Nowhere Else to Go--more thoughts on Retreats

I'm in the Internet coffee place by the beach where so many vacationers are checking their email that it's shuddering in and out. The luckier folks have iPhones, iPads, Blackberries, Droids and plain old PDFs so that they can check their email without slogging to the coffee joint. Or are they luckier?

The genius of this writing retreat is that there's nowhere to go when you want to dither, consternate, digress or just plain avoid your manuscript. And traveling to the avatar world of twitter, facebook, Huffpo, even this wonderful blogspot, is definitely going "somewhere else."

(Look, I've gotta post once week or so. Uh, yah!)

Come to think of it, I feel less obsessive, not being able to tweet every day. Even though the big black flies are biting my ankles and the seat of the rocking chair is hard, and the pacing and sighing and chuckling of my fellow writers is slightly distracting, the fact is, I've gotten a lot done. A 286 page revise finished and four pages of a new project.

I'm reminded of the artist whose wife used to lock up in a room, so he had nothing else to do but paint masterpieces (or rip his hair out in chunks).

We're not always producing masterpieces, but this retreat offers us the time to try!