The company I work for closes down over Christmas/New Year and since I’m not going anywhere this year, I decided an at-home writing retreat might be fun

You can find residential writing retreats in all sorts of amazing places, at any time of the year, covering time as short as a weekend, up to a couple of weeks. The most common ones tend to top out at a week.

One of the best I’ve heard about (several writing friends have been, several times), is Moniack Mohr, about 14 miles south(ish) of Inverness in the Scottish Highlands. Their early January retreat (Mon to Sat) costs £515 – which is great value compared to some of the others I’ve come across (and since it’s sold out already, I’d say others agree).

Compared to that, an at-home version feels like a good option. It’ll cost less, I can choose when I want to do it, and I can also choose exactly what I want to work on, and how that schedule looks.

Naturally, I bounced some ideas around with ChatGPT:

I have a two week break over Christmas and New Year, and want to use that time to explore my writing process, and try a fast-draft idea where I come up with the basic outline and some interesting plot points for the next book in my fairy-tale series. What information do you need from me to help me set up an ‘at-home writing retreat’ to inspire creativity, have fun and get some writing done on this new story. I’ll have another full first draft in progress for another book, but I’d like to more-or-less pause that for the two weeks and immerse myself in this new story, so it can germinate more fully in the back of my mind as I’m doing the other writing in the early part of the new year.

The questions ChatGPT came back with covered the following five general areas.

• The Story Itself
• Writing Style & Process
• Retreat Vibes & Routine
• Your Other Commitments
• Outcomes & Wrap-Up

Random tip, since hitting ‘Enter’ in the answer box submits your answer to the LLM, either go ‘Shift/Enter’ any time you want to go to a new line, or – much easier – just write it in Word or Docs or wherever, then paste.

You can check out my retreat schedule here on Notion if you’re interested

And then, because I can’t let ChatGPT have all the fun, I popped that schedule into Claude and had it come up with a Spotify Playlist, and a suggested treat (low or no cost) for each day (it is Christmas after all).

Note: the paid version of ChatGPT can now link directly to your Spotify app, so presumably I wouldn’t have had to do the manual search-and-add I did for this one.

Then came the unexpected development. Other people wanted to join!

This was cool, but also a bit worrying, how could I coordinate this without sacrificing my own writing time? Should I do it? I went back into the same conversation in ChatGPT (so it had full context), and asked the following:

I mentioned this writing retreat plan to some writing friends and they want to join. My thoughts are to have people each create their own schedule depending on what they’re doing and what they have going on in the rest of their lives, but to maybe have a central spot for checking in, getting advice and support, and maybe also doing a regular zoom call. What occurs to you as problems and opportunities for this?

Its reply gave me a bunch of points around opportunities, potential problems, and practical setup suggestions. I then used it to create a proposal (which I prettified in Gamma) and floated past a few other writers.

It proved way more popular than I thought, so I made a DIY Together At Home Writing Retreat customGPT. This was pretty straightforward as ChatGPT kinda knows how to set up customGPTs, so gave me all the prompt info I needed. Yes, I had to go onto a paid plan to do this, I’ll probably drop it after Christmas.

It did take a few goes to get it right, largely because I was on a diabolical internet connection at the time, and there are still a couple of cosmetic tweaks that could be made, but it works!

If you give the customGPT a go and decide you’d like to join the writerly fun, there’s an information page on my fiction writing website you can use to register.

I’ll let you know how it goes.