I’m here at Panera Bread in Aberdeen, piggybacking on their free wi-fi. Ain’t technology grand? Yesterday was a very good writing day. A good day in general.
I made my 10-page quota for THE FIXER-UPPER. With all of us in attendance, we settled into our writing routine. Generally, some of us gather in the kitchen in the morning for coffee and breakfast, then we break up and go off to our corners to write. Lunch is potluck–out of the groceries we brought. We all worked more in the afternoon, and then about 7 we broke for dinner. I’d brought the black bean soup and salad stuff, and we had good crusty rolls–and wine. You can’t have a writer’s retreat without wine! Also M&Ms–plain and peanut. After dinner, we gathered in the lounge at Weymouth. It’s a very evocative space, houses the NC Literary Hall of Fame, so as we sat there sipping our wine, we had Thomas Wolfe and Louis Rubin Jr. and tons of poets and novelists gazing down at us. The best thing about the retreat is the chance to bounce ideas and questions off other published writers who understand this awful business of writing a book. We took turns talking about our work in progress, and brainstormed where needed. I came away with lots of questions answered about THE FIXER UPPER. With the hard work out of the way by 10 pm, some of the girls wandered off to bed, while the others of us stayed up to play Balderdash, a word game like Dictionary that I’d never played before. We had a blast, trying to fake each other out with definitions for words none of us had ever heard before. It was great letting our creative minds come out to play with words instead of work. This morning, I polished the synopsis some more, and now I’ve just emailed it to my editor and agent to see what they think. Now it’s back to work–I’ve got to get started on my day’s quota of pages.
