So this weekend I was off with 3 writing friends on a retreat to an adorable Victorian cottage in Eureka Springs!  (no pics at the moment–we spent most of the time wearing sweats and messy hair as we wrestled with our WIPs…).  It was a wonderful time, with lots of work done and lots of wine on the big front porch in the evenings.  I am in the middle of my newest project, the first in my Elizabethan-set mystery series (coming out from NAL next year!!), and this was a great way to get a few thousand words ahead.  Plus it was fun!

So I started wondering if authors of the past did something like this.  All I could remember was how in high school a friend of mine (another future English major) had an old, grainy VHS tape of a movie called Haunted Summer, about the time Byron and the Shelleys (and others) spent a few weeks together at Lake Geneva in Switzerland, where a dare on a rainy night gave birth to Frankenstein.  This is what IMDB says about that movie:

 In 1815, authors Lord Byron, Mary Shelley and Percy Shelley get together for some philosophical discussions, but the situation soon deteriorates into mind games, drugs and sex.

My own retreat was not nearly so interesting….

As I looked around this morning trying to find more info on this famous writing retreat, I found a great article from the NYTimes’ travel section–it’s really fascinating and makes me want to go to Lake Geneva right away:  Lake Geneva as Byron and Shelley Knew It

Where would you want to go on retreat?  What authors would you take with you??  (I think Byron and Shelley would be fun, but probably not so conducive to getting much work done!  I might go with the Brontes…)