I’m fresh back from my trip to Charleston, SC. 2 of my crit partners, along with another member of RCRW, drove down to attend the Low Country Writers beach retreat.  It was a small, weekend retreat that was quite productive for me.  I took advantage of the scenery and the quiet time to get some writing done.  I am proud to say that I knocked back a total of 4,337 words while I was there.

That’s quite the accomplishment considering all the distractions I encountered  (like the beach, sightseeing, the beach, the excellent food, the beach, the wine, and let’s not forget the beach….). 🙂

All in all, a great trip for me.  Being away from everything allowed me the opportunity to really focus on my wip.  Here’s my writing desk I set up during the retreat portion of the trip:

The Beach Bound Retreat itself was a small, cozy affair.  There were workshops going on, but if you wanted to just go sit and write you could.  And I did, as evidenced by the pic of my writing desk-lol).  I found the tranquility and white noise sitting on the back deck listening to the ocean + the tunes from my Pandora station to be the balm to my writer’s soul (ok, that was cheesy, but you get the point) and I couldn’t resist it.

However, I did attend a couple workshops and my favorite 2, by far, were “Welcome to the World, Baby Book”  led by debut authorKieran Kramer and “20 Ways to Kill a Novel”, led by Joanna Wayne.

Kieran’s workshop was a fun, upbeat look at the journey of an author.  She shared several motivational points and overall advice on how to keep your wits about you as you write, polish, and sell your novel.  She shared her 9-1-1 rule (which is all about staying focused and pushing through the hump to complete a draft) and she gave us all a prescription to take ADVIL whenever we need it: Attitude, Depth, Validation, Involvement, Laugher.

Joanna couldn’t whittle her list down to 20 items, so she actually shared with us 25 ways that we would kill our books.  The list is mostly of stuff I’d heard at some point in time before, but I really enjoyed her chat, along with the personal recounts she peppered throughout it.   The list contains such standards as lack of motivation, too much back story, too much telling, not enough showing, etc.  But one thing I’d never thought about was the fact that you may have your book set in the wrong  location or time.  Setting never consciously occurred to me as being an area that could kill a story.  But when you think about it, it’s obvious.  The group spent a bit of time talking about this as we came up with examples of how certain books would not work if you change the environment in which they are set.  Joanna also recounted how she once used her story idea , along with the plot twists and her characters’ GMC to back her way into the setting for the story.  This chat really made me look at setting in a different way.  I really get the adage of using “setting as a character” now.

It was very pleasant the entire weekend and I got lot accomplished, not only with writing, but I was able to de-stress and unplug a little.  And with the beautiful views  how could I not. 🙂 Also, I got to meet some new authoring comrades & I even won a prize, Kieran Kramer’s debut novel “When Harry Met Molly”.

I had a  great time down in Charleston and will be blogging over at  A Bit of Clarity about some of my non-writing adventures in the Low Country in the upcoming weeks.