Amren Ortega - Writer

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,...

*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...