After huddling with my book solo for so long that I am beginning to feel like a pathetic chicken who has only managed to lay one egg, and an egg that won't hatch at that, I have finally remembered (I think I may have mentioned) that hanging out with other writers now and then can be of benefit.



Which is to say, I'm at the Feral Writers retreat for the someteenth year (it's actually the 8th), and now I'm officially the only person who has attended every single year since its inception (which makes sense since, you know, it's the family cottage). splash_the_cat had to bow out because she's pregnant with a snot baby in her head. (And also just pregnant the normal way.) dendrophilous has a work obligation that knocked her out, too. There has been some wailing and gnashing of teeth at our loss, but in the meantime, tonight we have steve_buchheit, sdrawkcabyaj, vidensadastra, and iuliamentis, which is (I think) a Thursday night record. (Last night, it was just me and vidensadastra, and we spent the time chatting and mostly didn't pretend that it was writing; though she wrote after I went to bed.) daveamongus managed to drive out and spend the day with us, too, and then will come out again early tomorrow morning after he gets the kidlets squared away, and later in the afternoon, Lawrence of No Known LiveJournal will tag in.

We have been vaguely wacky so far, but much of the humor has been around visual things, or absurd Laura Roslin-scolds-a-dog imitations, which are not so much quotable. But since splash_the_cat is not here to record our quotes, we have resorted to @feralwriters on Twitter as a means of recording. I am less quotable, I think, without Julie to parse me. Yay?


I've gotten a decent bit of work done; it helps to have an actual goal and stuff. I failed on bringing my headphones, which are kind of necessary (even with 7 participants instead of 9) to block out random chatting on occasion. But Dave is going to loan me a pair of headphones tomorrow, and regardless, I've already gotten more work done today than I've gotten done in the last week, or even at the last retreat. Hopefully, I'll be able to sustain the momentum--though maybe not tonight, since I've spent the last half hour looking for the photo of Ralph Lauren made skinny in photoshop... and sleepy time is coming.

Anyway, the writerly company I've been keeping of late has been very good for me--splash_the_cat and I even started up Write Club again--if only because it is only other writers who understand that, for example, 500 words is a pretty good day, and 2,000 words is an amazing day. And why staring into space or playing a game actually counts as work, no really, I swear.

One last thing. I forgot to post this before (I think): albogdan pointed a camera at jimhines (Jim C. Hines) and me at ConClave, and this video was the result. I only cringed 48.2% of the time while watching it. YMMV.