Today I did a one-day writing retreat, and in the spirit of my DIY artist retreat zine, here’s how it went:

I stayed home for most of the day. Typically I get out of the house, but for various reasons (DONUTS WERE BEING DELIVERED TO MY HOUSE, OKAY) I decided to give the stay-treat (?) a try. I had to be disciplined not to, y’know, start a load of laundry or get obsessed with the dishes.  But overall it was more comfortable–I didn’t have to worry about buying enough coffee to stay at the coffeeshop.

I am really pleased with the flow of the day. Starting with big picture stuff (redoing exercises from Better Together and answering Writers.com’s 7 questions)h got me excited to keep working and confirmed that I’m on the right path:  I want more community in my writing life, I want to be sharing work more (hello, recent blog posts), and I want to be more ambitious.  After an internal 2019, I am ready to put myself out there. I want to see what the friction of other people reading does to the work.

Then lunch. I finished playing With Those We Love Alive, which I have SO many thoughts about and may have been my only mis-step. It led me down a rabbit-hole of other Porpentine games, then I read reviews of the game, then I read interviews, at which point I was consumed with jealousy.

Instead of actually facing that jealousy, I researched markets to submit to and re-read work I did in the fall.  Thankfully, that shut down the part of my brain that was telling me how terrible I am, which meant I could work on something important to me. I worked on the Twine story for a while, while drinking a hard seltzer and generally living my best life.

I GOT SOMETHING DONE! Like, done done. I should do that more often. Work-in-progress limits are doing their dang job.