I’m Taking A Writing Vacation

This blog will be on hiatus until 2023.

Sometimes life has so many distractions and obligations that finding time to write requires a vacation. I decided to take a writing vacation. 

I’ve been inspired lately by a crime writing course with Vaseem Khan offered by Curtis Brown Creative. I realized that I was squeezing my writing in between writing for work, weekly blogs, two weekly videos, and career-related activities.

Last week I had my regular work writing assignments while I was a virtual attendee at three conferences—one on independent publishing and two about semantic search optimization. As I was working on a section of my novel for the crime writing course, I decided it was time I spent some weeks focusing on my writing. 

I’ve been writing weekly blogs and creating accompanying videos for over six years. I had to stop and count them. I decided to take a week for every year. 

What I’ll be doing:

• Writing and integrating the 10 sections that include the villains – not as long as regular chapters, but about a thousand words each.
• Finishing the draft of the novel.

So, I’ll be deep in the redwoods as Violent Crimes Unit Detective Jane Sharpe tackles a mysterious death…and then another death. 

As I reviewed chapters of my writing, I realized that my setup and story goals were clear. I just need to finish the story. 

A Writing Retreat at Home

I’ve thought before about taking a writing retreat, and the idea immediately grew complications with a shy cat. It would be wonderful to travel to the coast or down to the redwoods which I miss. But, I also love where I live by the creek among the fir trees. Why not just stay here and lighten my load?

That’s what I decided to do so my writing will be my primary focus. 

A thousand reasons for not doing this vacation flooded in, of course. What about the videos? Will I disappear from Google’s world if I stop weekly articles? Will I lose my knowledge graph? Questions like those. But then I decided to just…let go. 

For many people, the winter holiday season is filled with many seasonal activities. For me, that is not the case. The family lives close, and we celebrate the day of. I thought this would be the perfect time to take a break and focus on my writing. 

I’ll be posting my progress and thoughts on Facebook if you would like to follow how the experiment works.

Have a wonderful holiday season.

Keep writing!