I SPENT THREE DAYS AT A MAGIC LAKE HOUSE (and all you get is this lousy blog post...)

     My friend Julie the Nomad agreed to touch down long enough to spend three weeks house-and-dog-sitting for her family friends while they're traveling, and she invited me to visit her at the Magic Lake House for a few days for our own exclusive little writing retreat.
     You may ask: what made a lake house into a Magic Lake House?  The main requirement was for me and Julie to decide that it was, because both of us had hit snags in our writing and really needed some magic.  But there were other components too: remoteness, quiet, and beautiful surroundings.

and dogs.

and kayaks.

 

 

and a koi pond.

     Julie had already set up her writing station, which I call Still Life with Paint Cans, in the kitchen

and she graciously ceded the master bedroom to me for two nights and moved herself into the guest room downstairs.  And the Magical thing about the master bedroom was the attached sitting room.

That's where I wrote, and this was my view from the window as I wrote:

     And every bit of it was Magic.  We both wrote steadily.  I solved a major problem with my book that had been frustrating me for weeks.  And Julie and I talked about our books and our writing ambitions and a whole lot of other subjects too, and we cooked and swam and petted the dogs, but mostly we wrote and we helped each other write.
     And I took a lot of pictures because even though I'll probably never visit this MLH again,  I'm going to carry this visit with me in my mind and heart for a very long time.