Amren Ortega - Writer

Hi fronds! How's it goin'? [GIF: Monstera plant swaying over a pink background] Since I got my biggest mistakes out of the way last time, now it's time for the good stuff: the best choices I made in my Draft Zero to Writing Hero process! 1) Keeping diligent notes when querying.  I love a good spreadsheet. I've spreadsheeted things that really should not have been spreadsheeted. (And I've now verbed the word "spreadsheet.") And when it came to querying, it was incredibly helpful to have all of my querying data in one place: the agent's name, what agency they work for, when I queried them, when I expected to hear back, when I actually heard back (if I heard back at all), and any further notes on that agent or query package. Keeping extensive records like this took some of the stress out of querying. Yes, it was still a difficult and stressful process, but at least I knew things like "I should hear back from Agent A within the next week....

Hi fronds! How y'all doin? [GIF: Bertie from "Tuca & Bertie" watering a sad cactus with water, coffee, and soda, asking "You thirsty? Is this helping?"] Now that you've got all the deets of my Draft Zero to Writing Hero Journey, I thought I'd summarize my biggest mistakes. Because I'M an ADULT and I can LEARN from my MISTAKES. Or, you know, at least you can. I already made the mistakes and it's kinda too late for me. 1) Thinking I was ready to query before I was actually ready. This one is the big one. I figured as soon as I was done writing, it was Time. (Narrator: "It was not time.") Yeah, I was very, very wrong about this one. I mean, look at how many times I had to revise GIRLS BREAK THINGS - at least seven! Writing a perfect first draft is a fallacy. If I had spent more time revising my YA fantasy before I began querying, I might have had some success with it. Instead, I wasted a lot of time trying to query someth...

[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...