Posts Tagged ‘Video Rage’

A Certain Type of Violence, Interview with Rami Ungar | Spotlight Saturday

Posted: January 2, 2016 in Author Interciew, Writing
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My friend and fellow novelist Adan Ramie recently interviewed me for a new feature on her blog, Spotlight Saturday. I’m supremely honored to be her first guest on the feature and I was very happy to discuss my writing with her. Definitely check out our conversation, it’s something you won’t want to miss.

Applying The Bechdel Test To My Works

Posted: December 11, 2015 in Living and Life, Novel, Reflections, Writing
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I’ve been wanting to do a post like this for a while now, but I only got around to it now after a friend of mine did it on her blog and I thought to myself, “Yeah, might as well get my butt in gear and do this already.”

So anyway, if you’re unfamiliar with the Bechdel test, it’s used to measure how feminist a work of fiction, usually a film or a novel, is. It was first created by cartoonist Allison Bechdel for her comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For, and has since become used in academic circles and with critics.

Here are the criteria for passing the Bechdel test:

  1. You have two female characters (sometimes having them named is a requirement, and I’ll do that here).
  2. They actually have to talk to each other.
  3. They have to talk about something other than a guy.

On that last part, I usually take it to mean talking about a guy who is in some sense romantically linked to one or both characters. After all, a lot of stories focus solely on a woman’s quest for love or marriage, and that’s it, and I feel like that’s what this test was designed for. And what if the two women are detectives and they’re talking about a suspect who’s male and how he’s difficult to bring to justice? That should be worthy of passing the Bechdel test.

Now before I begin, I want to make one thing clear: I don’t see this test as the end-all test for how feminist a work is. While some do use the Bechdel test in that capacity, I see it more as a tool to examine various works of fiction and promote discussion, rather than as the only way to get a work to be called feminist. Heck, even film organizations who use the test when rating a movie do it mostly for collecting information on gender inequality in films and to make viewers aware of that same gender inequality more than anything else.

So without further ado, here’s how my novels (I’d do the short stories as well, but there’s a lot of those, so I’ll pass) do with the Bechdel test:

  • Reborn City/Video Rage. I place these two together because they’re part of the same series. And they do pass the Bechdel test with flying colors. There are several named female characters in RC, particularly protagonists Zahara Bakur, Ilse, and Iori. And they do talk to each other about a lot of other stuff besides men, including the gang situation in West Reborn and how being a gangster is not for the faint of heart (a problem for Zahara considering she prefers peace and harmony to violence and gun fights). Similarly in VR, there are at least four or five named female characters, including the ones I mentioned above, and they also talk a lot about things other than men, including the situation they’re stuck in or the history of the war that made the world how it is in their present (our future).
  • Snake. Um…yes, but just barely. There are three or four named characters, including the female protagonist Allison Langland. However, as so much of the book focuses on the Snake’s quest to save Allison and then to keep her safe, she doesn’t have a lot of onscreen time with other female characters. There is a scene where Allison speaks with another character about events to come, but the Snake is also part of this conversation, so I guess it depends on your point-of-view on the subject. If there’s ever a sequel to this book, I may try to do better on that front while writing the story.
  • Laura Horn. Despite still working through the second draft, I can tell you LH passes the Bechdel test. There are several named female characters, including our protagonist, and that they do talk to one another about things other than men. Especially the fact that Laura’s wanted for a crime she never committed. Yeah, heavy stuff. Guys and romance actually don’t come up that much. Yeah, romantic feelings are part of the story, but by no means are they the focus, and I expect that will be the case still when I reach the final draft (whenever that is).
  • Rose. Again, this one just barely passes, and whether it does is a matter of perspective. As I’ve mentioned, Rose is about a woman held captive in the home of a man claiming to be her lover. Rose spends a lot of time on her own or with the guy whose house she’s in. She does have conversations with another female, but this female isn’t exactly human, and a few other things about this being call into question whether or not it counts. There’s also a conversation Rose has with another girl in a flashback, but I don’t know if flashbacks count either. So again, this one’s up for debate, one that might not be settled until after the book is published (whenever that is).

So the final verdict is that one half of my novels pass the Bechdel test, and the other half are a matter of opinion. Again, this test isn’t definitive by any means, and as demonstrated in the cases of Snake and Rose,  there are shortcomings to the test. However, it does feel good to know that half my work does pass the test, and the other half might. Surprisingly about half of all films don’t pass the Bechdel test, while quite a number of movies pass what is known as the reverse Bechdel test, which focuses on men (not going to bother with that, except to say that Rose is probably the only one that doesn’t pass). I like to think it says something good about my personality or writing style.

Perhaps in a few years I’ll try applying the Bechdel test to my works again and see what happens. In the meantime, I think I’ll focus on creating good stories in general. And possibly applying other tests to the stories I write (though I’m kind of afraid of what the results might be and what they say about me as a writer). We’ll see how I feel about it.

What are your thoughts on the Bechdel test? Do your works pass it? Why or why not?

Paris Made My Mom Think of Reborn City

Posted: November 16, 2015 in Living and Life, Novel, Reflections, Writing
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pray for paris

This past weekend in Paris, a city I’ve visited and which I’ve often thought about returning to, was attacked by terrorists affiliated with ISIS. They attacked six different locations throughout the City of Light, including a concert hall, the Stade de France, and two restaurants. At last count, nearly a hundred and thirty people are dead, including seven of the terrorists, and over three-hundred and fifty wounded. The terror threat is apparently still high, and the search for the remaining perpetrators are still ongoing.

And in the midst of the death and horrors, people have come together from around the world for Paris. Through the power of globalization and connection, human beings have shouted out, in tweets and status updates, in blog posts and videos, through television broadcasts and press conferences, through offers of help and condemnations of the terrorists, to stand by France as she works to bring the rest of the terrorists to justice, to take on the sickness that is ISIS, and to heal her wounds after such a horrific series of events.

Still, there’s a dark underbelly to this show of solidarity. My mother and I were discussing this underbelly in the car after dinner last night. Barely two days after the attacks, some people have been condemning Muslims and the refugees from Syria and other parts of the Middle East for the attack (despite the fact that most of the terrorists appear to be European and only one is confirmed to be from Syria). People of all sorts, from members of France’s far-right political party the National Front, including its leader Marine La Pen and US representatives, to bloggers and common people from all over the world. In the need to blame someone for this attack, some are turning to two very large, and lately very popular, scapegoats: those who follow the teachings of Muhammad, and those who left their homes with very little, if anything, just to escape violence and fear.

RC cover

My mom then turned to me and said, “Kind of reminds me of Reborn City. There are people who see a woman with a hijab and feel afraid. Zahara gave that up and even dyed her hair blond to avoid that fear.” That surprised me, but then I realized she had a point. In a small way, the world is beginning to resemble the world of Reborn City.

If you’re not familiar with RC, Islamaphobia is a big theme in the novel. The war on terror devolved into a huge, worldwide conflict, so that by the time of the story most of the world is suspicious of Muslims. Zahara Bakur and her family take measures so that they will be at the very least tolerated by a population that is suspicious of them. Still, it doesn’t always work, and there is still a lot of discrimination in that world that goes unchecked.

While the real world is not at the level that the world of RC is, there are places that have made it difficult to be a Muslim. Angola and Tajikistan actively shut down mosques all the time, and certain European countries have banned burqas and hijabs. France’s Interior Minister has discussed the possibility of shutting down mosques perceived to be preaching dangerous interpretations of Islam. Here in the States,  Donald Trump has said that if elected President he may pursue that course of action.

And because many of the Syrian refugees are Muslim and one of the terrorists was from Syria, some are reacting against refugees. Poland has already said they will not be accepting new refugees, and several US states are now refusing to take in any. Some in the US now wish to screen refugees based on a religious test.

The refugees are not the people we should be lashing out against.

You can’t judge an entire group based on the actions of a few. I don’t judge all Christians based on the actions of Westboro Baptist Church, nor do I judge all football players because a few have been charged and sometimes convicted for violent crimes. But so many people insist on judging Muslims and the Syrian refugees that way. And based on my own experience with Muslims, that isn’t right. That’s nonsensical.

Zahara’s experiences in the book reflect that. Early on she becomes aware that people don’t like her because she’s a Muslim, that they’re afraid of her for things that occurred in her parents’ and grandparents’ generations. She takes steps to be accepted by society by changing her appearance and taking part in “normal” interests and hobbies, but no matter what she tires, people see her as different. They see her as dangerous without even getting to know her. And it’s how people see her that spurs Zahara throughout RC (and its sequel, Video Rage, and probably the final book too) to show people that she is not what people think of her. To show them that she can be kind, and brave. And even good.

In the wake of Paris, we all want to fight back against the evil that caused the attacks. But the evil isn’t the refugees, nor is it Islam and its adherents. No, the evil is ISIS, al-Qaida, Boko Haram and the other terrorist organizations, wearing Islam like a Halloween costume, scary but not the real thing. The real Muslims are standing up to these fakers, standing in solidarity with Paris and showing their disdain towards these inhuman monsters hijacking a respected religion. The last thing we want to do is turn our backs on them, punish them for being who they are.

Instead, we should be thanking them for being allies we can count on for support in hard times, like Zahara is for her friends in the Hydras. Because after all, if we show them the love they deserve, they may return the favor and, like Zahara does, surprise us in all the best ways.

Reborn City: The Two Year Anniversary

Posted: November 1, 2015 in Living and Life, Novel, Reflections, Review, Writing
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Today’s a very special day. Two years ago, I stayed up late on Halloween night to make sure that Reborn City, my first published novel, was released in all its formats and then wrote the blog post announcing the good news for the very next day.

That’s right, two years ago today was the day Reborn City was published. A lot has happened since then, most of it having melted from my memories. But one thing has stood out to me: over these past two years, RC has definitely become my most popular published work yet (I know that’s not saying much with only three books out at the moment, but you get the idea).

If you’re not very familiar with RC yet, it follows Zahara Bakur, a young Muslim teenager living in a dystopian future who is forced to join the Hydras (not the Marvel supervillain organization), a street gang whose leaders have mysterious powers. Zahara learns to deal with her new lifestyle and friends, while at the same time she becomes unknowingly ensnared in a plot by a shadowy government interested in the Hydra leaders’ powers. The novel comprises of themes tackling Islamaphobia, racism, gang violence, drug addiction, and much more.

Over the past two years, I’ve had plenty of people read RC and a few of them have been willing to give feedback (and I think only a quarter of the people who do the latter are my family, which is good). Here’s what some of the people who have read RC have said:

This is an extremely commendable effort by a new young writer, whom I believe we will see much more of in the years ahead. Rami Ungar’s vision of a frightening dystopian future is peppered with those elements that make us all human. There are quite a few surprises in the book, and I am anxious for the next volume in the series to be released.

–Marc M. Neiwirth

As a reader who does not read books in this genre, I must admit that I could not put down the book. I attribute this to the talent of the author. I am looking forward to reading the next books published by Ungar. I recommend this book to readers who enjoy action with features of supernatural powers and sci-fi.

–ENJ

This is not a genre I typically delve into, but I took this book on vacation and couldn’t put it down. The plot had me turning pages at quite the clip. The characters were unique and interesting and the imagery had me creating my own visual of what Rami’s interpretation of the future looked like. For first time novelist, Rami Ungar, this was an outstanding showing of talent and commitment to his passion of writing. Looking forward to seeing what he comes up with next!

–Michele Kurland

If you can’t tell, I’m quite proud of some of the reviews I’ve received on this book. Considering that I started work on this book in high school and worked on it through the first two years of college, I guess I have good reason to be. It was not easy to get this book out, and I worried a lot about how it would do. I also worried that people would say I’m another white guy trying to make money off a subject that others have experienced and written about (the Kathryn Stockett criticism), but so far no one has made any fuss about RC in that way.

And what’s in store for RC in the next year? Well, I’m sure more people will read it. I know of at least one friend who bought a copy and will probably read it within the coming year, and I’m sure there are plenty more people who will find the book and discover something enjoyable in it. I might also get a few more reviews, who knows? I also think an RC audio book is likely to happen. I’ve been working hard to make that happen and I might even have a narrator soon, depending on a few factors. If and when that happens, I’ll make sure to let you all know (and to force my whole family to download copies if they want to stay on my good side. Mwa ha ha!).

And finally, I hope to get the sequel Video Rage fully edited and released by summer next year. I’m working with a professional editor this time, so I’ll let her take a look at the novel before I release it so that the story can be the best story possible. I owe it to the readers who loved RC to do that, at least.

Anyway, if you wish to check out Reborn City for yourself, you can find it both on Amazon and Smashwords. And if you do decide to read it, please write a review of it. Whether or not you love it, I appreciate the feedback, and reviews help indie authors like myself find new readers every time we get them, so you’d be doing me another solid essentially.

That’s all for now. I’ve got a lot of editing to do today, so I’m going to try to get through that. Wish me luck, my Followers of Fear, and happy anniversary!

Oh, and I may have forgotten the two-year anniversary of The Quiet Game, which came out in July of the same year. My bad. If you’d like to check that out, it’s also on Amazon and Smashwords. It’s a spooky good time, if I do say so myself. Enjoy.

Laura Horn: The Verdict

Posted: October 17, 2015 in Novel, Progress Report, Writing
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As many of you know, I have a novel I wrote in college called Laura Horn, and that it’s about time I edited it. At the same time, I wasn’t sure if I should simply go over the first draft and edit where necessary, or do a complete do-over and rewrite the novel from scratch.

If you don’t know what Laura Horn is about, it follows a teenage girl with a dark past who comes across secrets that threaten the nation. Think White House Down or Olympus Has Fallen, only instead of Channing Tatum or Gerard Butler coming to save the day, it’s all on a very troubled teenage girl and her friends. Yeah, I wrote a novel like that. And it’s not comedy, YA, romance or anything like that. It’s a straight up action thriller, complete with one or two psychopaths and a bunch of corrupt agents and elected officials.

Also, I’ve limited the amount of gun violence and explosions in the book, because God forbid this thing should resemble a Michael Bay or Quentin Tarantino movie.

Back to the main point, though. In between drafts of the story, I began to worry that LH might need a rewrite. I liked the characters, I liked the story, I just worried that the way the story was being told was a little too unbelievable and that there might be a better way to tell it. At the same time though, I wondered if maybe the story I had already told was still good enough, it just needed a touch up here and there.

So after editing Video Rage, and writing and editing several short stories and novelettes, I decided to take a look at the first couple chapters of LH, do some edits, and then make a decision on whether I just need to do some simple editing, or maybe make a rewrite of LH my NaNoWriMo project.

Well, as of today I’ve gone through six chapters, combined three into one big chapter, and come to a decision. The first draft is somewhat sloppy, and there is a lot to work on, but that’s pretty typical of a first draft. It’s in the subsequent drafts you actually make something worth publishing. It’s certainly not bad enough at this point that I feel a total rewrite is necessary.*

It might take a lot of drafts to get it right, though. But hey, part of the joys of writing is a lot of hard work and touching up, right?

Anyway, I’ve made a start of the second draft, and I’m hopeful it won’t take too long to finish it. Maybe a couple months at most, if life doesn’t get too crazy and I don’t get too distracted. We’ll see how it goes.

In the meantime, I think I’ll take a break from editing. After all, all work and no play makes Rami a bad editor, or something like that.

Goodnight, my Followers of Fear!

*This also means I won’t be participating in NaNoWriMo this year, but I can think of worse things to happen in my life. Maybe next year I’ll participate though. In the meantime, check out my article on how to survive NaNoWriMo if you’re participating this year.

Something I Need to Get Off My Chest

Posted: July 31, 2015 in Living and Life, Reflections
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Well, Wi-Fi’s back, after being off for about a week. It’s the highlight of a week that’s been rather rough on me.

Don’t get me wrong, for the most part I’m loving Germany. I’m getting great work experience that’ll definitely come in handy after this internship, I’ve got great prospects for afterwards, I’m learning a lot about this country, its people and the language everyone speaks. And I’m seeing and doing amazing things that some only dream of doing.

But like anything in life, there’s ups and downs and lately I’ve been getting a lot of downs. My catchphrase lately is “if it’s not one thing, it’s always another”, and it definitely applied this week when a lot of the time I felt stressed and fatigued and just plain miserable. In other words, not me. At some points I wondered if I’d made a mistake coming to Germany. At other times, I wondered if God was maybe punishing me for something I’d done (perhaps getting into Tarot was a bad idea after all).

What’s been causing this, you ask? A number of things. Work, for one. It’s good people and it’s got great benefits and I get to write articles, which is fun. But often I’m doing tasks that nobody likes doing, and they stress me out. There’s also a hundred different that for some reason or another are mixed up or unresolved and when that happens it comes back to bite me in weird ways. I only just found out that somewhere along the line, my mailbox wasn’t properly put into the system, so I wasn’t receiving any mail! You can imagine the annoyance fixing that was!

There are other problems, as well. It’s not easy to go shopping. The closest supermarket is limited in what it has (and it’s in German, so I can only get things I can make on my own), and the base’s commissary is a trip to make, so unless someone’s providing a car, I can’t go there to get the stuff I’d like to cook with. So this leads to me eating things that may not always be good for me, which affects my health (and I was starting to lose a little weight).

And you already know there was the Wi-Fi situation. For a week because of a bank error we couldn’t connect to the Internet. And let’s face it, you need Internet to live in this world. So much of our lives is invested in it these days, being cut off at home and having limited access at work was another trigger for stress.

Add in a few other things, and it got really bad for me some days. Today, I even snapped at my roommate who was trying to help me resolve a problem. I apologized right after I realized what I’d done, but it was still awful and I felt really bad for doing it. And there I was, beating myself up for that. Another problem.

As I’ve been saying from the beginning, it’s been a tough week for me.

But there are reasons to feel optimistic. For one, the weekend’s here, and our Wi-Fi’s been restored. Always a reason to rejoice there. I can relax at home and watch Netflix, or go out on the town and explore areas I haven’t seen before. And while I was without Internet, I got a lot of work done. I finished editing Video Rage, rewrote Streghe, wrote a lot of blog posts on MS Word which I would post at lunch the next day, and I wrote two outlines for short stories I plan to write before starting on the next draft of Laura Horn. Definitely not bad. Pretty prolific, actually.

Plus after kind of getting off it once I got to Germany, I’ve started meditating again. I think that made a major difference. Meditation lifts my mood, makes me calmer and helps ground me. Not doing it affected my mood, so I’m definitely trying to make it part of my life again.

And now that the Internet’s back, I can also Skype with my folks when they’re online! That’s a huge reason to celebrate right there.

And the other problems…well, I’ll resolve them somehow. I’ve got to think positive. Can’t let myself mope over them. After all, you can’t accomplish much if you spend your whole life depressed over every little thing, and I certainly don’t plan on that happening to me. I’m doing what I normally do, and I’m going to seize life by the horns. It’s how I’ve gotten this far, after all.

So wish me luck and encouragement, my Followers of Fear. After this week, I’ll need it so I don’t have a repeat next week.

Have a great weekend!

#FirstLineFriday

Posted: July 31, 2015 in Living and Life, Novel, Writing
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It’s Friday again, so you know what that means! Yep, it’s #FirstLineFriday again! Here, I post the first one or two lines of a potential story, a story-in-progress, or an already published story. Today’s entry comes from the current draft of my sci-fi sequel Video Rage, which I completed the other day:

The sun baked concrete and metal in the hundred-plus degree heat, the many cars and trucks reflecting light off their chrome bodies like blinding beasts zooming down the highway.

Now there’s some scene-setting imagery.

Have any thoughts/comments/critiques? Let me know, I love feedback.

All for now. I hope you have a great weekend everyone. I plan on maybe exploring the areas around Wiesbaden this weekend, so that should be fun. I might even blog about it…assuming I can get Wi-Fi. Until next time!

Streghe: Rewritten

Posted: July 29, 2015 in ideas, Living and Life, Scary Stuff, short story, Writing
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What do you call a writer cut off from Wi-Fi, has too much time on his hands, and a lot of stories he wants to get out of his head and into the heads of others? If you guessed Rami Ungar, you are correct. Last night the Wi-Fi was still out, so I decided to work on rewriting one of my short stories where I was really dissatisfied with the first draft and wanted to change things up. The result was that this morning I finished rewriting Streghe, with phenomenal results.

Now if you don’t know about or remember Streghe, let me give you some background: during my last semester at Ohio State I took a class on the history of witchcraft to fill out the last requirement of my History major (yes, a class like that was offered, and it was awesome). One of the witch mythologies we studied in that class was that of the streghe, which comes from the Umbrian region of Italy. Now in Italian streghe means “witch” and comes from the word for owl, but in that region the word takes on an entirely different meaning. Rather than involving women who assembled to worship Satan, eat the flesh of children, and cast spells with the help of demon familiars as in traditional European witchcraft mythologies, Umbrian streghe usually worked alone or in pairs, did not consort with demons that often, if at all, drank blood from children as a form of sustenance like vampires, and had their own powers, including the power to transform into owls, which normal witches were said not to have (and that is your free history lesson for the day).

Hearing this mythology, I was inspired immediately and wanted to tell a story based on it. So over the last month of school or so, when I wasn’t busy with my thesis project, I wrote a short story that grew to the size of a novelette. And when I finished it, I found that I hated it. The story was way too long, the plot was all over the place, and at times the story actually felt like it was dragging itself along just to get to the ending. During the writing of the first draft I went back several times just to try a different angle, so I knew something was off even then.

I decided to let it sit for a few months and work on other projects and see what ideas to fix the story to me. Well, something did come to me recently, thanks to time and some Lovecraft stories I’ve been reading recently (I’ll have to write a blog post about that later when I’ve read more of his work). So as soon as I finished editing Video Rage (which was two days ago, by the way), I decided to dive back into Streghe and see what I could do with it.

The result was fantastic. I cut the story by about half to just under five-thousand words, reduced the backstory of antagonist Tom in favor of expanding protagonist Sarah’s backstory (he’s an ass anyway, so I don’t think people will care if they don’t know how he became that way), as well as reducing the number of characters in the story, and added more elements from the original mythology, among other things. And as of this morning, I feel I have much tighter, creepier, and more exciting story than what I had before. Maybe in a draft or two I get it published in a magazine (I know of one that might be interested in this one, depending on the final word count).

For now though, I think I’ll let this one lie for a little while, so that when I edit it I can look at it with fresh eyes. In the meantime, I think I’ll recharge my batteries a little before I tackle my next project. If the Wi-Fi’s back when I get home tonight, I’ll probably watch some Netflix and YouTube and plan that trip to Munich. If it’s not, I’ve got a couple of books, including one from my boss at the office, so I’ll dive into that.

In the meantime, I’m feeling pretty good about myself and about life. I’ve gotten a lot written and edited, I’m gaining valuable work experience and some language skills while here in Germany, and even if this job doesn’t last beyond the three months, I have some more prospects I can look into, so there’s plenty to be hopeful for. Things are going well for me lately, and I plan to ride that good wave for as long as possible.

Until next time, my Followers of Fear. Ein schonen tag!

Video Rage: Second Draft Finished

Posted: July 28, 2015 in Living and Life, Novel, Progress Report, Writing
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Well, latest estimates suggest that I’ll be getting Wi-Fi at my apartment back up tomorrow or Thursday, which caused me to turn into an angry gorilla and go on a rampage in downtown Wiesbaden last night (please send all complaints and bills to Donald Trump’s Campaign Headquarters). So I’m writing this on a Word document so that I can copy and paste it onto a blog post during my lunch break, when I’m allowed on blogging websites. At the moment, it’s the best I can do.

Now what did I come here to write about? Oh yes, the wonderful news for all you fans of Reborn City. Last night I completed the second draft of Video Rage, RC’s sequel, thanks to a lack of Wi-Fi and plenty of time on my hands yesterday evening (remind me to write about the benefits and problems of not having Wi-Fi after I get it back). For those of you who might be unfamiliar with the RC series, Reborn City is about street gangs in a dystopian future, told mostly from the point-of-view of Zahara Bakur, a Muslim teenager who is forced to join one of the gangs when her parents are murdered. It’s probably my most popular work, and I hope people enjoy VR as much as they liked RC.

All told, VR is a bit shorter than RC (but then again, RC had several chapters devoted to flashbacks, so that might explain a few things). The second draft is about 297 pages (8.5” x 11”, double spaced, twelve-point Times New Roman), two pages shorter than the first draft, and 82,441 words (about fifteen-hundred shorter than the first draft). I think this might be shorter than the first Harry Potter book, but I wouldn’t vouch for it. I can say for sure though that it reads better than the first draft, and that it sets up for the third and final book very well.

Now what’ll happen now that the second draft is finished? Well, I have a friend who is looking at the manuscript (he looked at RC prior to its publication) and once I get some feedback from him, I’ll do some more editing. After that, depending on how I feel, I could do a fourth draft, or I could get ready for some publication (I can hear most of my family, especially my sister, already shouting that it should go straight to publication). We’ll see what happens.

In the meantime, there’s a short story I have to rewrite, another one I want to write a first draft of, and maybe I’ll do a third short story because I am finally getting good at writing these things. After that, I have to rewrite my thriller Laura Horn, and after that I have to do a third draft of Rose, and I’m also planning a trip to Munich for either this or next weekend, and also…you know, I think it’s safe just to say I’m going to be very busy on a bunch of other projects but as committed as ever to writing and publishing quality stories while at the same time exploring as much of Germany as possible while I’m here (speaking of which, if you have any suggestions for places to visit in Munich, particularly scenic or historic locations, please let me know).

All for now. I’ve still got a long and busy day ahead of me, so I’m going to get right on it. I’ll write again when I have the chance. Let’s hope the Wi-Fi returns at home sooner than later, right?

Bis spatter, mein Anhanger der Angst! (Translation: See you later, my Followers of Fear!)

#FirstLineFriday (Plus My 1000th Post!)

Posted: July 24, 2015 in Living and Life, Progress Report, Writing
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It’s Friday again! You know what that means! It’s #FirstLineFriday!

It also happens to be my 1000th blog post. Yes, you read that right. This is my one-thousandth blog post. Nearly four years after I started blogging, I’ve reached this momentous milestone. And I couldn’t have done it without all of you. In the early days, when I only got one or two views every couple of days, I thought a lot about giving up. But you guys kept coming. From the far reaches of the globe and the farther reaches of the Internet, you came, read, liked, commented, and even followed. So thanks everyone. Without your help, I would not be here today.

And now, it’s #FirstLineFriday, so let’s dive right into it. Here’s what you do: on Friday you post the first or first two lines of a potential work, a work-in-progress, or a published story. This week’s entry comes from a novel involving ghosts I might work on after I get through Video Rage, Laura Horn and Rose (yeah, I’m planning that far ahead, apparently). I’ve had an idea for what the opening lines would be for awhile now, so here’s a good way to test them out and see how people react to them. Enjoy:

I awoke, feeling very uneasy, though why I couldn’t say. Sitting up, I scanned my bedroom, sure I’d heard somebody scream just a moment before.

Thoughts? Errors? Critiques? Let me know.

Well, that’s all for now, my Followers of Fear. This weekend I’m spending time at home just relaxing (especially since Sunday is Tisha B’Av, a big holiday with a fast in the Jewish calendar. Don’t want to do anything crazy, do we?), maybe planning a trip to Munich, maybe cleaning and doing laundry and editing Video Rage. If I have something to post about, I’ll let you guys know.

Ein schonen tag, mein Anhanger der Angst! Let’s stick together for another thousand posts, shall we?

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