Hi ink splAters.

One of the things I was most looking forward to in my last semester of college was the opportunity to go on my very first writers’ retreat.

For those of you that don’t know, a writers’ retreat is an event where a selection of writers (or aspiring writers) get together in a cabin in the woods or the mountains and sleep, write, critique, receive criticism, and drink. Retreats can last anywhere from a couple days to a few weeks, and authors I’ve talked to are fairly evenly split on their usefulness.

Anyway, the idea of going out to a cabin somewhere with some of my favorite literary-minded classmates and two Writers-in-Residence to talk about writing and books (and in my case, faeries) for a couple of days sounded like a fantastic time.

And then the news came. We were no longer able to go away for the retreat. Instead we would have it at school over the weekend. *Shudder* Nothing, I thought at the time, will make it feel like I’ve paid good money for extra homework more than having this “retreat” at a place at which I spend 6 days a week from September to April. But I had already committed to it and I was still eager to have some of my book read by an author who earns a living from writing books.

The weekend turned out…bittersweet. Though it was fun to do a reading on the second day at a local bookstore, and then go out and gorge on cupcakes afterword in celebration, the group of us felt that we had missed out on that bonding and camaraderie that would have grown from being forced into one another’s company miles away from civilization, unable to escape.

I’ll talk about the author I worked with soon.