Retreat West, competitions and more

 With details of the opening page competition, deadline midnight tonight, and more:

Deadline day! It's your last chance to send the first 400 words of your novel, memoir or short story for our Best Opening Page competition. Submissions close at 23.59 (UK time) tonight.   FIRST PRIZE - A one-week writing retreat at Casa Ana from 14-28 November 2020* with one mentoring session included with resident mentor, Amanda Saint. Value €1000. SECOND PRIZE - A half-price one-week writing retreat at Casa Ana in November 2020*. Value: €500. THIRD PRIZE - Detailed feedback on your opening 400 words from Amanda Saint. * The week can be transferred to a 2021 retreat if you can't make it in 2020.     Get more info and enter your story 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 New 1000-word story comp launched We're delighted to have launched a brand new competition this week. You can win a professional recording of your story by actor and voice artist, Holly Joyce, in the 1000-Word Story Competition. Before you enter, read Holly's advice on writing stories that work well for audio recordings.   Micro fiction comp shortlist online The 10 shortlisted stories in the August micro-fiction competition are now online and you can vote for your favourite until Monday 24th August. Winners will be announced on the blog on the 25th. Read and vote here.   Deadlines coming up 23rd August - last chance to enter the Best Opening Page competition to win a writing retreat at Casa Ana in Spain. 31st August - applications close for the Novel Creator Mentored Course starting in September where you'll write, edit and pitch your novel over the course of a year with help from Amanda Saint and CM Taylor. Giveaway If you're on Twitter then we're giving away a bundle of free competition entries to celebrate reaching 5,000 followers. Just retweet this post by 5pm on Sunday 23 August to be entered into the draw.     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, competitions, and books, and finding inspiration and time to write. After getting lots of requests for feedback on stories that don't make it through to the lists in our competitions, we have now updated all of them to offer optional critiques when entering too. These will be provided after the competitions close. We'll also be offering new editorial services for manuscript critiques and will be opening that up on the website soon. We've put together a top team of editors who are a great of mix award-winning authors, ghost writers, and editors for the big publishers and for indies, with experience across all genres. Congratulations this month go to Retreat West Books author, Ali Thurm, who has been long listed for the Guardian Not The Booker Prize with her brilliant novel, One Scheme of Happiness; and to Jan Kaneen, whose gorgeous memoir-in-flash, The Naming of Bones, is coming out with us in 2021, as she won the Segora Short Story Competition.  Happy reading and writing!  With love from all of us at Retreat West    Competitions News   NEW COMPETITION LAUNCHING NEXT WEEK! We have a brand new 1,000 word competition launching next week with a brilliant prize so keep an eye on the website and our social pages for details!    Listings The latest Micro Fiction competition longlist is now online and the shortlist for public votes will be published on Monday 17th August. See which stories went through here. The shortlist for the MUSIC themed flash competition is coming next week too! You can see the longlist here.    Deadlines There's just over a week to send your entries for the Best Opening Page competition to win a writing retreat at the gorgeous Casa Ana in Spain. Get all the info here. You have just over a month to send entries for the September themed flash comp on the theme of GLASS - the judge is Amanda Huggins, who also chose the prompt. The deadline is 27th September. It's time to start thinking about your entries for the annual prizes now too as the deadline for both the Short Story and Flash Fiction prize is 25th October. We'll have interviews with the judges, Peter Jordan and Susmita Bhattacharya, on the blog soon. Get inspired by previous winners in the annual anthologies.   Courses and Workshops News     The deadline for applications for the Novel Creator course is looming. You have until 31st August to apply for this year-long, fully mentored course starting in September that will help you write, edit and pitch your novel to agents and publishers. Get all the info and apply here to join students from Europe, the US and Asia to write your novel!    Here's what last year's students are saying about it:   "For years writing a novel was a pipe-dream for me. Then I joined Craig and Amanda's course and 9 months later I had a manuscript and am talking to agents. If you've had a book idea in your head and not known how to progress it, do the course. You will only look forwards."  "I feel lucky to have taken this course. The tutorials and exercises were excellent; the mentoring truly outstanding. Craig and Amanda are supportive, insightful and genuinely focused on making their students better writers. If you are serious about the craft of writing novels, I can't recommend it highly enough."  "My approach to writing an entire book is more time efficient. The prose itself is more contemporary and the voice more direct. When Amanda told me what was working in my novel and what I needed to change, she was right every time. Her editing transformed my work into the best writing I have ever done. Can you ask for anything more?"     See all of our courses here   Books News   Our latest book published on 22nd July and we were thrilled that it went straight into the bestseller charts on Amazon! A Song Inside by Gill Mann is beautifully written, emotional and compelling. Perfect for fans of Take My Hand and How to Stay Alive it has received all 5 star reviews so far.     Get a copy here   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   Hot on the wheels of our win at the 2020 Saboteur Awards, Retreat West books and authors are continuing to make waves!   Ali Thurm's debut novel, One Scheme of Happiness, published by us earlier this year, has been long listed for the Guardian's Not The Booker Prize! Huge congratulations to Ali! If you enjoyed the book and would like to vote for it, you can find all the information you need by clicking here.   Meanwhile, A Song Inside by Gill Mann is still riding high in the Amazon kindle charts and has 10 5* reviews, so far! Gill is donating all of her author royalties to SANE, ReThink & Riverside Counselling Service, so by buying the book, you are also supporting these important mental health charities.  And Jan Kaneen, author of the forthcoming memoir-in-flash, The Naming of Bones, has just won first prize in a short story competition! Jan won the 2020 Segora Short Story Prize with this beautiful story, The Hostile Environment.     Thank you once again to everyone who buys or books, votes for our books, leaves reviews or otherwise spreads the word about Retreat West Books, as an Indie Publisher we value our supporters so much. Happy reading The Retreat West Team    Retreat West Books   Copyright © 2020 Retreat West, All rights reserved. You are receiving this email as you signed up via our website for news of our creative writing courses, competitions and retreats. Our mailing address is: Retreat West Apartment 3735 Chynoweth House Trevissome Park Truro, Cornwall TR4 8UN United Kingdom .