Almost a week since I’ve been back home from my awesome trip to Fort Mac, and I’ve come to realize something I always knew: writers need routine.

Even though I had time in between my classes and meeting up with my fellow authors Lois Donovan,Renee Englot, Rita Feutl, Carolyn Fisher, Larry Loyie & Constance Brissenden, Debby Waldman, Lyle Weis, and Nadine Mackenzie (read their books”amazing stuff!), I found it really hard to get my pages in.

The room was different, the laptop didn’t connect to the WIFI properly¦there were all kinds of big things and small things (the sheets weren’t mine, the room smelled like air freshener) that threw off my writing game. It reminded me of drug addicts and habituation: the body gets used to doing a specific activity (shooting up) in a specific place (alley), and one day, when the addict decides to do it in a different place, they overdose”not because they’re doing a higher amount of drugs but because the scenery is different.

I guess it’s the same with me. My office gets my brain going. My routine: work, walk the dogs, then work some more is just the thing that primes my brain¦In the end I’m not sure if it means when I go on business trips I should just give up on writing or if I need to expand the places I write, but it’s certainly food for thought¦