A while back I announced that I was submitting a short story to get a copyright so I could publish it as a promotional piece for my upcoming collection of short stories, The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones. I’m happy to announce that the short story in question, Daisy, has its copyright and is now available on Amazon, Smashwords, Barnes & Noble, iTunes, and other formats as an e-book under the title Daisy: A Short Story. I’m very excited to share this news with you and I hope you’re just as excited to read my work now that it’s available.
I also regret having to inform you that while on all the other formats I was able to make Daisy free, on Amazon they wouldn’t let me make it free, settling for nothing less than ninety-nine cents. Why, I have no idea, but I tried to make up for it by opting for the lesser royalties option, so I’ll receive less of the money from sales. Once again, sorry Amazon users, but that’s the way it is.
Anyway, I’m very excited to share this news with you and I hope you’ll take a look at Daisy sometime soon in the future, as well as anything else I might publish.
It’s been a while since I’ve had anything to really write about, but I have something now. While I moved out of the dorms on Tuesday afternoon, I did not recieve my final grades till just now, so I’m writing this post now which some of you may have been eagerly anticipating. Others of you may also care less, but I hope you read this post anyway.
So anyway, a whole semester went by a little too fast if you ask me, but I did very well. I got a 3.3 GPA, an improvement by 0.1 from last semester. I didn’t get all the As I wanted, but I’ll work for that this coming semester. I did very well in Creative Writing with an A and American Literature with an A-. I also met some really awesome professors and learned a whole bunch.
I also worked hard on finishing up The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill Your Bones and I’m now waiting for the copyright. Also, thanks to my friend Matthew Williams, Reborn City is close to having its final draft finished, and Snake is getting its 3rd draft. I’m a busy guy, but with all this effort I’m putting in, I should have RC out by the holidays and Snake by summer 2014 (hopefully).
In the meantime, I’m going to be working in the financial aid office at Ohio State like I did last summer, and I’ll be writing when I have the chance. Plus I’ll probably be seeing plenty of movies and reading a lot of books, so expect reviews. And let’s not forget I’ll hopefully be getting a Kindle, so if you want me to read your books, better start bribing me now.
So here’s to the start of summer. Let’s hope it all goes well.
I’ve always wanted a snake in a basket. Yes I’m strange, but you already know that, right?
I’ve been busy lately. Exams, preparing for two summer jobs, and a recent addiction to Doctor Who, plus all my normal writing and editing obligations. I’ve been one busy guy, but I wanted to take a break to share with everyone how the editing job for the third draft of Snake is coming along, especially since the main aim of this draft was to add more depth and history to some of my characters.
So far, mission accomplished. I’m about halfway through the draft, I’ve written one of the two new chapters I meant to write, and I’ve gone into some depth into the characters’ personalities and history. I’ve definitely had some fun working on Allison, my heroine, exploring where she got her feisty attitude and seeing how it’s been affected by her ordeal. At the same time, I’m still searching for the right place to insert some more back story between my killer and the heroine, because there’s a lot there that I need to add in for the relationship to make sense.
Oh well, I have 54 chapters to go. I should be able to figure something out and insert those parts (and for those of you with your mouths open right now because I said 54 chapters, don’t worry because most don’t make it past five pages). And by adding all this character history, the characters become more real, their actions make more sense, and their struggles make them that much more endearing.
Except in the case of the killer. In that respect, you find the Snake more creepy and fascinating at the same time. At least that’s my take on him. He’s changed so much from when I first created him. He’s definitely not the same character I created back in June last year.
Well, there you have it. I’m going to hopefully do some more work on Snake tonight, but first I’m going to grab some dinner. Can’t edit on an empty stomach, am I right?
As most of you are aware, I have three works of fiction on their way to publication, and at various stages of that progress. Since there has been significant progress made in all three works on their roads to publication recently, I thought I’d give you all an update of each work, in the order they’ll most likely be published in. So here we go:
The Quiet Game: Five Tales To Chill YourBones
The last time my collection of short stories came up in a post, I think I’d sent it to the copyright office so that I could sue anyone who used it without permission after publication. Getting a copyright through the US Copyright Office takes about two and one-half months, so I’m about a month and one-half of the way through the wait. When I do get the copyright, I plan to do a month-long countdown, and then upload The Quiet Game onto Amazon, B&N, Smashwords, and other sites. It’ll be available for about $1.29, which is about the same as an iTunes song, but better because you get five short stories in one neat little package.
If you want to like the Facebook page for The Quiet Game, you can follow this link:
And if you want to watch my home-made trailer for The Quiet Game, please watch the video below.
Reborn City As I’ve mentioned before, my friend Matt Williams (author of the phenomenal novel Whiskey Delta, now available on Amazon) is critiquing each chapter of RC and giving me feedback. Just yesterday in fact, Matt sent me Ch. 17, leave less than ten chapters left. After I’ve finished editing the entire novel based on Matt’s evaluation, I plan on creating a cover, a Facebook page, and a trailer, just like I did for The Quiet Game. Plus of course the whole copyright process will be repeated for RC.
And for those of you who don’t know what RC is about, it’s the first novel in a trilogy taking place several years in the future and follows a street gang whose leaders have strange abilities and their strange connection with a shadowy military company. I hope it’ll gain an audience, especially given some of the themes in the story.
Snake My thriller novel about a serial killer hunting members of a certain New York mafia family is in the middle of a third draft, the point of which is to go into deeper character development and character history for the main characters. Once that’s done, I’ll probably put it through one more draft before I get ready to copyright it and publish it. And by the way, I think this novel is some of the scariest work I’ve ever done, and also some of the best.
I hope your interests are piqued by what you’ve read here today. I hope to publish The Quiet Game soon and to have RC ready soon, so wish me luck and keep reading the blog for updates. Thanks and I’ll write another post later. I’ve got an errand to take care of.
I had a bit of a revelation last night, but I haven’t been able to share it until now. So without further ado, here’s my revelation:
Last night I was watching the second episode of the new TV series Hannibal, which for those of you who don’t know is a prequel to the Hannibal Lecter novel Red Dragon. As I watching it I was seeing all these little things they were doing to develop the characters that the author of Red Dragon, Thomas Harris, hadn’t done when he originally wrote the novel. It struck me then that I had committed a grevious error in my own serial killer thriller, Snake: I hadn’t gone into any sort of character development whatsoever.
I hadn’t gone into the pasts of any of the characters, only focusing on the events of the story and what immediately precipitated those events. I had not gone into any detail on why the Snake was so twisted, why the female lead was so defiant and spunky, why the villain was who he was, none of that! I’d left it all up to the imaginati0n of the reader, but now I realize that might’ve been a mistake. I mean, the reasons why we emotionally invest in characters is that we want to know them, not just what they do in a story.
So I’m going to go over the manuscript one more time and see where I can add in more character development. Perhaps then I know it’ll be ready for publication. Heck, my beta reader’s on board with it, so why not?
I’ll let you know how things go after the third draft is done. Hopefully it’ll all go well.
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.
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
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.
Well, isn’t today full of editing pluses! I edited a chapter of my science-fiction novel Reborn City, and I just finished the second draft of my serial killer thriller Snake. I’m not going to go into word counts or anything, mostly because I’m waiting for a phrase or two to be translated into Russian so I can add it in before I add up the latest word counts. However, I will tell you that I took away a few words and I added some, and still I think this novel got a little longer!
Anyway, I’ll be calling my beta reader for Snake tomorrow, tell her that she’s got a new novel to put on her computer tomorrow. I hope she likes it. Wish me luck, and let’s hope she gets through it quick. Wish me luck and if there are any updates, I’ll let you know.
Merriam-Webster.com: expatriate–to leave one’s country to reside elsewhere
I’m about to edit another chapter of Reborn City (yes, I’m still editing, but my beta reader’s schedule has freed up a little, so the chapters are coming faster than before). Before that, I read a blog post (read here:http://stevenglassman.de/2013/03/11/grokking-expatriates-in-sci-fi/) about how certain characters in science-fiction are considered expatriates and what category of expatriates they are (yes, there are categories. Read the blog post if you doubt me). The post covered everything from Superman to Futurama to Star Wars to even Buffy the Vampire Slayer characters, and it got me thinking: Zahara Bakur, main character of my own science fiction novel, is an expatriate, or expat for short.
For those of you who haven’t read the novel–which is basically everybody but me and my beta reader and fellow author Matt Williams–Zahara was born and raised until her elementary years in Cairo, which in the RC universe is one of the last remnants of the Egyptian state (don’t ask me why, just read the book when it comes out). However Zahara’s father moves the family to New York City, which is now its own independent city-state, to attend NYU’s law school, and the poor girl has to adopt to a much more liberal and sometimes very Islamaphobic culture. Over the years she gets used to New York and finds friends that don’t judge based on a person’s religious affiliation, but things shake up horribly for Zahara when she’s fifteen.
What happens? Her father has to relocate to Reborn City, which is the Las Vegas of the strange world of RC. There Zahara has to adjust to living in a city that is worse than New York City in how Islamaphobic it can be. When Zahara finds herself coerced into gang life, she finds the whole gangster culture mind-boggling, especially the taken-for-granted hostility between the various gangs and the equating of surviving violence and conquering enemies as being tough and cool. Zahara has to live with this sort of culture and try her best to adjust to it while also integrating the gang culture with the culture of New York, her Muslim upbringing, and her naturally peaceful nature.
Even without all the science fiction elements in this story, you can see how much conflict Zahara has to go through. But as the story progresses, I hope Zahara can find a new strength that she didn’t have before. I’ll see where the two sequels go with the story and hopefully things will get better for Zahara and her friends.
But before that, I have to see the first book out on the digital bookshelves. I’ll let you know how things go as I get updates. Blog on you later.
I had to rewrite most of Chapter 91 of Snake, which is a part of the climax of the story. Why, you ask? Because the original scenario for this chapter, and for most of the climax because of this chapter, didn’t make sense in my head when I thought about it during the three months between the first and second drafts. So I rewrote most of it while still making sure that the story ended up going where I wanted it to go, which would be a final battle on the beach near the boardwalk in one of the Russian sections of New York City.
How’s the chapter look now? Well, I added a smidge more Russian to this chapter, I managed to keep some of the elements of the story I really liked (including a chase with a produce truck), and there’s still some battle and some bloodshed. Overall, I like this chapter, though I may add some more fighting and punching and kicking and whatever when I get this chapter back from my beta reader.
Well, I’m almost done with the second draft. Perhaps tomorrow or the day after the whole second draft will be done. Oh, and before I forget, I want to tell you guys that a few posts ago I messed up on how many chapters I had left. Snake has 98 chapters, not 92. So when I said I had 27 to go, I should have said 33. My bad.
I’ll let you know when the second draft is over. Wish me luck and good night.
