Writing Retreat 2026, days 3–5

Let’s see here:

Wednesday

Wednes­day was rainy and cool. I did some edit­ing on the paper print­out of There’s Noth­ing Good at the Top, and fin­ished read­ing Julian Com­stock by Robert Charles Wil­son and start­ed Fear­less Jones by Wal­ter Mosley. I also dis­cov­ered that Far­go is avail­able to me on the TV, and so I watched the first few episodes of sea­son 1.

Thursday

Thurs­day was a bet­ter day; the sun came out and the tem­per­a­ture cracked the mid-teens. I wore shorts when I walked over to Poor Michael’s book empo­ri­um, where I had a mocha and picked up some books for a friend (I have enough books of my own, thanks). Back at the house I entered my edits from the paper man­u­script into my doc­u­ment, and made a few more updates. I still need to add a few scenes and update a few dream sequences, I think; make a few things more explic­it. The first draft is you telling your­self the sto­ry^[1]As Sir Ter­ry Pratch­ett put it., but by the time it’s a sec­ond draft (which is what I’m work­ing on) it should be ready for oth­ers to read it too.

The sky was still clear after the sun went down, and it’s quite dark ’round these parts, so I set up my cam­eras in the yard, one fac­ing north and one point­ing pret­ty much straight up. The north-fac­ing one got about 2½ hours worth of 5‑second expo­sures for star trails (above); the oth­er one snapped a bunch of 30-sec­ond expo­sures of the Milky Way. I made time-lapse videos from both sets of photos.

Friday

That actu­al­ly bled into Fri­day; all the pho­tos were tak­en before I went to bed at about 1am, but all the pro­cess­ing hap­pened today. I’ve also read some more, and I plowed through all of sea­son 1 of Far­go too, which told a taut story.

And now I’m going to have some sup­per, and then work some more on my edit­ing. Tomor­row I have to be up ear­ly, so it’s prob­a­bly for the best that it’s cloudy and rainy—I’ll be less tempt­ed to try and get more night­time photos.

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