Thursday, November 14, 2013

NaNoWriMo Day 14:Writing Retreat Day One


My friend, Deb, and I arrived at Rockaway Beach last night about 10 p.m. We'd hoped to arrive a little earlier, but it takes as long as it takes, right?

She had to work. I had an appointment. We had to stop at stores to buy food, make a restroom stop, buy coffee for the drive.

Oh, and there was fog. Very thick fog in a few places, so travel speed was slower than normal at those times.

But we arrived safely, well-stocked, and ready for our personal writing retreat to get ahead and catch up on our word counts. And to do the exercises and assignments for the online poetry class with Daphne Gottlieb. 

So, technically, this is our second day here, though I say that last night doesn't really count, expect as a sleep over. 

Despite not getting enough sleep last night - due to the creative excitement of getting caught up on my feedback in the poetry class, and a visit from my muse, who delivered an excellent poem for the fist exercise - it has been a good day. The people in the lower part of the house were up way too early for how late I went to bed. I did manage to get a couple more hours of sleep, but that still left me very short of rest and recuperation time. But that's okay.

We wrote some more. This morning there was another exercise in our online class, and my muse was nearby and delivered another poem to me from the prompt. I set myself a target word count before going down to the beach and I reached it.

Deb and I went onto the beach, took some beautiful pictures, felt the air, the sand, the water. And the droplets as it started to rain. We walked a little more and then, with the confirmation that the storm we'd been watching move across the ocean was coming in our direction, we reluctantly headed back to the house. It started raining seriously when we were a couple of houses away. And just after we were safely inside, the wind picked up and the rain picked up and everything became wet.

More writing. Contemplating what we wanted to do for dinner; which ended up being staying in and cooking or heating up from the stores we laid in. More writing.

And I'm probably stopping with NaNoWriting for tonight, because I am feeling tired. I think tonight I will go to bed at a reasonable hour and I think I will get a long night's sleep. 

It has been a good day and it has been successful in the amount of writing I've done.

Today I've written 1723 words to bring my NaNoNovel word count to 25, 093. I am just over halfway to the finish line! Although I know that this novel will require more than the 50k and I do want to finish the first draft of this story.