Writing Retreat 2021: The week in review

Last week I was at a rent­ed cab­in up at Minnedosa, writin’ words and takin’ pho­tos. I had a bunch of goals for the week, but how’d I do?

Get “The Slow Apoc­a­lypse” into at least a 2^nd-draft state, some­thing that I can send out to beta readers.

I got it most of the way there. I think I have one “What we will lose in the fire” sec­tion left to fill in, and I still need to go through and clean up all the [TK] notes I’ve left for myself. (Have I explained [TK] notes before? If not, I’ll have to do a post on that later.)

Chrono­log­i­cal frame­work for “Praise the Torch When ‘Tis Burned”, and at least 1^st drafts for all the scenes. Also con­sid­er how it’s going to be chopped up later.

Whooo, this one. As I got clos­er to the end of the out­line, I kept real­iz­ing that I need­ed to add in infor­ma­tion ear­li­er in the out­line. So the out­line’s deep into endgame, but not quite complete—but it is sig­nif­i­cant­ly expand­ed and clar­i­fied from where it was at the start of the week.

As for the chop­ping up: I’m start­ing to have 2^nd thoughts about that. The sto­ry might not need it. But we’ll see.

Work on a grant appli­ca­tion for “Palimpses­ts”.

I worked on it. There’s more work to do, of course. I sus­pect that grant appli­ca­tions, like nov­els, short sto­ries, paint­ings, poems, &c., are nev­er fin­ished so much as abandoned. 

Astropho­tog­ra­phy: Dark sky shots of the Milky Way; star trails; Per­sei­ds; and, should the oppor­tu­ni­ty arise, the aurora.

Oh yes. See the gallery below (which also has a few day­light shots around town).

Bik­ing as much as I can/dare, con­sid­er­ing the heat; aim­ing to break last year’s 60km. Kayak­ing at least a few times, since it’s fun and I have access to a kayak.

Ha ha ha, joke’s on me. The dai­ly high tem­per­a­ture while I was at the cab­in was a good 10°C low­er than the week before or (so far) this week. My bike rid­ing was OK—I got about 40km on the bike—but the only day it felt warm enough to get out on the lake in the kayak was Sat­ur­day, my final day. So I got one pad­dle in, for about 45 min­utes. It was still a great time.

Inter­est­ed in prints of my pho­tos? Let me know, and we can work some­thing out.