Amren Ortega - Writer

[Image: My Hermes Baby typewriter with text "Draft Zero to Writing Hero"] Hi fronds! Welcome to the grand tale about my writing journey! I wanted to write about this in all its roller-coaster ups and downs because I had a lot of trouble finding this information when I was getting started in 2016. This is definitely going to span several posts, but I hope my story will help someone else with their own path to publishing. If you'd like to know how this all began, please start with  Chapter I . Chapter VI: NaNoWriMo 2018 With less than a month to go before NaNoWriMo, I was in panic mode. I'm a planner, but a notoriously bad one - usually, I think I'm 80% ready, but the real number is more like...30%. Even so, I usually have my NaNoWriMo idea bouncing around in my mind for a few months before November rolls around; having only three weeks was...well, like being told I suddenly had to write a full novel on a topic I'd barely researched. [GIF:...

[Image: My Hermes Baby typewriter with text "Draft Zero to Writing Hero"] Hi fronds! Welcome to the grand tale about my writing journey! I wanted to write about this in all its roller-coaster ups and downs because I had a lot of trouble finding this information when I was getting started in 2016. This is definitely going to span several posts, but I hope my story will help someone else with their own path to publishing. If you'd like to know how this all began, please start with  Chapter I . Chapter V:...now what? Shelving my YA fantasy left me in a weird funk. I'd been working on it for four years, and for the most part, I'd forgotten what life was like outside of revisions and querying. Fortunately, at the time, I had plenty of other things to occupy my mind. My partner and I were in the process of moving abroad to Belgium, which meant applying for visas, finding a place to stay, looking for jobs, deciding what to bring with us...it was a long and ar...

[Image: My Hermes Baby typewriter with text "Draft Zero to Writing Hero"] Hi fronds! Welcome to the grand tale about my writing journey! I wanted to write about this in all its roller-coaster ups and downs because I had a lot of trouble finding this information when I was getting started in 2016. This is definitely going to span several posts, but I hope my story will help someone else with their own path to publishing. If you'd like to know how this all began, please start with  Chapter I . Chapter IV: Shelving Manuscript 1 When I hit the one-year mark of querying my YA fantasy manuscript, I realized that I had to take a step back. By that point, I'd sent out more than fifty queries, although it feels like I must've sent at least three hundred. Out of all those queries, I got three requests for the full manuscript, and each of those ended in rejection. I had applied to mentorship programs, some more than once, but none of the mentors requested more page...

[Image: My Hermes Baby typewriter with text "Draft Zero to Writing Hero"] Hi fronds! Welcome to the grand tale about my writing journey! I wanted to write about this in all its roller-coaster ups and downs because I had a lot of trouble finding this information when I was getting started in 2016. This is definitely going to span several posts, but I hope my story will help someone else with their own path to publishing. If you'd like to know how this all began, please start with  Chapter I . Chapter III: Querying, Revising, and Asking for Help With my agent spreadsheet made, my query package ready to go, and my stomach freshly emptied of its contents, I began to query my manuscript. I'm an anxious person – and I was even more so at the time, before my anxiety disorder was diagnosed – so it took me a long time to work up the guts to send even one query. In the first four months of querying, I only sent seven emails to agents. Three came back with form re...

[Image: My Hermes Baby typewriter with text "Draft Zero to Writing Hero"] Hi fronds! Welcome to the grand tale about my writing journey! I wanted to write about this in all its roller-coaster ups and downs because I had a lot of trouble finding this information when I was getting started in 2016. This is definitely going to span several posts, but I hope my story will help someone else with their own path to publishing. If you'd like to know how this all began, please start with Chapter I . Chapter II: The First Query Package After making my massive spreadsheet of Agents To Query, it was time to actually come up with materials to send them. This apparently included a synopsis and something mysterious called a query letter. A synopsis I could handle, but a query letter? I had no idea what that was. Naturally, I went straight back to Google. I perused blogs and author websites, trying to track down the elusive query letter secrets that would catch an agent...

[Image: My Hermes Baby typewriter with text "Draft Zero to Writing Hero"] Hi fronds! Welcome to the grand tale about my writing journey! I wanted to write about this in all its roller-coaster ups and downs because I had a lot of trouble finding this information when I was getting started in 2016. This is definitely going to span several posts, but I hope my story will help someone else with their own path to publishing. Chapter I: The Grand Beginning The first manuscript I queried, a YA fantasy, I wrote from about fall 2013 to fall 2016. As soon as I was done, I thought, "great, ready to go! Let's publish this sucker." [GIF: Liz Lemon, "Let's do this."] Well, as we all know, not so fast. After several hours of Google searches on "Okay, I finished my manuscript, now what?", I found out that I needed a query letter, a synopsis, and the most important thing: agents to query. Okay, so...agents, wya? [ ...

So...remember how I said back in October that I was back? [GIF: Tom Hanks thinking] Yeah. Me neither. I've tried to keep up with writing a blog, I really have. But for some reason, I'm just incredibly flighty about it. For a while there, I was posting short stories a few times a week, but then life got in the way, I guess. Well, that's not quite true, but I'm not ready to talk about the specific reasons yet. Maybe sometime in the future. It's also been tough trying to think of things to write about. Right now, I'm also a team member of Operation Awesome, and I do posts on general writing thoughts, tips, and current events over there. So I don't want to be double-posting things, you know? I want to be able to provide something new and different here than I'm doing over there. In that spirit, if anyone out there is still listening, in the next few weeks I'm planning to write about my journey from my first time querying to where I am now -...