The days are finally longer than 4.5 hours and your cat has stopped permanently hibernating on the top of the couch. You have that itchy springtime feeling that makes you want to DO stuff: hike a mountain, take up kayaking, go for a bike ride.
Back in the day, this time of year meant summer time! No more school, the chance to do something fun and/or money-earning. For me, it meant babysitting or trying something new: working in a bakery, taking a summer class, teaching math. Whatever I was doing, there was none of the pressure I felt during the school year to make important choices: all I had to do in the summer was earn enough to buy books for the next year, and perhaps add a line to my resume.
Now that school is over (sniff) and summer doesn’t mean the same thing, I still want some time to do things without the pressure to succeed. I want to finish a project that I care about without having anyone looking over my shoulder and asking how it’s going. I want to sneak away into a tent in the mountains and fill up a notebook with things no one will ever see. I want to write things I never write: poetry! textbooks! whatever!
I’ve been lucky enough to do this before: when I was between jobs, I camped out at a family friend’s farmhouse and spent my mornings writing and my afternoons walking on the beach. It was amazing. I got things done.
The key was making a plan and sticking to it. A few months later, it dawned on me that this isn’t easy–it wasn’t easy for me, and it would have been a lot easier if someone had given me a plan and told me to stick to it. So, I wrote DIY Writing Retreat.
But always in the back of my mind, I knew that an ebook wasn’t necessarily the best medium for this type of thing. I wanted to make something people could print and fill in–a way to plan a retreat that would be more tangible and, to my mind, fun. I wanted to add more to DIY Writing Retreat and make it something people would be more likely to actually use–instead of just read and think, “Oh, that sounds nice.”
And that is how Your DIY Writing Retreat, the DIY Writing Retreat e-course, was born. I broke down DIY Writing Retreat, added in printable worksheets for almost every chapter, and expanded the schedules to accommodate folks who only have time for an afternoon or a day-long writing retreat. I added in more concrete suggestions for how to make a writing retreat work for your life, whether you’re a mom, a just-graduated student who misses writing, a teacher, a self-employed person who can’t get a break (high five), or someone who’s always wanted to try writing something but never found the time.
For $39 (and maybe a train ticket), you can buy yourself a fun, no-pressure-to-succeed getaway experience that will (in my experience) make you more productive, more relaxed, and better able to write. You’ll enjoy trying something new. You’ll learn about your writing style: when and where you work best, what you write when you don’t have cat videos to distract you. You’ll probably put more words down on paper than you ever have before (I did).
Interested? Your DIY Writing Retreat e-course is on sale now–read more here.
