There's no beating this Retreat!

It was my birthday last month.  One of those birthdays with the zero on the end which means you have to tick the next age box down when you take part in on-line surveys.  I was blessed with lots of cards, enough cake to start a patisserie and several bottles of rather nice gin...

And somewhere around the cusp of passing from my fourth decade into my fifth, I decided the time had come to do something mildly radical to shake myself out of the writing glums. Which is why I took myself off yesterday morning in a large room overlooking Pilgrim Street in Newcastle with other several people who I'd never met before to take part in an Urban Writers Retreat, my birthday present to myself.

Having run successfully in London for several years, the Urban Writers Retreat has made a little toe-hold in Newcastle upon Tyne and it offered special rates for its first three sessions.  It promised plentiful tea, coffee, cake and lunch and the opportunity to write without distractions from 11 in the morning till 5.30 surrounded by other people who were doing exactly the same.

And it did exactly what it said on the tin! After a few brief introductions, we launched straight into our own projects and after that hardly emerged except to retrieve some nice M&S sandwiches, carrot cake, oranges and (begone, temptation!) roasted pistachios from the central table, which was groaning under the weight of all the goodies.

The chairs were not desperately comfortable. The coffee could
have been warmer. And after a few hours, my extremities did begin to numb with cold.  But I had a big jumper, some fingerless glove/wrist warmer things and the view across the rooftops was spectacular - you could see for miles - especially as the November evening drew in and the Christmas lights came on.  And we typed as if our lives depended on it, completely oblivious to what was going on around us.

I'd decided to work on a Christmas story which ran aground last year amid much family illness and I managed to double the existing word count until my fingers finally froze and I admitted defeat with fifteen minutes left to go... retreating over the road to the Tyneside Cinema where my best friend was waiting in the warm with hot coffee to thaw me out!

Worth it? Every blinkin' penny! Although WHEN I return in the Spring, I will wear thermals and take a hot water bottle!

Remember Me?

I am still here.  And so is my unfinished novel. I could make excuses.  But you've heard them all before.  Just scroll down the page : look at how positive I felt last May that I'd be finished!  And then the Block arrived: the huge concrete mass of a Block which has left me feeling as if I cannot write at all.

I did do some new writing back in the summer when we visited a 'new' part of Scotland (for us - the people who live there have always known about it!) - visiting Dumfries and Galloway - discovering the delight that is Kirkcudbright.  We stayed in a tiny 4 roomed cottage with bats roosting in the eves and did very little except eat and read and walk in the rain.  But since then, there has been nothing.

I think about my characters often, and feel sad that they're stuck in limbo.  I feel like I abandoned them in their hour of need and suspect they may not want to work with me when I finally force myself to the keyboard again.  (There's a half-finished Christmas story as well.  I'm just not very good at commitment.)

I spent a snowy Saturday this week sorting out the wreckage of Scotch on the Rocks yet again and think I am within six chapters of finishing the first draft. If I can start to write again, work out how I used to do it, I think it will be okay eventually. I don't even know if I have an audience any more. 

 It is sad but I no longer even think of myself as a writer.  I've tried, in recent weeks, to do 'writerly things' in the hope that it might stir me to action, but I'm not a sociable bunny and the writer's group type events I've been to have left me unstirred. My job has become a greedy monster, swallowing up any free time I might have had, leaving me drained and demoralised with little to offer my imaginary friends.

I know I need to escape the shackles of everyday life for a while: break out of the crippling routine of teaching and allow myself to be creative for myself.  I need some space and quiet.  I probably really need Scotland. More than anything,  I need to finish this book so I can move on from it.  It has occupied my mind and festered for too long away from the sunlight.  Poor book. Poor brain.

Or, to the knowing, the inspiration for the 'Slap and Tickle'