I wonder if any of my writer friends have done this, and how it turned out.
Next weekend Zachary leaves for a two-week trip with his Italian friend. Circumstances have arranged themselves such that I have no commitments during that time. No pressing work assignments, no tickets to plays or concerts, nada.
When Z is away I revel in having the house to myself. Not that I don’t love the guy, you understand, but even after 18 years together I’m not entirely used to cohabitation. It’s a vacation for me to be home alone when he travels. He feels the same when I travel, in case you were wondering.
My normal practice during these idylls is to sleep late, watch bad Syfy (is there any other kind?) and lots of slasher and horror and Korean revenge flicks (stuff Zachary doesn’t really like). And I go out to dinner a lot with friends, and maybe schedule time with girlfriends whom I haven’t seen one-on-one for a while. Usually I’m working on one or more deadlines, though, so it’s not exactly a free-for-all of leisure.
This time there’ll be no deadline. I am, however, about 30K words from finishing the first draft of the novel I’ve been noodling with for some time. So I’m thinking, “Full-immersion, one-person writing camp.” I’ll stock up with the groceries I need, and plenty of Mountain Dew, and I’ll keep my schedule empty, with the intention of writing every day, as much as I can and whenever I feel like it. Middle of the night? No problem. Want to play that Fever Ray album over and over again until my ears bleed? No problem. If I stick to the extreme version, I won’t leave the house except to go the the gym five mornings a week and take a walk the other two mornings.
The single-mindedness of the plan pleases me, but who knows whether I’ll maintain it.
Have any of you done something like this? If so, did you:
(a) accomplish a ton of writing and feel awesome,
(b) fall off the plan in the first day and spend the rest of the time watching the entire runs of Babylon 5 and Lexx on Netflix, or,
(c) start wearing a tinfoil hat to keep the government and/or aliens from hearing your thoughts?
Sixty hours a week!? Holy crap, you must’ve been in amazing shape. (Your usual shape is pretty damn good.) I don’t think that will happen to me. 🙂 Thanks for the offer. I’m gonna try to go full-immersion, no social breaks, but we’ll see . . .
I’d love to have such full immersion in writing…alas not for some time. Though it sounds a lot like how I spent one summer studying for my Master’s exams. In my case the exercise component took over and I used that as my escape until I worked out about sixty hours a week. Not recommended.
Let me know if you need me to airdrop anything to you, or need a sanity break in the form of cute kiddos.