The Retreat!

(Sorry this post was delayed while I was out at sea again!)

The retreat was amazing. I only wish I had the means to do it more often! Unfortunately, at that rate, I'd just be paying for this book to be written, which is not exactly a long-term strategy. So I'll just have to splurge every once in a while when I really am feeling that I need it.

I had to run some errands so ended up getting to the B&B about 20 minutes late (precious writing time gone!), and then of course they had lost my reservation. I was almost done filling out the paperwork again when they found the original one, so that was a lot of fun. But still, it was before 4 PM by the time I got my laptop set up, put on my pajama pants, and started cranking.

At first, it was just like any other writing time. Then I got to the point that I would usually stop, and instead I had to just push through. And do that again. And again. Finally, my stomach would not be ignored any longer, and I headed out to grab a salad from a nearby fast food place. Of course, that ended up taking a while since my quick Googling had neglected to inform me that this fast food place was in a busy mall food court.

Back to my writing hole, I devoured the salad and kept churning through the scenes. I had just returned from an at-sea period in which I had gotten a little sleep-deprived, so I had to call it quits from exhaustion before 10 PM. Still, in less than 5 hours of writing I had put down over 4k words. I set my alarm for 7 AM so that I could get a few more hours in before check out at 11. It was hard to get into the writing before breakfast--I am not much of a morning person--but I managed, which made the breakfast taste that much better. I returned to the room and powered through the last two hours. That morning I put in about 3 hours for about 3k words.

El Primero Boutique Bed & Breakfast

So in only about 7.5 hours of writing time spread over two days, I managed to write 7,097 words! That may not sound like much, but that is more than I wrote the entire month of May. It also propelled me into the last section of my book, and restored some of my passion for the story. I even started playing around with new plot bunnies in my head while I was falling asleep!

All in all, the mini-retreat was a huge success for me. I can really see the light at the end of the tunnel on this draft, now!