Amren Ortega - Writer

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 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 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? [ ...