Summary:
My second retreat was also great – and I finished outlining my new novel! I also lined up some great new paid editing projects to start on my return to real life, which was great.
Monday:
Today was a travelling day – taxi from Tall Trees to Castle Cary, train back to Paddington, Elizabeth Line to Heathrow, sitting around for ages as flight was delayed, plane to Dublin, then hour-long bus and 25-minute car ride to undisclosed second retreat location.
Tuesday:
And today, Carla and I decided afterwards, was a ‘settling in’ day! We went on a long walk around the property and did a huge amount of chatting with Gabrielle – some of it related to writing! We had our usual Tuesday afternoon call with Sam, but didn’t do a focus session.
Sam kept us honest by suggesting we reconvene for actual writing work on Wednesday.
Wednesday:
We had a morning focus session with Sam and I did make some notes about the novel I’m currently working on – A Wizard Calls My Name. But I got a bit stuck – I’ve done a lot of the planning, but not nearly enough (I always get to a certain point and trying to buckle down to work out any more details just feels impossible) – and I couldn’t remember how to get from that stage to having a workable outline… I think it may have something to do with index cards (which I didn’t bring with me). I thought about trying to go straight to the spreadsheet stage (because it would be easy enough to change things around and add in extra bits on that) but the session came to an end before I could get started on that – so not my best session ever!
I went out for a walk with Carla and talked through the problem, deciding that working on whatever aspect of the novel was most interesting to me was perfectly fine, even if it didn’t fit in with my ‘official’ outlining process.
After lunch, we did another focus session with Sam. I edited Carla’s synopsis down from 633 words to 498 – then I went back to Wizard and started building the outline in a spreadsheet, because that felt like the most interesting and productive thing to do.
I put together a scene list and a basic structure and fleshed it out a bit – so, by the end of the exercise, it almost felt like I had a whole novel planned out!
Thursday:
I had an idea the night before about a different way to do the viewpoint in Wizard, so I went back through my outline and rejigged it to fit the new plan. Then I went through all my notes and transferred the most important and most interesting points onto the outline so I wouldn’t forget them. I also made a list of all the biggest remaining questions to work on.
It felt by this point as if I might be ready to start my first draft (exciting!) but I decided to leave this for next week, when I’m back in my usual routine.
Friday:
Today was a lot of travelling, but one of the writers from the Somerset retreat gifted me a copy of one of her novels – and I read the whole thing in one go, across buses, planes and trains throughout the day!
Sunday:
I had some more thoughts about how to approach drafting Wizard so I added notes to my outline and plan.