Everyone deserves a vacation from time to time.

We all need opportunities to rest, unwind, and recuperate.

For writers, however, vacation time can cause quite a dilemma.

I am pretty sure it was our literary friend Hamlet who once said, “To write, or not to write while on vacation? That is the question!”

In this week’s episode of The Writing Coach podcast, we tackle that question, and I share my advice on how to go about best mixing writing and relaxation.

Listen to the episode or read the transcript below:

The Writing Coach Episode #133 Show Notes

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The Writing Coach Episode #133 Transcript

Hello, beloved listeners, and welcome back to the writing coach podcast. It is your host as always writing coach Kevin T Johns here. And I am recording this and sending it out at the end of August 2022. When I think of August, when I, the late, late August, when I think of labour day weekend, my mind always goes to Stand By Me that incredible film starring River Phoenix, and will Wheaton movie from my childhood based on a Stephen King short story called the body, just an incredible film and in a film about summer coming to an end. But in, in that film, in that story summer really represents childhood and the end of childhood and that film, you know, I remember looking up to the kids in that film, their 12 going on 13. And I remember watching that movie and thinking those kids were so old.

Now I’m a 42-year-old man looking back on watching that movie in my childhood. And again, it’s just August ends, September starts and I think of Stand By Me. And I think of the end of things in terms of the year coming to an end in a new school year, beginning. Yes, obviously we have new year’s Eve and the actual turning over of the clock. But I think in some ways, certainly, if we’re parents, but even not our, our minds stay wired to that idea of September being the beginning of something new. And certainly even as an adult, I, I really start to think of it as the final sprint to the end of the year. I think as adults and young people, we need goals, and quarterly goals and yearly goals are really a reasonable timeline to look at things.

So when I come up on September, I start saying, did I accomplish this year what I wanted to accomplish? There are only three or four more months until the new year until 2023. And am I going to be able to look back on 2022 and say I accomplished the things that I wanted to accomplish? I know right now, one of my major priorities is finishing my novel, The Page Turners Part 3, that’s been a long, long project. I’m near the end. I, I have about 20 scenes. I’m guessing that I need to Polish up and finish off I’m. I’m kind of on a near-final draft of that book. And rather than just sitting here and saying, oh, well, I hope I can get it done by the end of the year, I did the math on it. You know, there’s say 16 weeks left in the year. And so I’ve got 26 scenes to write in 16 weeks. You know, it basically means I need to be revising two scenes a week every week for the rest of the year if I want to get that book done in 2022.

But that sort of goal setting and that sort of monitoring of wheth...