Writers hard at work

I’m on a flight from St. Louis to Philadelphia, on my way home from the business trip that followed the Smoky Writers 2018 retreat. I left home ten days ago, days that went by in a blur, but what a fantastic blur.

I’ve blogged before about Smoky Writers. This was my third time, and it was my most productive retreat yet. In 2016 and 2017, I focused almost entirely on the novel I tentatively titled Subliminal. At some point over the last year, that book ceased to be fun to write. It was a chore, and I became very adept at avoiding it.

Last December, I sought advice from the best writing advisors I know – my fellow Smoky Writers. After hearing what they had to say, I decided that come January 1, 2018, I would be working on something new, whether I had completed Subliminal or not. The book remains unfinished. While I may return to it someday, for now it is off my plate. A book that was not fun for me to write would not be fun for others to read.

Instead, I decided to switch gears and write some short stories, for a few reasons. I wanted the sense of accomplishment that comes with completing a work. I cannot describe for you how it feels to finish the first draft of a novel, but I sure wish I could bottle it. A few writers finished novels during last week’s retreat, and they know exactly what I’m talking about. Finishing a short story isn’t quite the same euphoria, but completing some projects reassured me that I could still do it. Also, I wanted to have several pieces to put out on submission. I’ve concluded that real writers put themselves out there and try to sell their work. I want to be in a situation where I always have at least one piece out on submission, and preferably multiple pieces.

In that spirit, I flew to Knoxville, Tennessee on February 24 with the goal of returning with five or six new short stories. I’m very happy to say I did that. Between Monday, Feb. 26 and Saturday, March 3, I wrote five new stories from scratch and finished a sixth that I had been working on in the weeks leading up to the retreat. I wrote 20,176 words in all over those six days, an average of 3,363 words per day. My goal had been 5,000 per day, but for me the word count goal was secondary to the goal of producing new, complete stories. Because I am coming home with these new works, I feel this was my most productive and satisfying Smoky Writers retreat yet.

Of course, the work is only part of the experience, as important as it is. This retreat is also a family reunion of sorts, and I do consider my friends there (we refer to ourselves as “Smokies”) to be family. We celebrate each others’ achievements; we laugh together; sometimes, we cry together; and this year we did a lot of convalescing. We had much more physical illness this year than we did my other two years. I fought a head cold the entire time; one person got the flu just before the retreat was due to start and delayed her arrival until after she was no longer contagious. The sounds of coughing echoed throughout the house. One Smoky is also an expectant mother, and she got knocked for a loop by illness halfway through the week. Yet another became so ill from overwork in the weeks before the retreat that she was pretty much in seclusion the last two days. Another was knocked flat on her back one day by headaches and fatigue. It some ways, it was not an easy week.

And no one could leave real life entirely behind. One Smoky had to cancel at the last minute due to a family illness; another was coping with the serious illness of a beloved pet and nearly skipped the retreat. One of our awesome gourmet cooks was called home early due to family responsibilities.

And yet … the night the expectant mom was bedridden, a bunch of us crowded around her bed and read her the stories we’d written that day. A couple of people made a special trip to the airport to pick up the Smoky who has the ill pet. When the one cook had to leave, a few of the writers who have culinary skills jumped in to help out, and they helped make some phenomenal meals. We brought snacks and drinks to people who could use them, we checked up on those who were having issues back home, we gave a lot of hugs and cheered a lot of fine fiction-writing. We were there for each other; I know they were certainly there for me. That’s the definition of family, or at least it should be.

All too quickly, Sunday morning came and we had to say goodbye again, but we have great memories and some videos (check out Tee Morris’s Facebook page for videos of some of our morning walks through the mountains.) It is not an exaggeration to say that I’ve already started counting the weeks until next year (50.5, unless the dates change.) I will see some of them between now and then. I am long overdue for a trip to northern Virginia, and a theatrical version of Katie Bryski’s Six Stories, Told At Night will be produced at this summer’s Toronto Fringe Festival; getting north of the border to see that is a priority for me. Other Smokies will visit the northeast or I’ll visit where they live. I won’t wait until next February to see all of them.

And I will continue to write. Last year, I gave up my seat on the Liverpool Public Library’s board of trustees, and I dropped other commitments so that I could free up more time. I loved being a library trustee, but I needed to make space, and it was the right thing to do. I’m still writing freelance insurance pieces, though not as many, so I have more time for fiction. Since I was seven or eight years old, I’ve wanted to be a writer, and I’m still banging away at that dream. Smoky Writers is one week out of 52. Productivity must continue the rest of the year.

It was back to real life yesterday with a day-long (but also very productive) meeting in St. Louis and a crisis erupting back in the office. Tomorrow I’ll be an insurance geek again, but I’ll be one with a basket full of new stories and a renewed sense of what I really want to be.

I think in the end all we really have is our gifts, the lives we touch and the lives who touch us. If this week has reminded me of nothing else, it has reminded me of just how much I have been given in all three categories. I have the gift of knowing how to write words in ways that affect people (at least sometimes), and I have so many people inside and outside the writing community who mean the world to me. Everyone should be so lucky as I.

Until next year, my friends. Write lots of words.