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 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:...

[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 V:...now what? Shelving my YA fantasy left me in a weird funk. I'd been working on it for four years, and for the most part, I'd forgotten what life was like outside of revisions and querying. Fortunately, at the time, I had plenty of other things to occupy my mind. My partner and I were in the process of moving abroad to Belgium, which meant applying for visas, finding a place to stay, looking for jobs, deciding what to bring with us...it was a long and ar...

[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...