Writing Retreat

So this coming week we're going to have a week-long writing retreat! Maybe we should give it a name? Anyway, my friend is coming out on Sunday morning and we get to hang out and check out the town and spend some time with the family. (Unfortunately it's still supposed to be hot and dry here, which is a drag.) Sunday night and Monday night she's staying with me, and we'll write on Monday. Then we'll write on Tuesday, and on Tuesday afternoon two additional colleagues are coming to join us. They're all going to stay at a hotel halfway between my house and campus, and we'll all write together on Wednesday and Thursday. On Thursday, our first two colleagues leave, and two more colleagues come into town. We'll keep writing on Friday and Saturday, and the second set of colleagues fly out on Saturday evening and Sunday morning. And my original friend is staying until Monday afternoon, so we can do more fun stuff together on Sunday!

It's crazy the number of meetings I've had to cancel or say no to for next week. I'm only keeping one meeting on Monday afternoon because it's relevant to the paper I'm going to be writing, but other than that, it'll be only writing. This has already shown me how much every day is interrupted by non-writing events. For me this is hard because in order to get any significant work done, I really need big uninterrupted chunks. Preferably an entire day, or at least half a day. I'm not the kind of person who does well writing in 1 or 2 hour blocks interspersed with other activities. It's too hard to get back into it after an interruption. This week, for instance, I have had at least 2 meetings every single day, which really makes it hard to keep up writing momentum. And it's summer! Why am I meeting so much? (It's mostly students who need help as they work on their prelims / proposals / masters theses / dissertations).

I have been working hard to try to finish up summer paper #1 these last couple of weeks so that I can have that off my plate and do something new for the writing week. I've gotten a bit behind due to getting sick last week, but I'm almost done with it. Next week, my goal is to write summer paper #2 from start to finish and have a draft by the end of the week. That might be completely unrealistic, so we'll see how it works out, but it's nice to have a goal. I won't be starting from scratch, because I do have a conference version of the paper to work from, but I'll be expanding it greatly (from 14 pages to 40+ pages). Meanwhile, my post doc is working on summer paper #3, and my grad students are prepping new transcripts to do the analysis for summer paper #4 (which realistically will be fall paper #1). At any rate, if we can get the first three summer papers out the door by the end of the summer I'll feel pretty good.

I'm excited about writing, but even more I'm excited about getting to spend time with my friends and colleagues. I'm looking forward to being able to talk, hang out, go out to dinner, share our writing issues, and basically just spend time with five other awesome women in my field!