Retreat Report

So, I see from Lacey's blog this morning that I am under some pressure to post something about our retreat over the weekend. (Of course, in the time it took me to write this, she's already made not one, but two ginormous postings about our weekend!)

Well, of course, it was fabulous! Do I need to say more than that?Apparently so, since my post is supposed to take the place of the long one that Lacey couldn't get ported to WordPress!

So, where to begin?

Well, first of all, Darcy and Lacey are as lovely and fun in person as they are in email. Okay, that's not true. They are even more lovely and fun in person! I spent most of Sunday after they'd left moping and wishing they were still here.

Since they came to visit me in my hometown, I won't tell you about the small bit of sightseeing we did. I'll leave that up to Lacey. (I'd leave it to Darcy, too, but she keeps refusing to get a blog! Seems to think it will interfere with her actually writing. Smart woman!)

But mostly what we did was sit in the hotel room and talk. And talk and talk and talk. About our books, even! Speaking of sitting in the hotel room, here are a couple of pictures:

Lacey and Darcy

Darcy and Me

We did have a nice dinner out on Friday night with my family and an amazing lunch at a restaurant called The Prado in Balboa Park (the steamed lemon cake with blackberry sorbet dessert was divine) on Saturday, but by and large, we spent our time very productively.

We got a ton accomplished. Or, at least, I feel we did.

We figured out how to cut Living in Sin down to a reasonable size. It turns out there's a lot more that can go than I initially thought. It might even wind up being a standard, 100,000 word single-title historical when all is said and done. Yay!

We also came up with a revamped plotline for Darcy's Notorious which we all think is going to resolve the most significant problem that manuscript has always had (to wit, the hero and heroine aren't physically together often enough in the first third of the story) and reworked her characters' GMCs and arcs to match the new story. I'm so excited about it, I wish I were writing it!

Of course, we also (perhaps perversely) decided that she should finish writing the second book in the trilogy, Glorious, before revisiting Notorious for the third or fourth time. Because the first half of Glorious completely lives up to its name! And that means she can probably pitch it sooner than Notorious, assuming she finishes it.

Finally, in addition to discussing some minor issues in Lacey's new partial for If You Asked the Devil to Dance, we actually plotted out the third book in the series in about a half an hour of discussion. And it's going to be awesome! Again, damn it, I wish I were writing it.

So, here's the thing I didn't know before we had our retreat: the energy and immediacy of having your critique partners in a room with you is incredible. I don't have any local critique partners--everyone I work with, I work with via email. And that's certainly not bad. But it's not real time. I never realized how different it would be to have my critique partners in a room with me, brainstorming ideas with me. Call me stupid, but it's true!

Needless to say, I can't wait to do this again. Even if I wind up in the doghouse with my husband for a week afterwards instead of just a day! (He was a little shocked to discover he was on his own with the kids all day Saturday, LOL!)