This summer was my summer for beach trips. I began with a trip to Myrtle Beach for a quick trip in the middle of the week with friends who shared their rented condo.
The next trip two weeks later was to the Isle of Palms near Charleston with a dear friend I made when our children were in preschool. We haven’t spent a lot of time with each other since we moved away from each other and headed south from Pittsburgh fifteen years ago, but our conversations didn’t miss a beat.
A week after that I spent a glorious week at Emerald Isle in North Carolina with my family. You can read more about that vacation here.
Those earlier trips were fun times, but this week I’ve been staying in Avon on Hatteras Island in the Outer Banks with a group of writers. This time was a working week. A week to stop and listen to God and to my own brain. For me, it was time to get back to writing, to focus on one task for longer than twenty minutes before dealing with somebody else’s to-do list.
Writing takes time and quiet and thinking and putting words down, then deleting them, then putting more down. Sometimes it looks like nothing is happening. It looks like we may be daydreaming or procrastinating or avoiding real work. That’s why time like this week is so important to writers.
When I look at the work I accomplished in the past few days and hear the word counts my author friends met, I’m mentally high-fiving all of us.
It just looks like I’m staring at my computer, grinning.
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