A to Z Blog Challenge -- W is for Writers' Retreat

Welcome to Day 23 of this year's A to Z Blog Challenge where --
   

  

W is for my Writers' Retreat

As many of my longtime blog readers know, I belong to my local chapter of Romance Writers of America.

Although north of the border, Canada boasts six RWA chapters, including mine -- Romance Writers of Atlantic Canada.

We represent writers focusing on careers in commercial romantic fiction, from the four Atlantic Provinces:

Nova Scotia (29 writers)
New Brunswick (2 writers)
Prince Edward Island (1 almost-returned-home writer in transition from Nova Scotia)
Newfoundland and Labrador (2 writers)
We also have 1 Nova Scotia-based writer living in the United States, but still part of our chapter.

We meet once a month, with the exception of July and August, first informally for lunch (my favorite part!) and then formally for a business meeting, followed by a workshop on either the craft of writing, the business of writing or the writing life (my second favorite part!)

Once a year, our chapter also holds an event which has become the high point of our year -- the fall writing retreat.

It takes place at a rented cottage about two hours from Halifax along the province's South Shore. We start arriving on the Friday, embark on the retreat and wrap it all up by lunchtime on the Sunday.

So why do we start dreaming of the next year's retreat, the moment we pack up to make the drive home?

Here's a look back at the retreats in which I've taken part, for the past nine years.

photo by Jennie Marsland

As far as I'm concerned, the retreat begins when my friend Kelly Boyce picks me up for the drive to the cottage. We're already detaching ourselves from our regular lives, which is an integral part of any retreat. We chat and catch up during the drive, often discussing what we plan to work on during the weekend.

We normally have the keys, open up the cottage, turn on the heat and wait for the other RWACers to arrive.

That's Kelly to the left, me in the orange Tshirt, Jennie Marsland at center and Lori Robitaille at right, relaxing on the arrival Friday night.

We split out meal prep and clean-up, so that one dinner, two breakfasts and two lunches are taken care of by teams, leaving the other retreaters to chill. Works out great. Enjoying the Friday night dinner, clockwise from lower left: Shawna Romkey, Jennie Marsland, Lori Robitaille, Nikki McIntosh, Michelle Helliwell and Tara MacDonald.

Relaxing, catching up and getting ourselves re-settled into the retreat space is all a part of Day 1.

L to R: Kelly Boyce, Nikki McIntosh, Sara Hubbard, Lori Robitaille, Lilly Cain, Annette Gallant and Shawna Romkey

Sometimes on the Friday night, we play the Whose Muse is Whose? game, where we bring in pictures of inspirational actors or models to represent a character we're writing about, and we have to guess: who brought in the picture, and who does the character seem to be?

We just love this one! Hunting down the right picture is part of the fun, even before the retreat. Guessing who brought which picture correctly hardly ever happens, but guessing what sort of character he represents is often bang-on.

L to R: Kelly Boyce, Jennie Marsland, Michelle Helliwell, Debbie Boutilier and Linda O'Toole

Last year, Michelle Helliwell brought in this amazing storytelling card game.

We played one round of the official rules, then altered it to suit our need to make one giant rambling story out of laying down every card in the deck, as they had been dealt to us. I'm pretty certain this game is now our new tradition.

L to R: me, Shawna Romkey, Kelly Boyce, Linda O'Toole, Debbie Boutilier, Pat Thomas

photo by Lori Robitaille

Saturday starts with breakfast.

L to R: Heidi Hamburg, Stella MacLean, Elaine Skinner, me, Kelly Boyce and Nikki McIntosh

We used to schedule workshops for the Saturday, generally three spread out through the morning and afternoon. This one was a workshop on using color in your scenes, by Lilly Cain.

Clockwise from left: Heidi Hamburg, Kelly Boyce, Tanya Dawson, Renee Field, Pat Thomas, Lilly Cain and Nikki McIntosh

We've gravitated toward using the previous workshop blocks of time for personal writing time. We now come to the retreat with serious writing goals and the head space to focus on them.

L to R: Lilly Cain, Nikki McIntosh, Renee Field and Sara Hubbard

On Saturday evening, we head over to the main lodge for dinner -- walking if it's it's nice out, driving over if not.

L to R: Jennie Marsland, Sara Hubbard, Shawna Romkey and Kelly Boyce

photo by Pat Thomas

We linger over our delicious dinner with much animated talking and laughing. I swear it can't be easy to be seated near us...

L to R: me, Kelly Boyce and Nikki McIntosh

Saturday generally winds down with a movie -- if you can call it winding down...

L to R: Nikki McIntosh, Lori Robitaille, Kelly Boyce and Heidi Hamburg

photo by Kelly Boyce

One of the biggest highlights of the weekend is our brainstorming sessions. We split off into groups of three or four, often mixing up writers from different genres, and spend about 40 minutes per writer to explain what we're working on, and then taking brainstorming ideas from our group.

These sessions often lead to the following year's writing direction for many of us. It's been enormously popular.

L to R: Elaine Skinner, Annette Gallant and me

Ingredients for a successful retreat:

Copious amounts of wine

A sense of fun

Feather boas and tiaras

A writing project to work on

A good ear and speed in order to add out-of-context quotes to the mirror -- good for all kinds of fun!

Thursday Thirteen - 260 - 13 Highlights From My Amazing Year

1 – Having been born in the Year of the Dragon, 2012 turned out to be pretty freakin' fantastic for me, starting with the arrival of the hard copies of my debut release, SAINT SANGUINUS.

2 – My friend and fellow author Shawna Romkey gave me this first-ever moment: my first book signing during the Valentine's Hearts on Fire event for my writers' group at The Halifax Club. 

3 – In March, I attended the Women in Film and Television conference with my producer and friend Tara MacDonald, and our friend YA author Renee Pace.  

4 – Later in the spring, I attended a women's retreat at the Oak Island Inn with Tara and Shawna. A much-needed rest before a crazybusy summer.

 5 – WAY, way up at the tippy top of my joy this year: directing the book trailers for my Scorpius series. Produced by Tara MacDonald and shot by Caroline Ruyle. Best time I ever had on set.

 6 – This May I participated in Free Comic Book Day. Thanks to three local comic shops, I gave away free downloads of the e-book version of SAINT SANGUINUS, since it's a Dark Ages vampire superhero origin story. Many thanks to Giant Robot Comics, Quantum Frontier and Monster Comic Lounge.

 7 – The thrill of seeing your very own book for the first time never gets old! My second release BOUND BY DRAGONSFYRE arrived in the mail in early summer.

 8 – The book trailer for SAINT SANGUINUS won two awards!

9 – In August I signed copies of my Dark Ages vampire novel and my dark fantasy novel in the Indie Artist Alley at Fan Expo in Toronto. Many, many thanks to my friend Tara for helping me navigate this venue, and to my husband Brad who worked alongside me.

10 - Easily, the most amazing moment of this year came when I finally made contact with a friend whom my sister and I met almost 30 years ago. We met Rashid Kamalov during the 1984 Tall Ships event in Halifax, while the Iron Curtain was still firmly in place. After writing about him here on my blog many times, his email showed up in my spam folder in September, which I only looked at because of the Fan Expo contest I held.

Rashid is now my Facebook friend!

Here's what he wrote after reading the tale of our summer together which I told to readers here at A Piece of My Mind:

"Dear Juliа, thank you for the wonderful story about our meetings and for good memory about me. I carried in my heart warm feelings to Michelle and to you through all life. I am glad to know that you are well, we can email each other. It is so well you are here!" - Oct. 2, 2012 

11 – In October I attended my 10th writers' retreat with my writers' group. Already counting down the days until the next one.

12 – A few weeks later, I shared a table at Hal-Con with paranormal/sci-fi erotica author Lilly Cain. Signed more copies of my books and had a ball.

13 – To cap off the Dream Come True year, I went on my second trip to New York City, sat in the red booth at the Russian Tea Room and walked into the lobby of Radio City Music Hall to watch The Rockettes Christmas Spectacular.

That's my sister with me in the red booth, and my BFF at Radio City.

SO amazing.

I can't believe it sometimes!

Thank you to all my readers who have become friends over the years. You've made the world a much, much smaller place.

Here's to 2013! Hope you're off to a fantastic start.

I'm blogging at Natalie G. Owens' place today

Have you always wanted to participate in a writers' retreat, but have never managed to get to one?

Maybe 2013 will be your year!

Join me at Natalie G. Owens' blog for the lo-down on Writing Retreats, Atlantic Canadian Style.

I'm blogging at The Popculturedivas

I'm over at The Popculturedivas today, talking about the care and feeding requirements of my creative muse. 

Thursday Thirteen - 181 - 13 Reasons I Love Going to My Writer's Retreat

1 - Fall is my favorite season, and my writer's group has held its annual retreat in October for the past few years. An already beautiful spot unfurled into grandeur.












2 - My friend Kelly picked me up early Friday morning, as we'd both made sure to have that day free from work. Then we picked up our writing chapter president, Annette, and off we went, already enjoying our getaway with our trip out to White Point Beach. Only an hour and a half out of the city, and there we were. Long enough to be a journey, short enough to give us most of the day at our destination.












3 - We already encountered some exciting weather on the trip down - masterfully navigated by Kelly - but once the three of us settled in at the cottage and began working on our various writing projects, the wind and rain lashed the cottage with the full force of the Atlantic, a twenty-minute walk's distance from our doorstep.

It got a little unnerving at times. But it was also incredibly cozy to be inside and watching the storm from our front row seats.












4 - Once the other retreat-ers arrived, it was time to break out the bubbly. I brought a bottle of prosecco with me, which Jennie shared with me.

Yum.












5 - We played Whose Muse is Whose? Each person brought pictures of two characters they're working on, and we then guessed which writer the character belonged to, and what sort of person we thought he or she was.

There wasn't a high success rate in matching the character to the writer.

But there was a very high success rate at guessing what sort of character the picture conveyed. And really specifically, too. For example, I said "Time traveller dude" for one picture, who turned out to have started life out as a time travelling character, but then became a straight historical one. And everyone keyed into my female character's attraction to the 'bad apple' sort.

A really fun game.












6 - The next afternoon we played two versions of the Add-a-Sentence game. Here we nab an opening sentence from a book, and then each person adds their own sentence to it, resulting in some outrageously funny stories. It's also eye-opening to see what sort of style emerges from someone we think of as writing in a particular genre. Sometimes a women's fiction writer can shock us with something twisted, or an historical writer can zing us with something edgey or macabre.

Guaranteed to result in howls of laughter.
















7 - This is the first year where we didn't have craft-of-writing sessions. Instead we had multiple timed writing sessions so we could work on our own projects.

Every year by the time I get home from the retreat, my brain is on overload from all of those craft sessions. This year I didn't experience the same level of mental fatigue. Considering I'd happily subjected myself to all of that mind-numbing stimulation, you can rest assured it was all good.

But all of those writing sessions helped me to leave the retreat with my goal of completing eight missing scenes for my vampire manuscript accomplished.












8 - Last year we decided we needed more glamour at our retreat.

This year we carried on the tradition and worked it, baby.












9 - More traditions. A good retreat is a subtle blend of discovery and soothing predictabilty. Kelly and I always flourish when we partake in our pinot grigio toast at the Saturday evening dinner at White Point Beach lodge.












10 - Real quote from Nikki, the fetching brunette in charcoal gray beside me:

"Stop hitting on me!"
















11 - Discovered our newest retreat-er, Shawna is a kindred spirit.

Shawna's sleepwear = Xena, Warrior Princess

My dog = Xena, Warrior Princess












12 - More traditions. A renewing walk beside the breakers, past the resort and along the road erupting in color.

Happy sigh.












13 - Ever thought about organizing a writer's retreat in your area?

All you need is an amazing location, a group of writers to share the space and the cost, some organized activity, some unscheduled time to do whatever takes your fancy, lots of delish dishes, a considerable supply of vino, several DVDs like Mamma Mia! and Julie & Julia, a willingness to stretch your creative muscles and a kick-ass brainstorming session to set you off and running for the year ahead.