I have to remember to buy yogurt at the grocery store.

Why hasn’t that agent gotten back to me yet? Does my whole book idea suck? Do I need to rewrite the first chapter - again?!

I need to figure out what courses to offer for spring. Maybe I could do one on the Inside Outline…

What do these have in common? They are all sentences from my recent Morning Pages.

I recently returned from a self-designed writing retreat during which I finally finished my latest novel. Hooray! I love writing retreats, because they are focused chunks of time when I can work on specific writing goals. I don’t schedule them often enough, actually, but when I do them I find they jump-start my enthusiasm for a project, give a flagging project momentum, or provide a spurt of energy for the final push, as in this time.