Amren Ortega - Writer

Hi fronds! How's it goin'? [GIF: Monstera plant swaying over a pink background] Since I got my biggest mistakes out of the way last time, now it's time for the good stuff: the best choices I made in my Draft Zero to Writing Hero process! 1) Keeping diligent notes when querying.  I love a good spreadsheet. I've spreadsheeted things that really should not have been spreadsheeted. (And I've now verbed the word "spreadsheet.") And when it came to querying, it was incredibly helpful to have all of my querying data in one place: the agent's name, what agency they work for, when I queried them, when I expected to hear back, when I actually heard back (if I heard back at all), and any further notes on that agent or query package. Keeping extensive records like this took some of the stress out of querying. Yes, it was still a difficult and stressful process, but at least I knew things like "I should hear back from Agent A within the next week....

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 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...

[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? [ ...