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....

[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 IX: Back to the Revision Board As it turns out, once you sign with an agent, it's time for more - you guessed it - revisions.  Christa and Daniele had already sent me a long, detailed email with their notes on GIRLS BREAK THINGS. They included several paragraphs about what they loved (which absolutely gave me LIFE at a time I really needed it), as well as several more on broader items that they thought needed work. I talked it all through with Qiren, we decided ...

[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 VIII: The Calls Okay I think I've kept you hanging long enough. One of the agents I queried from a Twitter pitch, who had spent about three weeks with my full,  got in touch to set up a call!  [GIF: Excited Lottie from "The Princess and the Frog"] I'd never gotten that far in the query process before, so my reaction was something like *happy scream* mixed with *terrified stressed scream.* I was so excited, and yet -  I had no idea what to do...

[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 VII: Querying and Revising - Again With NaNoWriMo over and done, I was t i r e d . The process of writing this manuscript had been extremely intense, and I was more worn out than I had expected. I decided to let the manuscript rest for a month or so, and when January 2019 came around, I decided it was time for everybody's favorite step in the writing process: revisions. Yaaay.  [ G IF: Person in a flower costume dancing with text "Aww Y...

[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:...

Hello, fronds. It’s been quite a while. Okay, a really effing long time. A year. But hello, because I am (at least for now) RETURNED. I know the grammar there was wrong. It’s just how the words happen in my head. Anyway, a lot of not-so-fun stuff happened that made me stop writing on my blog for a while. Without going into too many specifics (I’m a fan of my privacy), after last year’s NaNoWriMo, I developed some mental health issues and it took me a long time to get back to the level where I am now. Moving on... I decided to start blogging again because I’m gearing up to start Preptober, during which I’ll be planning for this year’s NaNoWrio project with the 90-Day Novel method. This year’s work is tentatively titled THE JULIE PROJECT, since it’s based on the legendary life of Julie d’Aubigny. If all goes well, this will be my fourth finished manuscript, which is exciting! And I want to keep track of what I’m doing, not only for myself, but in the hopes that this m...

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,...

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...

*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...

Welp.  Here we are.  This post, unfortunately, needs to be written - the first one.  The one that conquers the blank page, the empty blog. So.  Let me do what (I think) I do best and paint you a word picture. I'm sitting at my kitchen counter, where I've got soup on one burner and stock on the other.  My tea kettle, a gift from my grandmother that matches all of my grandmother's plates and cups and bowls but none of mine because mine have been slowly accumulated from various sources over the past four years, is recovering from my most recent cup of tea.  Milk oolong, if you were wondering.  (You probably weren't, but now we're at that point in our relationship.  Hi!)  I really ought to be working on my homework, like most other students out there.  When they say that grad school is a lot of work, they are not lying.  I'm so tired.  Anyway, just down the counter from me is my husband's pet project, an electric typewriter tha...