by Chris McMahon

Having talked about Swallowing the Big Lump, and the ambitious little three day retreat I had signed up for, I feel compelled to give you a little run down on how things went. The retreat was called The Rabbit Hole and the aim was to produce 30,000 words in three days, ten hours each day.

I am usually distracted easily, and I was a little worried by the format of the retreat, which basically had a group of around twenty writers pretty much together in a smallish room. Yet despite this, the strange thing was how quiet it was! Right from the beginning the writers were all business.

It was like, well – ‘How can you tell when a group of introverts are having a party?’  You can’t – they are all sitting in the corner reading a book! Except in this case they were all sitting together writing books! I guess one thing that was pretty much universally shared by all the people at the mini-retreat, and that was we were all time-pressured and struggled to make any progress on our work in  the normal run of things.

I had been battling to make progress on the first draft of my new SF novel Foreign Elements since March. I entered the retreat at around 49,000 words, in the saggy middle of the manuscript. I have to tell you between full time work, family, and running another business – it was tough to make progress. So it was unbelievably excellent to be able to up that total by 25,000 words in three days! Not only to do that, but to actually finish the first draft! Hoo ya!

I felt like I had just put myself out of my own misery. The lack of progress on that story had been like a millstone on my back for most of the year. I’m sure I don’t have to tell you how that feels.

This is doubly excellent for me, as I am the sort of person who finds re-drafting infinitely easier than first drafting – and much easier to fit into tiny slices of time.

However . . . there is no such thing as a free lunch. After a solid three days ripping through the plot and enjoying the natural acceleration of the book to climax – I then found myself back in a working week. I work as a process engineer, the sort of work where extended concentration is required at a pretty high level, yet using a very different hemisphere. I felt like my mind had been suddenly pulled in two directions and twisted violently. Added to this I was battling a major case of eye strain, persistent tension headaches and trying to convince my head not to have a migraine. I have been keeping the pharmacy in business. As I am typing this the left side of my face is numb, as is the outside of both arms to the two smaller fingers of each hand – typical symptoms of impending migraine, while my vision is starting to blur on the left.

But was it worth it? You bet!

Being able to live that plot, writing the big action scene at the end. That was gold.

What are your best writing moments?