Amren Ortega - Writer

Sigh.  This is a difficult post. I had to abandon "Tangle" as my NaNoWriMo project. I got to about day 22, so that was all right, but as I kept writing, it just kept getting more and more depressing.  I shouldn't have been surprised that that happened, since it is a fairly depressing story - one of the characters dies and another can't remember two months of her life - but I think it got away from me.  It's that kind of thing where something slightly sad happens, so then the response is sadder, and then that gets even sadder, (and then there's lesbian sex), and then things get really depressing and then I need to take a break. Don't think I'm giving up on "Tangle" altogether.  I still think this was a good exercise, and I did write about 36,000 words in it.  Now I've at least got a (very, very) rough draft that I can come back to in the future, once I've had about a month to let it sit.  In the meantime, I'm filling out the ...

Hi all!  Today's post comes to you from Los Angeles, California.  I'm currently attending the Hackaday Superconference and trying to keep up with NaNoWriMo at the same time.  It's...a bit of a challenge, but hey, I eat challenge for breakfast. Not really.  I eat toast and eggs.  Or leftover Chinese food. Anyway, the writing has actually been going pretty well!  The stuff that I've written in the past couple days hasn't been 100% original material for NaNoWriMo, so that's made the going a little easier.  Since I've previously written some of the story, I've been more adapting  the old stuff to fit with the new characters and plot.  That has proved to be nearly as challenging as writing new material.  I'm constantly judging myself for the stuff I've written in the past, which is not at all a constructive thing to do, but I can't stop myself.  So in addition to working through all that mental drama, there's the matter of fitting ol...

Well, in good news, I've hit 11,000 words a day early (whoo!) but in not-so-great news, I've now come to a point twice where I realized that the way I was writing wasn't working.  The idea is still good (to me, at least) but at the end of the month, I'm going to have to do a loooooooot of editing.  Of course, once you get to the point where you figure out that the style isn't working, there's the dilemma of whether to go back and edit right away, thereby possibly losing the progress you've made and ending up with negative net words, or to just change styles in the middle of the piece.  I chose the latter.  I'm not sure yet how well it's working, if at all; I only did this yesterday.  Today brought its own challenge of working in stuff I'd written before, for the same project in its infancy.  Things were very different - characters had a different feel to them, and the entire thing is much, much darker now.  At the beginning of the month, I wa...

Okay good things: I think I'm getting back into the swing of this.  The story is picking up, taking on its own rhythm and its own drive.  I'm curious to see where it's taking me!  So far today, I'm at 5,236 words, and I think I might have a little more in me yet for the day.  The struggle is making sure I don't write myself out and run out of ideas... I started this month having already written a preliminary draft of "Tangle," in which I'd gotten stuck.  I was really frustrated about it, since I thought it was such a cool idea (yeah, no bias there) and really wanted it to work.  By the time I got stuck, I had come up with an ending already (which I hadn't written) and about 7,000 words of beginning text.  At that point, though, the timeline started to become important, and things just weren't working out.  Something was bugging me about what I'd already written, and eventually I just gave up and focused on "Thicker than Water."...

*gasp gasp* ugh I made it *struggle gasp* Day one is done, and I'm already tired.  I forgot how much work it is to write 1,700 words every day.   I had an idea, and what I thought was a pretty good one at that, but still, 1,700 words is about 3 pages, and it's been quite a while since I wrote anything particularly original.  I do a lot of academic writing, and that's all based on my data and other people's data, so I guess I'd forgotten what it's like trying to pull the thread of an idea from my head.  That didn't make any sense.  I'd forgotten what it was like to have a completely original idea of my own, and then write that idea and try to develop it at the same time.  In the past year or so, since I did NaNoWriMo last, I've mostly been editing.  My first project, "Thicker than Water," ended up being about 168,000 words.  Turns out, that's not a great length for a young adult book, unless you're J. K. Rowling.  I recently mana...