Amren Ortega - Writer

Hey, all. Thanks for tuning in to...whatever this is. You could be looking at cute cat videos, but you're here oh wait now that I've said that you're gone whoops. Well, for those of you that stuck around, there's been a lot going on since my last post. I've been querying my fingerprints off, got some rejections, that's fine. It happens to everyone, and it just means I haven't found the perfect agent yet. I'm cool with that. Nah, what's bugging me is the fact that I finished the first book in my series and now I have to move on to the next. See, the complex thing about "Thicker than Water" is that the ending is ambiguous. I love the idea of branching timelines, that a single decision can change the world. There are two possible endings, and I wanted to leave it up to the reader to decide whether...well. Spoilers. But after six rounds of revision, I'm finally feeling confident in this draft. So, I started on one of the sequels, that...

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 ...