The vacation was to Upper Saranac Lake in the Adirondacks. Quite simply I consider this the most peaceful place in the world. Generally when visiting there I spend the majority of the week sitting on the porch, alternating between staring at the lake and reading. This is exactly what happened this time as well. There were some additional activities like playing with my kids, hiking, kayaking and visiting a nature museum as well. I'm willing to go out on a limb and say that I had a better week than you did.
What I also love about our annual retreat at the lake is the lack of TV or the internet. Both of these things are available there but we don't bother to get them. The house has not a single television set and no cable or satellite either. There is a newly added wi-fi connection at the house but I solve that problem by only bringing my elderly laptop which can't seem to make the technological leap to wireless, even when I slap the appropriate gear in it. It is clunky and slow, making it suitable for really only one task: writing.
And that's what I used it for. I started the week by tackling the second draft of my script She Hates the Idea. This is something I've been working on for weeks but despite my best efforts, completely failed to complete before going on vacation. The first draft was finished in April. After that I spent six weeks working on a third draft of Joe Bob the Messiah. That was a pretty easy job as I had worked out all the changes in my head before starting, so the effort was more typing than anything else. Since then the priority was the second draft of Idea. That was a considerably larger effort since I thought the first draft was pretty disjointed. I also skipped the step of having anyone read the first draft. I knew who my alpha readers were and knew that if certain elements weren't in good shape before they saw it, I would get ripped apart. So with that second draft completed (I think), it's time to bite the bullet and get someone else's opinion.
That was completed shortly into the vacation, leaving lots of time for something fun. A brand new script. For the last year I've been essentially making myself eat my vegetables. I wouldn't entertain new ideas until the old ones had been whipped into shape. If writing is to be my real occupation, it needs to be treated more like a job and that meant not taking off on any flights of fancy when there was other work that needed doing. Despite that, new ideas were creeping into my head. So without Idea at least temporarily off the work schedule I could let those ideas loose. The result is 27 pages of a new script with the loose working title of Psychic. More pages certainly could have been written but this script represents something new for me. It's a script that demands a considerable amount of research. The previous three required very little research. I did little bits here and there to lend credibility to the stories but for the most part they did not need me to learn a lot of stuff. Psychic is entirely different. To work properly, I need to nail the details. And a lack of details kept me from getting more of it written this week. Now that I'm back home, I can start doing that research. We'll see how rapidly I progress from here.
Of course the last thing we did on vacation was go to a wedding. It was an evening wedding, which meant our kids were not invited and thus my enthusiasm was considerably dimmed. But my wife wasn't letting an opportunity to dance slip away, so we went anyway. So here you can see the two of us at said wedding. She's the attractive one. Something about this photo demands humorous captioning to me. So feel free to have at it.
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