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...

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 ...

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...