I am freshly back from a personal writing retreat. I spent three days up in Lake Tahoe in a room that was ridiculously large and had a comfortable dining booth, where I was quite productive.
This trip was to revise my second novel. When I left my house, I was only 75 pages into re-reading the book and taking notes. Within the first 24 hours, I had finished reading all 300 pages and had more than 10 pages of edit notes.
Being my normal overachieving self, in the next 24 hours I’d finished editing 150 pages, including rewriting two scenes to fix major point of view errors. There was one passage I skipped over, not sure how to fix it, but the rest felt right after I smoothed out the rough edges. One scene is now on the cutting room floor. Another might join it soon.
That big run of edits pretty much killed my energy. I would have been happy getting to the half way mark, especially with where I started. But, as is usual for me, I arrived at the airport early and cranked out another twenty pages. This would have taken weeks of my normal writing sessions.
Just in case this book becomes a major hit, I took a picture of the room number. Who knows, maybe in the future the lodge will be able to charge extra for that room because I was there. Ha ha!
I feel so fortunate that I had the ability to give myself this gift. I’m in the middle of a big project at work. Thank goodness my trip had been booked before that was announced. This was the last vacation I will take until the project is complete next February. I definitely made the most of it.
Grown Up, Now What? 