This past weekend, I drove 3 hours southwest from my home in Alexandria to Norwood, Virginia to stay at the beautiful, peaceful Porches writing retreat.
View from one of the porches at Porches!
The idea of a writing retreat is to step away from all of the day-to-day distractions that prevent you from getting writing done, or from getting deep into your writing. The point is to sit in a room, be quiet, and let the words flow. No folding laundry, no packing kids’ lunches, no grocery shopping, no TV. Porches allowed me to hole up in a quiet room with my writing, my reading, and my knitting, and crank words out onto the page.
The house instructions included this quote
I spent Thursday afternoon to Sunday morning at Porches and got more done in under three days than I would normally accomplish in a month. My daily goal, when I’m writing at home, is usually to complete one scene from my novel. At Porches, I wrote 26 scenes in the novel and finished up a short story. The biggest accomplishment was finishing up the draft of my novel revision that I’ve been working on since January. What a feeling!
My desk
I did miss Al and the kids, of course. I pestered Al for frequent photos of Lucia and Ewan and we spoke on the phone every day. But man, was it nice to be able to have nothing on my agenda except to write, eat, and sleep. My typical day at Porches went like this: I’d wake up around 8 am (LUXURIOUS), make a cup of coffee, write for an hour or so, eat breakfast, write for another couple of hours, eat lunch, read, knit, maybe go for a walk, then back to writing until 6:30, when I’d eat dinner.
Veggies, chocolate, and a book – my dream dinner
After dinner, I’d read and knit until bedtime, which was ludicrously and satisfyingly early (one night I fell asleep by 9:30 and slept until 8 the next day. This amount of sleep is UNHEARD OF for a mother of young children and might actually be illegal?).
My room
My room, again
I wish I could go back to Porches every month, but that would be logistically challenging, to say the least. But here at home, surrounded by nagging chores and quarrelsome children, I’ll try to hold onto the renewed sense of purpose and accomplishment I got out of my brief retreat. Until next time, Porches!