Mrs. Cat takes a writing retreat!

/ samtasticbooks
Mrs. Cat standing in front of a road with hills in distance, clear blue sky, and bright clouds overhead
Mrs. Cat hits the road.

That’s right! Mrs. Cat was long overdue for a writing retreat, the last one being in the long hot summer of 2019. It’s summer again, it’s hot again, and this time instead of being cramped in a desert tiny house with minimal allowed A/C use, I trekked all the way to the mountain town of Idyllwild to stay in a friend-of-a-friend’s cabin, with shade trees and moderately more A/C!

Mrs. Cat lounging on a deck rail, pretty trees in background
Mrs. Cat takes some air.

This retreat was a long time coming. After the long awful year of 2021, it felt like my brain would never recover. I spent the first three months of 2022 laboriously finishing a novel edit that I’d begun the previous August and then put on hold during The Terrible Times, well aware that the book would be forever etched in my mind as The Book I Edited While Big Sis Was Dying. The editing went so slowly, I began to worry that this was my new normal, just fits and starts of brain power at a fraction of the speed I used to work.

But I sent the book off to my agent, and I spent the next couple of months on a deliberate break. I squeezed one short story in there, realized I was making a mistake even trying to force that out, and then stopped writing shorts as well. For the rest of the time, I read sea monster books and took notes and let my brain percolate on something brand new, something not bogged under the stress that The Book I Edited While Big Sis Was Dying had suffered from.

And folks.

I think it worked.

I have an outline that I’m very excited about. I have characters and the characters have voices. (Yessss this is the project that I mentioned in my last post.) I had a start and a course of action and an end goal, and that meant I was ready to dive in.

Close up of chipmunk eating a nut on a large tree stump
Ms. Chipmunk says hello.

Enter: writing retreat.

Forty-eight entire hours without interruption. Forty-eight entire hours to get momentum going on the sea monster book and also to take several quiet naps! Heaven.

I napped and watched birds and chipmunks and ground squirrels and ate in the sunshine and sat on a couch typing until my hands went numb, and it was great. The book is past the 10K mark and I’m feeling good about it.

I’ve also spent some time pondering this here blog! It’s time for a bit of reconfiguring. Now that I’ve put short stories on hold, there’s a short-form-sized hole in my attention span. I’ve got ideas for blog series on music, B-movies, and crafts that I can pepper in between writing news. They’re gonna be great.

Goodbye, cabin! Till next time, Mrs. Cat out.

The back of Mrs. Cat in focus as she looks out at sunset behind leafy trees
Mrs. Cat says goodnight.

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