Weekend unplugged

I spent the entire weekend away from the internet, my computer, and even my humble writing efforts. My wife and I (and our two dogs) left for the Missouri Ozarks after work Friday evening to the little cabin in the woods we have down there. The place has no plumbing or electricity. We were roughing it (though we did have beds with mattresses, a gas stove, and a truck that could take us 10 miles into town whenever we wanted).

I was more or less compelled to be unplugged for the entire time. I could have brought my laptop, but the battery life is not very long — about three hours of continuous use, which is about the time I think I’m finally ramped up creatively — so I left it at home.

I didn’t have the chance to do any work on my writing. Any productive work at least. I did make a couple of notes about bits and pieces for a couple of stories — just a few lines — and I made entries into my visit journal, which I began keeping last spring for our visits. Mostly I record what we did or saw, and most of that has to do with chores around the place or natural history. It is true that such a journal will figure in a short story I am busy imagining, so I suppose you could say that by keeping this journal, I was working on my writing, but let’s not split hairs.

I expected to anguish the whole weekend about how I was not using such a long stretch of time at all for writing, but I didn’t find myself feeling that way. In a way, the weekend was a vacation from my writing. I don’t know that I needed such a vacation, but I enjoyed it. I could focus on being in the woods without feeling the nagging sense that there was something other I should be doing.

And now that I’m back in civilization, I can pick up the writing where I had left off. Fortunately, I was at a good stopping point, having recently finished the first draft of the novel. So, now, onward!

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