Writing Retreat Gone Awry

So, I had planned last Friday to be a mini writing retreat for me, locked in my office, cranking out 5000 or 10000 words like I do on the last day of NaNoWriMo, but instead, it turned into a nonstop interruption machine.  Our air conditioning had a problem which then resulted in my having to get errands done in the morning and then I had other stuff that afternoon and ended up out of the house for all the time that I would have been writing.

Looking back, it's just a bunch of excuses.  However, I think putting a little structure to the day might have helped.  So this Friday, I am also off (yeah yeah, must be the life, right?  No, seriously I am just trying to burn a day or two of vacation so I don't totally max out which I most likely will anyway over the next six weeks or so).  So I plan on taking a good chunk of time Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, and cranking out those much needed 5000 or 10000 words.  But in this plan I will be realistic, including time to eat, time to be interrupted by other things, time to waste, time to tackle other projects (have some baseboards to touch up with paint...have a yard to mow...).  And I will find a way to stay offline and writing for those blocks.  Because that's really what I would want to do, once I actually start doing it.  It's never a matter of writing, just a matter of starting to write.  If I can finish the draft on White Rock, so be it, and I can move along into revisionland on the next next item to tackle.

Ah revisionland, the dream world that I keep not-so-fondly looking forward to but never quite reaching.  That's going to need some structure, too, as well as some externally enforced deadlines.  We'll see how it goes.  One of the editor/writer individuals I follow on Twitter suggested I find three readers and I set a pass-off date to hand the revised draft over for their happy consumption.  Not a bad idea, I think, but first I will need to determine what that reasonable date is.  August 8th?  That could be pretty aggressive, but workable.  October 1 is drop-dead because we all KNOW that I will want to start working on my NaNo idea, which this year may not include a murder-mystery element.  I'm toying with something sci-fi-fantasy-horror-ish that I may play with some flash fiction in the meantime to flesh out, just a scene here or there to define some characters.

I also figure from August to October I will have my hands full personally when I am not at "the work" (meaning the job that pays money), so that may be a difficult time to get anything done...so I won't count on that, and in the meantime I will try to be uber-productive now.  Like that's succeeding in anything other than a little poetic creation, excess meta-writing-bloggery, and incessant planning of events which may or may not come to fruition.

But it all will start with my "mini-writing-retreat" this weekend, and we'll see where it goes from there.