Retreat West newsletters

With details of how to vote on the June Micro Fiction Competition and more:

Last chance to vote for your favourite! We've had over 300 votes so far and if you haven't chosen your winner yet, you have until 23.59 tonight (UK time) You can read and vote for your favourite here. There's now just 6 more days to get your entries in for the latest quarterly themed flash too - deadline is 28th June for your music-themed stories that judge FJ Morris will choose from. There's £400 in cash prizes for the winners in this competition. Get all the info here. Happy reading and writing! Love from the Retreat West team x Need help to develop your flash fiction writing? Our affordable online courses, designed and delivered by award-winning authors and publishers, can help! Start anytime, work at your own pace and get feedback on stories you create to help you edit them ready for submission to competitions and journals. What writers are saying about our courses "The most beneficial online writing event I've ever participated in. I've never been more prolific and adventurous in my flash writing! Brilliant." "Everything about it was first rate. I was pushed to delve deep from the interesting and challenging prompts, and as a result created work I would never have created otherwise." "A fantastic course for writers at any level who want to be motivated and inspired." "A challenging course with a variety of excellent prompts and examples. After just two weeks, I've created around 40 new ideas for stories - great value for money!"   See all of our online courses here Copyright © 2020 Retreat West, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: Retreat West Apartment 3735 Chynoweth House Trevissome Park Truro, Cornwall TR4 8UN United Kingdom It's that time again! This month we have 11 great stories on the shortlist as we just couldn't choose between some of them. They're all now on the website for you to read and vote for your favourite. Voting is open until Monday 22nd June. It's the first month of the new prize structure too so all of the writers that have been shortlisted will now get a prize. The first and second place winners share the 50% of entry fees cash prize (a 30/20 split) and get a free entry to the annual Flash Fiction Prize. Everyone who has been shortlisted but doesn't get voted into one of the top 2 spots gets a free entry to next month's micro comp. We changed over to this prize structure as it seemed fairer, especially as the voting is often very close, and it didn't seem right that there wasn't a prize for all. So if you haven't had a go at this very popular monthly comp yet, now is a great time to start! The next competition will go live on 6th July. Don't forget that the latest quarterly themed flash comp closes on 28th June, so you've got just under 2 weeks to polish up your music-themed stories for judge FJ Morris to choose from. There's £400 in cash prizes for the winners in this competition. Get all the info here. Happy reading and writing! Love from the Retreat West team x Need help to develop your flash fiction writing? Our affordable online courses, designed and delivered by award-winning authors and publishers, can help! Start anytime, work at your own pace and get feedback on stories you create to help you edit them ready for submission to competitions and journals. What writers are saying about our courses "The most beneficial online writing event I've ever participated in. I've never been more prolific and adventurous in my flash writing! Brilliant." "Everything about it was first rate. I was pushed to delve deep from the interesting and challenging prompts, and as a result created work I would never have created otherwise." "A fantastic course for writers at any level who want to be motivated and inspired." "A challenging course with a variety of excellent prompts and examples. After just two weeks, I've created around 40 new ideas for stories - great value for money!"   See all of our online courses here Copyright © 2020 Retreat West, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: Retreat West Apartment 3735 Chynoweth House Trevissome Park Truro, Cornwall TR4 8UN United Kingdom Thanks for being part of our reading and writing community. We hope you're enjoying our courses and competitions and finding inspiration and time to write. We're still very excited to have won the Saboteur Award for Most Innovative Publisher and soon we'll be launching a whole new program of free advice blogs to help you develop your writing and bring you more insights from the literary agents, editors and publishers working in the publishing industry. Amanda and Craig are also delighted that they've signed up their first students for The Novel Creator: A Mentored Course already and are looking forward to getting started in September. We'll be featuring them both on the blog soon with insights into narrative structure, creating complex characters, and how being a flash writer can make you a better novelist. So keep an eye out for those! In the meantime, all our latest competitions, courses, books and retreats news is below. Happy reading and writing! With love from all of us at Retreat West  Competitions News The latest Micro Fiction competition prompt is now online. You have until Sunday night to send us your tiny stories! This month's prompt comes from author, Gill Mann whose beautiful memoir we are publishing next month. After polling our Twitter followers about the prize structure for this comp, we have now changed it so that the writer in second place gets a cash prize too, plus everyone shortlisted now also gets a prize as well. The winners for the ABANDONED-themed flash fiction comp are now live, find out which stories impressed judge, Gaynor Jones, here. Many congratulations to these talented writers and to all the writers shortlisted. Get polishing your entries for the June comp on the theme of MUSIC - the judge is FJ Morris, who also chose the prompt. The deadline is 28th June. The extended deadline is approaching for our first ever Novelette-in-Flash comp and we're delighted to have Sophie van Llewyn, whose debut novella-in-flash was longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, as our first judge. Get all the info on this new comp here. You've got until 14th June to submit!  Courses and Workshops News We ran our first Flash Memoir group course in May and tutors, Amanda and Mary-Jane had a great time helping the memoirists use flash to tell their stories. This course is now available as work alone, start anytime option, still with feedback on the stories you write, and we hope to run another group course in the Autumn. The new Micro Month online workshop kicked off this week and once the group course is over, we'll be making this available as a work alone, start anytime option too. If you can't wait to get started, then we have the Fantastic Flashing and Flash Mini available right now so you can start stretching your flash muscles to get lots of new stories in draft, ready to edit and send out in the world. See all of our courses here. Books News Our latest title, Scratched Enamel Heart by Amanda Huggins released last week and the reception has been phenomenal. All 5 star reviews so far with readers saying: "Storytelling at its best." "A collection to keep and cherish." "A beautiful collection that will take you on a journey through time, across land and sea, and deep into the hearts of her characters." You can get a copy on Amazon, Waterstones, Book Depository, or order through your favourite indie bookshop! Retreats News Now that the world is starting to re-open again, in November 2020, Amanda is the mentor-in-residence at Casa Ana in Spain for two weeks. You can work on novels, short stories/flash fiction or memoirs, and get 1-1 guidance and feedback from Amanda throughout the retreat.   Creative Writing Retreats at Casa Ana Casa Ana is a 400-year old house in the village of Ferreirola in the Alpujarras, Andalucia. Once an important family home with a wine press, olive oil store, barns and stables, Casa Ana has been transformed into a stylish and comfortable guest house with south-facing terraces, a garden and spectacular river gorge views. 2020: 14-28 November Mentor: Amanda Saint Retreats are for one week or two, include all food and drink and your own en-suite room with desk. All info here. Memberships Sign up for membership to make a deeper commitment to your writing. Plus as part of your membership you'll get feedback, competitions entries, courses, discounts, books and weekly emails to help you learn, write and submit more included. Author Membership starts at just £2 a month or £20 for the year and is for writers working on novels, short stories and flash fictions. Flash Fiction Membership starts at just £5 a month or £50 for the year and is for writers working on stories at the short-short end of the scale!   Copyright © 2020 Retreat West, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: Retreat West Apartment 3735 Chynoweth House Trevissome Park Truro, Cornwall TR4 8UN United Kingdom It's National Flash Fiction Day 2020! A day when we come together to celebrate the tiniest stories...but what exactly is flash fiction? It's Gaynor here, I'm tempted to say flash fiction is ... whatever you want it to be, as long as it fits the word count. But that's not quite true. What is true, however, is that definitions and descriptions of this art form are evolving constantly. When I began writing very short stories, maybe 13 years ago, I hadn't heard the term flash fiction. I had heard of short-short stories, micros or drabbles. Often these stories were funny, with a twist in the tail or a kick in the end. This is a trend that has faded over the years, and now flash fiction writers are expected to craft emotional, impactful, entertaining or meaningful stories in around 500 words or fewer. Here's a list I recently shared with writer friends while pondering the form: The Perfect flash has... - a striking title - a universal theme - tension - emotion - truth - momentum (not a vignette) - a definite arc / sense of story - a central, unusual, recurring image - emotional impact - striking structure - great first line - you have to read it - you can't stop reading it - tightly structured - woven plot - things that seem disparate come together by the end And...deep breath! In 500, 300, 100 or even 50 words? All that?! Yes! As you can see, it takes real skill to write a very short story that has a big impact, but the end result is worth it. I think that the name 'flash fiction' does the form a disservice, it implies you can write it quickly, that it won't have any lasting impact, but that really isn't the case. Yes, I can get a first draft down very quickly, but the editing and tweaking can take months, to get those words just right. There is no room for error in flash fiction, you must be absolutely precise. The best advice I can give to improve your flash writing, is to read great flash. Here's a Retreat West one I particularly love, Aut Dormi, Aut Lacte by Christina Dalcher. The theme was 'white' - I entered this competition (before I joined the RW team!) and came nowhere, when I read this I thought 'wow, no wonder mine didn't come close!' I like to look at winning or well received flash fictions and figure out just how they did it. If you're interested in learning more, we have a range of resources, from flash fiction memberships, to stories we've published available to read free online, to flash fiction courses, to flash collections, such as these by Sandra Arnold and FJ Morris (judge of our current quarterly flash competition - the ebook is on offer for 99p right now!). We also have our quarterly themed flash fiction competitions and of course our well loved monthly micro competitions to inspire you. Go on, have a read, and then have a go! We love hearing about your successes, you can email gaynor@retreatwest.co.uk or you can tag us on twitter every Wednesday with the hashtag #retweetwest Happy writing!  Buy This is (Not About) David Bowie for 99p kindle Buy This is (Not About) David Bowie for 99p ebook Copyright © 2020 Retreat West, All rights reserved. Our mailing address is: Retreat West Apartment 3735 Chynoweth House Trevissome Park Truro, Cornwall TR4 8UN United Kingdom