This week is a bit of an exciting one. On Wednesday I leave for the annual Altered Fluid & Friends writing retreat for what will be nearly 5 days of writing. This year it is even more exciting than usual for a number of reasons. One of those being that it will occupy the time between me finishing one job and starting another.

It also gives me the much-needed time to finish revisions on my middle grade novel. Come the end of February, I intend to hand it over to my agent and, hopefully, forget about it for at least a little while. And for the moments when my brain will inevitably need a break from that, I have a few short stories that I need to complete as well.

The other exciting thing is that N will be coming up for part of the retreat, which minimizes one of the harder parts of such retreats, namely being away from the people you care about.

Perhaps in anticipation of this, I had a dream last night that played out like a story. In it, I was picked up from the airport by two men driving a car. The fact that they anticipated where I was going before I was able to tell them, clued me in to the fact that they were up to no good. It was soon clear they were abducting me for nefarious reasons and one of them pulled a gun on me.

Unfortunately I don’t remember the exact reason for them wanting me but I remember pleading with the man, saying that I’d be out of the way since I would be on my writing retreat and it was really important to me and if they just let me go I wouldn’t muck up whatever they were planning. It was as soon as I mentioned the writing retreat and the gunman realized how much it meant to me, that he moved the gun barrel toward my right hand. That’s when I really started freaking out.

Thankfully, the dream shifted gears shortly after that.  So yes, the retreat – I’m really looking forward to it.