I had an amazing week on retreat and got a lot done. I thought I’d take a little time to write a quick round-up of what I accomplished and report on whether I thought it was worth taking the time away.

I went with three goals: incorporate recent blog posts into my upcoming book, Face to Facebook, work on an ebook on elevator speeches and finish the first story in my upcoming fiction series.

That was the goal. Did I accomplish them? Not quite.

I got about halfway through the work on Face to Facebook. I did the heavy lifting of planning and organizing, so I can finish the rest fairly quickly. I’ve given myself a deadline of the middle of June.

I’m a little less than half finished with the elevator speech ebook. Again, easy enough to finish that as a part of my regular work week.

I didn’t get much writing done on my short story, but I did work my way through a point where I had been stuck for at least a week. I now have the rest of the story planned out, and it should be fairly quick to finish it now. I also have laid some foundations for further stories in the series.

So it doesn’t sound like I accomplished much, does it? Was the trip worth it?

Definitely. Grunt work of adding and editing content is easy for me to do in and around blogging, client meetings and networking. But having time away to do planning and organization was valuable. And I certainly got more done in three days away than I would have here. Without the retreat, I think it would be midsummer before Face to Facebook would be in shape to send to beta readers. Now, I think I can have it there in a month or maybe a bit less.

I had been making no progress on the stuck point in my story. I think I could have gotten unstuck here, but the story is going to be better for the quiet time I had to reflect and work on plot seeds, backstory and other fun stuff.

I do plan to go on retreat again. By staying in my camper, the total cost was less than $200. Very affordable to do once or twice a year.

I’m tentatively planning to go out again in September. This time to work on rewriting an old novel, bringing it into the world I’m creating with the series of short stories.

By the way, I’m going to be looking for beta readers for Face to Facebook in about a month. If you’d like to volunteer, sign up in the comments. All readers will get a signed copy when the book is published. Feel free to email me if you want to know what it will entail. Thanks!

Tags: writing

This entry was posted on Monday, May 17th, 2010 at 12:14 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.