ll have to wait until the book comes out.

Just kidding! No, my book is called Rose, and follows the story of a grad student named Rose Taggert. On the night of Rose’s engagement party, she gets killed in a hit-and-run. This leads one of her students, who has an obsessive infatuation with Rose, to kidnap her body from the morgue and resurrect her using nature-based magic. The way he resurrects her though leaves Rose dependent on him for her survival, which causes the young man to believe they are in a relationship. With Rose trying to find a way out of her situation, she is set against impossible odds, and may not be able to overcome them.

How’s that for a setup?

Rose is the first full supernatural horror novel I’ve written in a while. Reborn City and Video Rage were sci-fi stories, while Snake and Laura Horn were thrillers, the former having some obvious horror undertones. I’m looking forward to diving into some full on horror. I know how the novel begins and I know where it’s going to end, and I know some of the things that’ll happen in this story, I just have to flesh out the rest. The thing about some horror stories, this one among them, the main character or characters have to face seemingly insurmountable obstacles in order to escape the evil plaguing them. Sometimes they do it successfully, other times they don’t. The thing is, you’ve got to make it about the protagonist dealing with the great evil at each and every turn and looking for ways to fight back against it. And sometimes fighting back will do more harm than good, leading the reader to wonder how they will continue on with the odds against them and read on.

So believe me when I say, I will be looking for some great ways to make Rose’s life difficult. Or second life, I guess. Either way, it’ll be very exciting for the reader (I hope).

I’ll be doing periodic updates on the progress of Rose, with the ultimate goal being finishing the first draft before the school year is up and I graduate (oh my God, I can’t believe how close it is! It’s sneaking up on me). Tonight, I hope to resume my work on the outline and get that done by the end of the week. First though, I’ve got some other things to take care of, including another blog post to write up. As usual, my life won’t slow down any time soon.

Wish me luck, my Followers of Fear!

After a year, a week, and two days, with twenty-six minutes before midnight, I am finally finished with the first draft of my fourth novel Laura Horn. I wish I hadn’t had to take so many breaks to focus on schoolwork (not to mention writing was nearly impossible during my study abroad trip), but I’m glad I was able to get it done. And even though it’s a first draft and obviously will need a lot of editing when the time comes for that so it can look something resembling publishable quality, I’m quite happy with the result.

For those of you who are not very familiar with LH, it follows the story of a girl with a very traumatic past who, through an odd series of accidents, stumbles upon a conspiracy that could destroy the United States of America. With a few good friends to help her, she sets out to save her nation from the threat that looms over it, and confronts her demons as well.

So it’s kind of like White House Down or Olympus Has Fallen, only it’s got less explosions and a little more character development. Actually, a lot more character development. Our titular character goes through a lot of changes throughout the book, and it’s astounding even to me, the guy who created her, how much she changes in the course of the story.

It’s also a lot more thriller than I tend to write, but my next big project will be some pure psychological/supernatural horror, so it all pans out in the end.

Anyway, I’m happy to announce that I’m finally done with LH, and that in a few months (schedule permitting) I can start editing the book and getting it ready for eventual publication. I’ll be setting up a page for the book on this blog with the notice “Coming Soon”. With any luck, I can have this book out sooner rather than later, and maybe work on a sequel or two (I have a couple planned out, I just need to commit to them).

So now for the page and word counts. I wasn’t actually too far off. I did say the three chapters that would make up the epilogue would be around five-thousand words and it turned out to be more like nine-thousand, but hey, it could’ve ended up much longer. Anyway, the Epilogue in total was 32 pages and the word count ended up as just under eighty-nine hundred. That brings the total page count to 356 pages and 94,774 words. About average for a Rami Ungar novel. Of course, these counts might change drastically by the second draft, but this is a good placeholder until then.

In the meantime, let me tell you guys what projects I plan to take up next (though they may or may not be in this order):

  • Work on the outline for the novel that’ll be my senior thesis (more on that at another time)
  • Edit Video Rage
  • Write several articles on writing for Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors
  • Write a few blog posts I’ve been putting off so I could finish LH.
  • Write several short stories, and hope I can get a few of them published in magazines
  • Start assembling a new collection of short stories
  • Experiment with writing erotic fiction (yes, I plan on doing that. I meant to do it earlier this summer, but things got in the way).
  • Try and get through the many books I still have to read for pleasure.
  • And just have a good time as usual.

Not too hard to do, right? At least, I hope so.

Anyway, that’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. It’s late, so I’m going to read a little and then sleep. It’s my day off tomorrow, so I’m going to find plenty of time to celebrate before I get back to writing (it’s a work hazard, I just can’t stay away from it). Anyway, that’s all for now. Have pleasant nightmares tonight. I know I will be!

tqg cover

One year. I can’t believe it’s been exactly one year since my first book, The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones was released. Maybe that’s because so much has happened in that year: I finished my third year of college, went on a study abroad trip to England, France, and Germany. I began and finished Video Rage, the sequel to Reborn City, and I’m very close to finishing Laura Horn. And I also released two more books. Am I forgetting anything? Oh yeah, I moved into an apartment off-campus with a friend and I also turned 21, which causes certain members of my family endless worry about my drinking habits (though I usually only drink alcohol 1-3 times a week, and usually not that much).

Anyway, back on point. The Quiet Game emerged from an idea I had while the editing process of RC was going on. That process was going slower than I thought it would, so I thought to myself, Why not release a collection of original short stories? I ended up doing just that, writing all those stories during winter break and rewriting one of them during spring semester. I also included at the end of each story a little bit about how the story came about and what influenced me while writing it, which was fun because it gave me more ways to relate with my readers. And after many long months, I released it on July 17, 2013, not too long after the copyright process ended. And it’s been selling and scaring here and there ever since.

Besides also being my first published book, The Quiet Game is also my most popular book. I think that might be because it’s a lot shorter than the other two and it’s a lot cheaper. But that doesn’t mean people don’t like it. I’ve gotten ten reviews over the course of a year on The Quiet Game, and people have had some positive things to say:

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

Imagine if you will a young Stephen King penning dark scenarios inspired by his youth, and what you get is this anthology. Through this collection of short stories, Rami Ungar brings us into the world of dark urges, childhood traumas, ghosts, phantoms, and dark psychological thrillers. An inspired creation, and definitely a good intro to this indie author’s world!

–Matthew Williams, author of Whiskey Delta

All of the stories were really diverse and fun to read. I also enjoyed the authors blurbs about each stories origination and development. Keep up the good work!

–kimberly broulliard

These and other reviews have lead to The Quiet Game gaining a 4.3 rating on Amazon, which I am very happy about. It also encourages me and makes me think that this and my other books will continue to do well and that I will be able to write very good and very scary stories for years to come.

To the people who helped me create The Quiet Game, thank you so much for everything you’ve done for me. You don’t know how much I appreciate it. To the people who have already read and/or reviewed The Quiet Game, thanks for your patronage and I hope in the years to come you’ll enjoy reading my books and getting scared by them. And to those who will read The Quiet Game and my other books, I hope you enjoy them. And whatever you think of my books, please let me know in a comment or a review. Bad or good, I love feedback.

If you’d like to know more about The Quiet Game, click here for its page here on the blog, or check it out for yourself on Amazon and Smashwords. It’s available in both print paperback and e-book, though the former is only available on Amazon.

That’s all for now. If I have anything else, I’ll let you know later in the day. Have a good one, my Followers of Fear.

Oh, I doubted I would actually get this far. I mean, with all the delays and breaks and whatnot I had to take with this novel, I really despaired about getting to the climax of the book. I’m happy to say that after four or so days of working through Chapter Fifty, I whizzed through Chapters Fifty-One and Fifty-Two and finally finished Part IV: Inauguration Day of Laura Horn.

This part of the novel actually got longer and shorter while I was writing it. I added two chapters to give the antagonists more page time, and then I combined two chapters into one so that the flow of the novel would…well, flow smoother. I’m glad to say that it all went very well in the end. Now I’ve only got ten chapters left of the novel, seven of which are in Part V: Triumph, and three in the Epilogue. I can’t wait to see if I can’t get through these last ten chapters in the next seven days. Ten or twelve at the most.

And now for the page and word counts (and by page counts, I mean 8.5″ x 11″ pages). Part IV was fourteen chapters, comprising about seventy-five pages and seventeen-thousand, seven-hundred and ninety-four words. Combined with the preceding thirty-seven chapters, that’s a total of 292 pages and 77,274 words. Wow, we’re right up in the novel range. I’m going to make a guess between 85,000 95,000 words at the end of it all. Well, that’s around normal for one of my books, I guess. Video Rage was around eighty-four thousand, while Snake was 110,000. Reborn City was somewhere between them, around ninety-one or ninety-three thousand.

Huh…funny now that I look at it. The novels that had longer chapters but less of them had smaller word counts, while the novels with shorter chapters but more of them are much longer. I’m not sure why that is, but I’m sure it might have something to do with the books I read growing up and how I began writing with the goal of being as good as the books I was reading.

Well, I’m going to probably write an article for Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors and a blog post or two and then get to work on finishing this novel about a girl with a very dark past who confronts her demons and ends up saving her country from a horrific coup. Should be fun. Wish me luck on it.

Well, I’ve got a big day tomorrow. I’m meeting someone who’s helping me find a job after graduation tomorrow morning, and if I’m lucky I might be able to pick up my new glasses beforehand. Plus another shift at work, so that’ll be my whole afternoon. I might as well go to bed now and get some sleep. Goodnight, my Followers of Fear. Pleasant nightmares to you all.

Not sure how, but it looks like I have another piece of good advice to tell everyone about. Laura Horn, the WIP I’ve been working on on-and-off since last summer, has reached another milestone, with Part III: The Ringleader, done and out of the way. This part of the novel was actually rather interesting to write: not only did the three main characters find themselves isolated from just about everyone they know and care about, but I had to cut out two chapters I found extraneous and unnecessary, and I merged two more into one, reducing the chapter count by about three. Just goes to show that a lot can change between the original outline and the actual writing of the novel.

With the completion of Part III, I also move pretty quickly to the climax of the story. At the moment, I only have about twenty-five chapters left, and most of them will probably be less than ten pages left. Good for me, because I’m aiming to get the first draft of this novel done before I go back to classes in August. With the rate I’ve been going these past couple of days, as long as I’m able to not get distracted and find time to write, I might jut get there some time between the end of the month and mid-July.

Before I start Part IV though, I’d like to be able to take on some quick projects: I’d like to write a few articles for Self-Published Authors Helping Other Authors, as well as write some poems and some flash fiction pieces. Once I get those out of the way, I plan to finish off LH as quickly as possible and move onto the next project, which will probably be editing Video Rage and working on some short stories.

First, I’d like to update the page and word counts of LH (for those who weren’t around for the last update on those counts several months ago, I do this every time I make it to a milestone in writing my novels. Not sure why I broadcast it on my blog, it’s just something I like to do). Remember, by pages I mean 8″ x 11.5″ pages. The total for the Prologue was about 10 pages, and 2,190 words. Part I was 43 pages and 12,019 words. Part II was 107 pages and 29,634 words. And Part III came out to be 57 pages and 15,637 words. That brings LH‘s total to 217 pages and 59,480 words. Since most authors use word counts to gauge the length of their books, this makes LH just under novel length, by about 520 words. I’m looking forward to seeing where it gets with Part IV!

For now though, I’m going to head to bed. It’s been a crazy birthday, I’ve got a busy day tomorrow, and I’d like to be well-rested when I go about my day tomorrow. Especially with the articles and with work. Good night, Followers of Fear.