Retreat to the House on the Hill V

Once again, I head the pleasure of attending the now annual Retreat to the House on the Hill. This was my fifth time attending the writing retreat, and incidentally the fifth time the retreat has been held--so I've been around since the beginning. It's a fantastic opportunity to get a ton of writing done, as well as get to know some other writers.

Dave Butler, author of the Witchy War series among many other books--and my touring teammate--continues to serve as gracious host of the retreat. I spent time with many other talented and awesome writers while there as well--and I'm particularly proud of the work I accomplished while there. For me, it went more or less like this:

Monday: Outlining Dawnrise, the fifth and final books of the Chaos Queen Quintet.

Tuesday: Finished the DR outline. (I'd hoped to be finished by the outline before the retreat, but alas, that did not happen. And, tbh, I'd started getting a bet down on myself on Tuesday because, while I was accomplishing a lot of work by finishing the outline, I wasn't getting tangible words written, and that bothered me. [To be clear, I don't think it should have bothered me--work is work, and writers get things done in all kinds of ways--but I find retreats are at their most useful for me at the drafting phase, where I can just churn out a lot of words. So, I was letting that get to me.]) But, once finished with the outline, I did start writing the Prologue of DR, getting a whole 255 words into it :-D.

Wednesday: Continued the first draft of DR in earnest, writing 8494 words.

Thursday: 9013 words farther into the DR draft.

Friday: 10066 words! It's a rare occasion that I get 10,000 plus words (I think I can count them on one hand), and this was one of those days. Killed it.

Saturday: 4206 words. This was more of a half day, but 4200 is still much better than my daily minimum goal (2k).

So, all things considered, I wrote just over 32,000 words for the week. That's more writing than I do in a month, sometimes, so I'm pretty happy about it. And, despite heavy outlining at the beginning of the week, I'm very happy I was able to dig into a decent word count total at the end. I think that puts me at just over 20% as far as my progress on Dawnrise goes, and that feels pretty good.

Oh, also I won the Edward M. Kovel award for "Best-coordinated loungewear on a Curmudgeon." That was the exact Kovel award I was gunning for, tbh, so I couldn't be happier there, either!

Retreat to the House on the Hill II

As some of you may remember, last year I attended a writing retreat here in Utah and it was amazing.

Well, I attended the same retreat two weeks ago, courtesy of the eclectically brilliant, academic-hating, ice-giant-of-a-man Dave Butler, and once again triumphed over my writing foes.

I can't say for sure exactly how much work I got done this time because it was mostly revision, but I revised upwards of 80,000 words, and re-outlined the main story braid of book 2 in the Chaos Queen Quintet for further revision. It was fantastic.

The retreat is a cool thing for a number of reasons. (1) I get a lot of writing done. Writing happens pretty much from the moment everyone wakes up until dinner that evening, with itty-bitty breaks here and there for lunch and shooting the breeze with the other retreaters. (2) I get to hang out with some other awesome writers--we all eat dinner together, and then play board games until the late hours. It is a lot of fun, and this year I got to hang out with Jon Rock, Daniel Braithwaite, Scott Taylor, Aaron Michael Ritchey, Eric Patten, Michael Dalzen, and Marion Jensen. We had a special guest in the form of Nick Dianatkhah, and of course were hosted by Dave Butler.

It was quite an enjoyable week.

Highlights include the Edward M. Kovel Awards:

Remind me to tell you why these awards are so amazing sometime.

A delightful, over-too-soon game of Twilight Imperium:

The greatest board game on the planet (or in the galaxy, for that matter). And this was only a six-player game.

And, of course, making significant progress on version 2.0 of CQQ2. That, my friends, adds up to a very successful week.

I Wrote 37k in a Week, Like a Total Boss

I did a fantastic thing this last week: I went to a writing retreat.

The "Retreat to the House on the Hill I" was at David Butler s house in Utah Valley, a fantastic space where myself, Dave, Steve Diamond, and E.J. Patten (and Robison Wells, who was able to join us towards the end of the retreat along with his delightful canine companion, Annie) were able to hunker down and write. And write. And eat a few things. And then write some more. And then eat dinner. And then more of the writing. And then play some board games, and sleep, and wake up, and repeat the whole process. Basically, the idea was to create a space where we could all get as much writing done as possible in a week's time, and let me be the first one to tell you, it totally worked. Here's my personal breakdown for the week:

Day 1 - I got there about halfway through the day, but still ended up writing 5100 words. That's a great day for me, any way you look at it.

Day 2 - I really hit my stride, and pumped out over 8000 words. Almost superhuman, until you look at the next day.

Day 3 - More than 8700 words.

Day 4 - More than 9200 words.

Day 5 - Things slowed down for me a bit here, being close to the weekend and me already feeling really great about what I'd produced that week, but I still hit almost 6000 words.

So, all told, I wrote more than 37,000 words in the past five days. That, for me, is a truly incredibly feat. To put it in perspective, my normal daily writing goal is between 2-3000 words, so I was producing 3-4 times the quantity of what I normally get out in a day. In fact, 37k is closer to what I produce in a month.

Not only that, but I was able to finally blow past the problematic midpoint in my current WIP (Dark Immolation, Book 2 of the Chaos Queen Series), and now only have about 1/4 of the manuscript left to write. That is a great feeling.

So, the retreat was certainly worth it. Not only for me, but for the other writers as well. Dave estimates we produced around 140,000 words between the five of us last week, which he compares to two full mass market paperback novels, written in five days. That isn't exactly true for me--the final draft of Duskfall is around 160k, and Dark Immolation is looking to be a bit larger than that. Such are the woes of writing epic fantasy, though. Sigh. What can I say? I'm long-winded.

Anyway, the retreat was a phenomenal success, and if Dave ever decides to hold another (which he says is a likely thing), I'll be the first in line to beg entrance.