Vacation? Five Stars – Highly recommend!

So, I just got back from a vacation. What makes that so special? Everyone goes on vacations. Most people do one or two a year. Well….

What made this vacation special for me was the fact that A) it was my first vacation in four years and 2) it was the first vacation in about 20 years I didn’t work. Yep, you heard that right – I didn’t work (for the first time in about 20 years – did I mention that already?). It’s not that I’m type A (well, I guess a little – okay, maybe a lot), but for the past 20 years I’ve either been teaching (mostly online) or working fraud cases.

My family has usually elected to take vacations while I still had to teach (it worked mostly for my wife’s work schedule and the kid’s school schedule), so I had to drag the laptop along and teach while on vacation (logging in daily and grading, mostly). Even while walking across Spain on the Camino de Santiago I had to drag my laptop along to complete a fraud case (that pesky time-sensitive thing most fraud cases involve).

What made this non-working vacation possible? First, I quit teaching online (sorry students). Second, I let all the clients and attorneys know – I’m on vacation. I will not be working or responding to emails or working on any cases or answering any phone calls. And I didn’t! And it was great!

I know what most of you are thinking – who cares that you didn’t teach or work on any fraud cases while you were on vacation. How many words did you write?

Honestly, not many. Although I did haul along my little laptop (more a tablet – an Asus Mini-Transformer), I actually didn’t sit down and do too much writing. I got a little done on a couple of mornings, and some on the flight back to the mainland, but that was it. At most, a couple of thousand words (on a YA novel set in the CoD/HC timeline which I’ve been working on piece by piece over the past two years), but nothing on Reset or the next in the CoD series (which I still don’t have a name for).

Here’s a special shout-out to Shawn Inmon, who took some of his valuable time away from writing to talk a little publishing business (while I sipped Kona coffee on the lanai one morning, watching the waves of the tropical ocean, smelling the scent of tropical flowers wafting up while bird sang and screeched in the trees). I would say between that 20-30 minute conversation and the probably one hour spent writing, that was the most actual work I did (and I don’t consider writing or talking writing to be business – so there!).

Back to writing!