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Review of the Winter Solstice Writing Retreat, June 2021 Kinglake, Victoria is surrounded by trees and national park. On the third weekend of June 2021, it was also shrouded in early-morning mist. If you had been passing through, beyond the cacophony of Sulphur-crested cockatoos and kookaburras, you may have heard the scratching of pen nibs … Continued
Stop struggling to write. Retreat to the mountain for RENEWAL. Gain confidence, meet like-minded people and get writing.
Once you finish writing your manuscript, what do you do next? Submit it somewhere Give it to friends to read Revise. If you answered number 1 or 2, you’re wrong. A first draft shouldn’t go anywhere. You might think it’s brilliant. It’s probably not. A first draft is a spill: ideas, prose, phrasing, idiosyncrasies, crap, … Continued
There are lots of people out there offering fast, nasty mentoring packages. They’re fast, because the mentor wants the quickest turnaround possible, which inflates their bank account. And they’re nasty because, often, the mentor knows very little about writing, or the publishing industry – if anything, they know just enough to bluff their expertise. Usually, … Continued
It’s been a while since I’ve written anything longer than a paragraph. I thought it would feel unfamiliar, but it feels like coming home. My spontaneous hiatus from writing, reading and generally functioning is coming to a close, and I am feeling a hesitant kind of relief. Prior to my internship at Busybird, I had … Continued
Someone once asked me what I would do if I knew I would not fail. I responded, without a shade of hesitation, that I would write a book. Have I? Nope. Do I want to? Most definitely. Will I? I don’t know. What if I fail? For years, the book I have had my heart … Continued
Competitions are exciting. We all want to be recognised. We want our work to be lauded. We want that celebration to spread across the publishing industry and consumer market and let people know we (and our work) exist. We want to mean something. Then you have the practical output: competitions can lead to goodies, like … Continued
Authors often comes to us, asking what means they could employ to improve their manuscript. There’s editing, which would look at the manuscript in terms of structure or copy (or a combination of both). There are also workshops, although they’re designed more to improve the writer’s skills, which they will then apply to their manuscript. … Continued
