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....

[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? [ ...

So...remember how I said back in October that I was back? [GIF: Tom Hanks thinking] Yeah. Me neither. I've tried to keep up with writing a blog, I really have. But for some reason, I'm just incredibly flighty about it. For a while there, I was posting short stories a few times a week, but then life got in the way, I guess. Well, that's not quite true, but I'm not ready to talk about the specific reasons yet. Maybe sometime in the future. It's also been tough trying to think of things to write about. Right now, I'm also a team member of Operation Awesome, and I do posts on general writing thoughts, tips, and current events over there. So I don't want to be double-posting things, you know? I want to be able to provide something new and different here than I'm doing over there. In that spirit, if anyone out there is still listening, in the next few weeks I'm planning to write about my journey from my first time querying to where I am now -...

Hello, fronds. It’s been quite a while. Okay, a really effing long time. A year. But hello, because I am (at least for now) RETURNED. I know the grammar there was wrong. It’s just how the words happen in my head. Anyway, a lot of not-so-fun stuff happened that made me stop writing on my blog for a while. Without going into too many specifics (I’m a fan of my privacy), after last year’s NaNoWriMo, I developed some mental health issues and it took me a long time to get back to the level where I am now. Moving on... I decided to start blogging again because I’m gearing up to start Preptober, during which I’ll be planning for this year’s NaNoWrio project with the 90-Day Novel method. This year’s work is tentatively titled THE JULIE PROJECT, since it’s based on the legendary life of Julie d’Aubigny. If all goes well, this will be my fourth finished manuscript, which is exciting! And I want to keep track of what I’m doing, not only for myself, but in the hopes that this m...

Hey, all. Thanks for tuning in to...whatever this is. You could be looking at cute cat videos, but you're here oh wait now that I've said that you're gone whoops. Well, for those of you that stuck around, there's been a lot going on since my last post. I've been querying my fingerprints off, got some rejections, that's fine. It happens to everyone, and it just means I haven't found the perfect agent yet. I'm cool with that. Nah, what's bugging me is the fact that I finished the first book in my series and now I have to move on to the next. See, the complex thing about "Thicker than Water" is that the ending is ambiguous. I love the idea of branching timelines, that a single decision can change the world. There are two possible endings, and I wanted to leave it up to the reader to decide whether...well. Spoilers. But after six rounds of revision, I'm finally feeling confident in this draft. So, I started on one of the sequels, that...

I sometimes attend a free-writing Meetup in my city.  The organizer gives a single word, and then the goal is to free-write for 30 minutes without self-editing.  I like to use it as a writing challenge, to write a short story in half an hour.  I haven't done things like that in almost a decade, not since grade school. In grade school, I was part of a writing group called Power of the Pen.  It was a chapter of a state-wide writing competition with the same name.  For the first meeting, we'd be given a sealed one-sentence prompt (also known as a strip of paper stapled in half), and then we'd be responsible for writing on that prompt for 40 minutes, timed.  We'd then share our writings at the following meeting, critique one another, and be given another prompt.  All of this was in preparation for the competitions, where there would be three timed rounds of 40 minutes, each with their own prompt.  At the district competition, the top 50% would go...

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,...

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 ...

Hi all!  Today's post comes to you from Los Angeles, California.  I'm currently attending the Hackaday Superconference and trying to keep up with NaNoWriMo at the same time.  It's...a bit of a challenge, but hey, I eat challenge for breakfast. Not really.  I eat toast and eggs.  Or leftover Chinese food. Anyway, the writing has actually been going pretty well!  The stuff that I've written in the past couple days hasn't been 100% original material for NaNoWriMo, so that's made the going a little easier.  Since I've previously written some of the story, I've been more adapting  the old stuff to fit with the new characters and plot.  That has proved to be nearly as challenging as writing new material.  I'm constantly judging myself for the stuff I've written in the past, which is not at all a constructive thing to do, but I can't stop myself.  So in addition to working through all that mental drama, there's the matter of fitting ol...

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...

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...