This week, I’m headed off for a break. It’s a writing break, a work break, and an at-home stuff break. My family and I are hopping on an airplane tonight (a few hours) to head off to LA (Yes, Disneyland). We’ve never all been on a vacation together, the closest we’ve gotten is a trip down to Seward or that one time we went to Fairbanks for a weekend. 

Normally, the airplane is a great place to write, it’s one of the few places where the distraction IS writing. Hotel rooms are also particularly productive, I mean, what else would I do? Last couple of work trips I spent my hotel and airplane time knocking out about half of Wine Bottles and Broomsticks. That’s even after dinner with co-workers and talking with the wife on the phone. This isn’t that sort of trip though. I’ve got the kids with me so there will be those distractions, plus I’m flying late-night flights there and back. I’m not going to have the energy to be creative or productive in any meaningful sense. 

At the moment, most of what I’m working on is line edits and various bits of polishing, not an awful lot of content creation going on anyhow. By taking a break like this, I’m hoping that when I come back, after I get a bit of sleep, I’ll be able to focus on not only editing book 1 of the Rick Basket stories, Wine Bottles and Broomsticks, but I’ll be able to start seriously thinking about plot details and outlines for the second book. I think a good break to absorb some of the real world will do wonders for my created world and make sure I stay excited about the project. 

In any case, I’m sure I’ll be all over Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook during my time off, so if you’re wondering what sort of trouble I’m getting in to, there will be a full-public accounting of that. Except for the moments where I’m getting told to ‘put that damn phone away.’