Guess who got back from his writers’ retreat in time for Content Challenge! If you guessed good ol’, me, you would be correct. Oh my goodness, what a time. I wrote about thirty-three pages of my New Book, which is quite a bit more than I have written in my Old Book in months. I think the new one will be the winner in this Tortoise and the Hare.

Every day, I would awaken at the crack of 11:30 and then sit down to write. I’d get through a couple of pages and then have to take a two-hour nap, an hour of naptime per page. Then write again, then nap again. There was some discussion of this meaning my writing was coming from a deeper place, but maybe I was just tired. My work schedule is not normally grueling, but it is so psychically challenging, I can’t tell you. Everyone’s problem is my problem. Imagine if you had the compounded problems of fifteen people on top of your own. Sometimes I get home after just a couple of hours on the job and have to curl up in bed or drink a bottle of wine.

Anyway: the retreat. So lovely. We went to my parents’ house in Western Maryland, in middle of nowhere. No net connection, barely any cell connection, just woods and lake and herds of deer crashing through the underbrush. Goblin thought she had found her soulmates and tried to crash off after them, but her stapled-up leg kept her in the yard.

Every day, except today actually, most of us gathered to do kundalini yoga, which I used to do back in my New York days but haven’t had the opportunity to do since. It was such a quiet place, and the yoga practically froze my ever-analytical mind into a statue. Heaven. And I’m reasonably happy with what I wrote, so I think it was a complete success.

Now to sink back into my real life, filled with work, vet appointments, neighborhood beautification projects, and content challenges.

And chupacabras, of course.