Writing retreat, "moving forward" and in the wild

Wrapping up a two week break of house (and cat) sitting in the rural loveliness of Perthville and putting in some concentrated hours on the elusive Book 2. Set my self a target of 30,000 words and, surprising myself, I've achieved it. I think a big factor was forgetting to pack my portable hard drive which had Time Machine on it, which forced me to go forth and write on with no looking back.

It wasn't that straight forward of course.

After discovering I'd forgotten it, I fretted and had my security blanket hard drive posted up from Sydney, only to find  that as I had not formatted and exported my copy of the novel from Scrivener, I couldn't open the file on a new computer! So I was there, on the road to novel, without the comforting distraction of "Oh, I'll just go through what I've already done and edit it a bit" to provide the appearance of activity without making any actual forward progress.

So I have been writing off the map, so to speak. Resisting the temptation to tinker, just creating the next piece of the jigsaw, and the next, oh and a bit over there, and something that might go down there, and this might work later on in the piece after that ... scenes and sketches that will need to be fleshed out, slotted into place, re-worked, in some cases possibly scrapped but .... they are now in existence. And that's a happy thing to be.

So thank you to the beautiful - though bloody cold - Central West for providing excellent walking, thinking and dictating landscapes:

Thanks to those I met along the road:

and cheers to the welcome glimpse of sprinter:

Meanwhile back at the ranch! 

Thanks Maggie for two sightings of The Old School in the wilds of Paddington!

Maggie at Berkeluow's at Paddington

The Old School - face out at Ariel Paddington! 

So, back to Sydney tomorrow, to warmer weather (I hope) and tickets to see Neil Gaiman read "The Truth is a Cave in the Black Mountains" at the Sydney Opera House thanks to Galaxy Bookshop's competition.