Our first writing retreat was held November 20 – 22nd, 2009 at a little cabin in Northwest Indiana (you can rent it here). The owners referred to it as a “cozy cabin” and we quickly started referring to this as the “cozy cabin writing retreat.” Five people attended the first writing retreat: Andy King, Nick Carcioppolo, Lisa Guntzviller, LaShara Davis, and Jakob Jensen. Everyone had to write a rough draft of their results section in advance (as data analysis alone can easily consume several days). Given that, the goal was to write rough drafts of intros, literature reviews, methods, and results. We started working the moment we arrived, and often worked late into each night. The cozy cabin writing retreat produced three publications (and two more articles that are under review):

Jensen, J. D., King, A. J., & Carcioppolo, N. (2013). Driving toward a goal and the goal-gradient hypothesis: The impact of goal proximity on compliance rate, donation size, and fatigue. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 43, 1881-1895.

Carcioppolo, N.,* & Jensen, J. D. (2012). Perceived historical drinking norms and current drinking behavior: Using the theory of normative social behavior as a framework for assessment. Health Communication, 27, 766-775.

Guntzviller, L. M.,* Jensen, J. D., King, A. J., & Davis, L. A. (2011). The foreign language anxiety in medical office scale (FLAMOS): Developing and validating a measurement tool for Spanish-speaking individuals. Journal of Health Communication, 16, 849-869.

Needless to say, we deemed the cozy cabin writing retreat a success and vowed to hold another one in the future. Note: We took a lot of photos during the cozy cabin writing retreat, but for some reason only one survived: a picture of me standing beside a horse. Maybe you are asking, “What’s with the photo of Jake beside a horse?” Well, that’s all we have. Fortunately, we have done a much better job of saving photos since the first retreat. Heck, maybe that’s why we are so interested in photography!