History That Never Was

Home of Dawn Vogel: Writer, Historian, Geek

The Retreat Recap

The Location: A beautiful rental property on Harstine Island. Overall, it was great! There were some minor oddities that could have become an issue, but didn’t. Like the fact that it only had 2 bathrooms, and only one of them had a shower! With 9 women in the house, that could have become disastrous, but we got by. It was also a difficult walk/climb on wet leaves to get down to the beach, so I only went down once. Getting snowed on while we were walking back may also have dissuaded me from spending more time outdoors in general!

The Food: I can’t remember the last time I had so much food that was so good! Breakfast and lunch were generally sort of “grab what you want,” with occasional additional organization. Dinners were more organized. I made my spaghetti sauce, which we ate with ravioli and/or gluten-free pasta. We also had some amazing gumbo and dirty rice. There was other stuff too, but I can’t remember all of it. All I know is that I snacked a ton, sometimes even on healthy stuff! The one thing that I need to remember if we do something like this again is to bring more sweets (and/or fruit), because even if the rest of the people don’t have a sweet tooth, I love my sugar!

The Fun: I had met all but one of the other authors before going, so I knew I was headed out for a weekend with a bunch of fun ladies. We talked a lot (maybe more than we should have for productivity’s sake) and played some games. We had a They Might Be Giants sing along. We laughed until we couldn’t breathe!

The Writing: As I mentioned on Friday, I went out with 7 projects and a book I needed to read for a review. I managed to finish reading the book and wrote that review. I also finished one of my other projects. I worked on another review, three of my short stories, and a bit of my novella. There was only one project, a fourth short story, that I ended up not working on at all, because I discovered that I hadn’t quite copied ALL of the notes I needed from my E-mail. Ah well. So yeah, the review is the only thing that I finished that will be published. I would have liked to actually FINISH more, but progress is still progress, right?

On the way home, the Seattle contingent discussed this, in particular, and agreed that if we do this again, we should set up a bit more structure, like specific times when people should be writing and not chatting. I think that would be a good plan for any writer’s retreat, and am going to strongly urge it if my regular writer’s group is able to get our retreat organized.

Our fearless leader also said that she’s going to start sending out weekly E-mails to ask what everyone has worked on and accomplished during the week. Between that and Write1Sub1, I should be able to stay on target this year. Fingers crossed!

 


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