Amren Ortega - Writer

Thicker than Water (hereafter TTW) is YA high fantasy.  There's not really a magic system or anything, but there are water spirits, and they control the changing seasons.  Long ago, the water spirits were revered, but then times changed and people forgot their importance.  To reassert their power and their place in the world, the water spirits married into the ruling families of the four primary Thiosoran Realms.  Each of these realms has a dominant season in which it is the most powerful.  (There are also secondary realms, realms that split off from the four primary realms, but they aren’t so much the focus of TTW.)  The story focuses on the ruling family of the winter realm of Kinh, the Ilsedines - more specifically, the twin heirs, Malous and Jonalee.  They've recently found out that their father, the king, has chosen to make political marriages for them.  Well, they don't like that too much, and they scheme to escape the arranged marriage...

I sometimes attend a free-writing Meetup in my city.  The organizer gives a single word, and then the goal is to free-write for 30 minutes without self-editing.  I like to use it as a writing challenge, to write a short story in half an hour.  I haven't done things like that in almost a decade, not since grade school. In grade school, I was part of a writing group called Power of the Pen.  It was a chapter of a state-wide writing competition with the same name.  For the first meeting, we'd be given a sealed one-sentence prompt (also known as a strip of paper stapled in half), and then we'd be responsible for writing on that prompt for 40 minutes, timed.  We'd then share our writings at the following meeting, critique one another, and be given another prompt.  All of this was in preparation for the competitions, where there would be three timed rounds of 40 minutes, each with their own prompt.  At the district competition, the top 50% would go...

I finished!  50,250 words at final count.  Woohoo! Now, I do feel like I cheated slightly by changing projects 2/3 of the way through, but oh well.  The goal is to write 50,000 words, and at least I did that.  Switching to work on the sequel to "Thicker than Water" turned out to be pretty awesome.  I was worried that it would be too dark, since I'd been working on "Tangle" and that had gone pretty far down the rabbit hole without a flashlight, but it turns out I didn't need to worry.  The stuff I wrote for "Thinner than Smoke" was, in my humble opinion, hilarious.   My characters are trying to escape from soldiers who want to capture them, which seems like it would be pretty harrowing, but it actually came out funny.  The characters (one male, one female) end up borrowing clothes from a prostitute so they can blend in (since the soldiers are looking for at least one man), and they have to pretend to be lesbians to avoid notice.  So, yeah,...