the brain game

Sorry I haven't posted in a while.  We were all sick over the Christmas break (upper respiratory flu, bronchitis, then stomach virus) and I was either sleeping or cleaning up messes.  Then I got called up for subbing (I'm a substitute teacher) three days in a row.  Add to that regular daily life, planning for a trip to Ireland & Scotland, and investigating the possibility of going back to school for my master's degree and there's been very little writing worthy to write about: more Sad Poetry, basically, and a few more vignettes.

This weekend was my Writing Retreat with Steph.  We took a condo (really a studio apartment) in Austin, carefully guarding our location so people we knew there wouldn't bother us, and made the drive out there (2 hours for Steph, 5 for me).  We chose the place based on its location to places we knew we wanted to visit (Penzey's spices for appeasing the husbands, Half Price to use my gift card from Christmas, and a couple good restaurants Steph wanted to introduce me to), but planned mostly to stay in and doing writerly things.  Ha.  The kitchen was way too small for cooking, plus we never could locate pots or pans, so we ended up eating out a lot, while discussing writerly things.  

We also perused the writing guides at Half Price and picked up some good ones and read to each other the good bits of those, taking copious notes (well, I did at least) from the good ones.  I also pieced together bits from old story ideas that I thought would go together well in the novel I've been having hang over my head for a while now.  I edited those bits for names and tenses and shoved them into my outline where they belonged (also made the outline, as before I just had one big scene for the novel and that was it).  Then I fleshed some of those bits out (they were mainly just more outlinish things).  In the end I added about a thousand words of actual new writing.  

It was a really great weekend!  :)