Tina Haapala, Excuse Editor

Recently, I had the opportunity to “get away from it all” and participate in a casual writer’s retreat.  A month or so ago, a few members of my writers group decided it would be a great idea to pick a weekend to head out of town and into the mountains so we could write, write, write!  Most people thought that was a fantastic idea and were all in; after all, isn’t that what we dream of, just some time where we are free from the distractions that are keeping us from achieving our writing goals? However, by the time we were signed up and ready to go, only 3 of us made the trip. Those distractions? Those are called life.  I am just grateful that I was able to rearrange my life in order to go, and I hope the others in my group will be able to make it another time (because there WILL be another time), or they will be able to use the lessons I learned from the retreat in their everyday writing lives. So, whether you are heading to a cabin in the woods, or sneaking in a f...

It's been almost one hundred years since Virginia Woolf said, "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write...". We still fall back onto this antiquated excuse. We don't allow ourselves to write because we focus on the material things we think are necessary for a writer: a desk, the latest computer, maybe even an MFA. Getting all of those things cost money, so we focus on making the money so someday we can buy the things we need to write. So we work for money, but we don't write because we feel that our time would be better spent doing "real work". That way, we can save money for an extended vacation where we will sit on the beach, writing our Great American Novel longhand, or we will rent a cabin in the mountains and our poetry will be inspired by the majestic trees reaching to the sky. After all, everyone knows we need a big space and a fat bank account to write, right? “Everybody knows it because Virginia Woolf said it... But I’v...