Well, the first day of my writing retreat did not go quite as planned. I had a wonderful morning on an impromptu driving tour of Los Angeles thanks to a very generous friend, and then she dropped me off at the retreat around 1:30.
Within half an hour of arriving at the American Jewish University campus, two traumatic things happened:
- My flip flops broke. Okay, no big deal. I can survive without those.
- I opened my brand new laptop and saw only the black screen of eternal death.
Surprisingly, I managed not to panic right away. But after many failed attempts to revive my computer, my roommate offered to drive me to the Apple Store to send the thing off for repairs. So now I am computerless, likely for most of the retreat, and two of my critiques were lost. It’s proven a bit stressful so far, as most of the computer lab computers here are borked in some fashion and at best are running Windows XP circa 2001. One of them doesn’t even have Word installed.
At any rate, after returning from our quest for electronics, we had dinner around 5pm and then there was a welcome at 7. All of the fellows in every workshop (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and genre/YA) gathered together to introduce ourselves. We went around the room and shared our names, where we came from, our preferred pronoun, and a sentence or two about what we hope to accomplish this week. I can’t remember exactly what I said, because I have the memory of a developmentally disabled goldfish, but I believe it was something along the lines of “I hope to learn from my fellow writers and revise the end of my book this week.” Fortunately, the first part of that is already coming true. The second is a little more challenging, sans computer, but I’m sure I’ll get through with the support and generosity of all the other Fellows here.
On the bright side, I did manage to fix my flip flops due to a random tube of crazy glue that I obtained in Eugene when the horn fell off my unicorn mask last week.