It’s getting harder and harder to carve out time for my fiction. Life gets busy, and with even the best intentions, I don’t set aside enough time for the work I really want to do.
So I’m very excited to say that my writing group has rallied to set aside a whole weekend in July to step outside our busy lives and work on our novels (or screenplays, as the case may be). It’s the first official Rock Lake Writers Retreat. Well, the rest of the gang went up to Colorado last year for five days, but it happened to coincide with my sister-in-law’s wedding and Daniels subsequent back surgery, so it wasn’t in the cards for me. And that doesn’t count anyway, because we didn’t officially name our group until about six months ago. Which reminds me, we are in the process of setting up a website for our group. In a few weeks I should be able to share a url, and these mysterious writing-group-friends will finally be a lot less mysterious. I bet you were starting to think I made them up.
Anyhow, where was I? Writing retreat. Yes.
We rented a vacation house in Idyllwild, that’s a photo of it at the right there. It’s a nice place with three bedrooms, and we’re splitting the cost between the five us. We’re going up on Friday the 19th and staying two nights.
I’m so excited. I am also unprepared. I have just three weeks to get ready to make the most of my precious few days up there. Basically, I just need to figure out what changes I still want to make to the manuscript. I think I mentioned in a previous post that I got some conflicting advice from my readers on the most recent pass, so I need to really think hard about where I want the story to go.
I’m also feeling tempted by a new story idea. It’s a non-ficion book that really needs to be written (by me). I’m meeting with my agent to run it past her on Friday (tomorrow – wow, that came up quick). If she thinks it’s as exciting as I do, it might be hard not to spend the retreat working on the proposal.
Damn this creative life and its myriad potential writing projects.
Well, I have a few weeks to figure it out anyway.
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