Retreat

Its been a few days since my last post. I worked pretty hard through to the end of the week, so on Saturday I took a retreat and came up to the Inn for the weekend. Its been a bit of a trange ride. Fun, stimulating, restful, and sometimes a little scary.

One thing I'm learning about myself is that it's good for me to get completely isolated sometimes. Long stretches of silence are good times to stop, listen to things you don't always hear in your own head, and talk with God about a lot of things.

The flip side of that, is that I'm learning how much I really need to be with and around people. That may sound like a strange thing to be surprised about, but since roughly this time last year I've been amazed at how true that is of me. I'd always thought of myself as a relatively self-sufficient person, emotionally and relationally. This season is continuing to prove that isn't as true as I might have thought. I've had to make a conscious effort not to get online too often or constantly check my email, after only about 36 hours. I find myself looking for things to distract me from my own thoughts.

It's certainly been a productive break though! I've finished a first draft of the new and improved chapter one of my book, and hopefully I'll have more than that done before bed. It's a huge relief to finally feel that I have all the pieces I need for the first several chapters. I very much doubt I'll be doing any more major revisions to the whole story that would require my starting over, so as of now I guess I'm officially "making progress".

I also spent some time working through the "Writing Influences" thought exercise Janelle suggested. It's been helpful to go back and think about some of my favorite books, even about where I was in life when I first encountered them. Mostly, it's been good to take a lot of the vague impressions that contributed to some of my bottlenecks, and work them into a more defined shape.

I'll post more specifically on both of those things later, but I wanted to put up my in-the-moment reactions at the end of the second full day of mostly silence.

On a mostly related side note: this blog has already been proving its value. I'm feeling a little more settled after just writing this short post. I'd definitely recommend it, if anyone has been thinking of starting one but hasn't gotten around to it yet.

Thanks to all of you who have responded to these thoughts in some way, it actually means quite a lot to me.

More to follow...