The morning on the 24th of December (Christmas Eve in Sweden) my girlfriend surprised me with the best gift ever. She had booked and paid for me to go on a six day “writing trip” all by myself – seriously: how lucky am I? So after spending Christmas Eve with my family, I left on the 25th to travel to a hotel where I would spend the coming six days.

The room was tiny but great.
A bed, desk and a TV.
That was all I needed to be as productive as possible.

I bought some “food” that I could have in the room, so I didn’t have to go out and eat, and that was maybe ambitious (or crazy) but the truth is: that was a big mistake.
I got a lot of writing done in the first two days, but by the third day, I didn’t feel that great. To only eat cold stuff and not any real (or warm) food, fucked me up. I felt dizzy and my favorite friend saw a chance to come and visit, the one and only: Mr. Migraine. So after two days, I forced myself to leave the room and get some air and real food. That helped a lot, but did not solve things for the remaining days.

The problem was that I had no fridge in the room, and there weren’t any restaurants close to the hotel. I had to continue with what I was doing, even though I didn’t feel very good from it. The priority was writing and nothing else.

Between the writing sessions, I only had two choices of entertainment, and that was watching TV or reading books or comics.
I don’t know about you guys, but I don’t watch TV. I haven’t done that in like seven years. Everything I want to watch I stream or “borrow” from the interweb. Watching TV sucked, but the good thing was that I tired from it fast, making me go up and continue writing (did not allow myself to use Netflix).

I think it was on the fourth day, that Stanley Kubrick’s the Shining was on the TV. It felt really weird watching it as I was feeling kind of dizzy and tired from all the writing and I could only laugh at the bizarre coincidence. For those that have seen the movie (more the movie than the book) you know what I’m talking about.

During my stay at the hotel I managed to produce right over 31 000 words, which feels amazing.

I will give myself two weeks two finish up my first draft, and after that Phase Two will begin. I’ll share the details of that in another post.

Final thought: the trip was definitely a success and I would happily do it again, but for next time I need to sort out the food logistics and have a better sleeping structure.