Take your writing to the next level

A lot of great courses coming to our Substack!

Now that Retreat West is moving over to Substack, I am making many of my courses available on here as part of a paid subscription. You can join anytime and access the course content, post comments and share your responses to the prompts.

Experiments in Flash

The first course I am going to bring to Substack is Experiments in Flash. This will start on 14th July 2023. This 6-workshop course uses ideas from science and spirituality about the nature of reality and human existence to inspire new ways of thinking about our writing of flash fiction (and longer stories). Workshops will be posted every 2 weeks on a Friday.

After that, I will publish:

• The Mini Novel Course - A 6-workshop course to get you started with writing your novel. You’ll discover tools to plan and plot your novel, get to know your characters and the world they inhabit, and start writing some chapters.

• The Micro Fiction Course - 8 workshops that are a mix of discussions, readings and prompts to get you writing stories up to 350 words.

• The Five Elements of Fiction - The five elements at the heart of the Taoist philosophy are Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal and Water. This course uses the characteristics associated with each element to find new ways to inspire stories and create memorable narrators that have real depth.

• Fantastic Flashing - 10 workshops featuring craft development discussions, readings and writing prompts to help you take your flash fiction writing to the next level.

• Storytelling with the Tao - This 6-workshop course uses chapters of the Tao Te Ching to inspire stories that explore what it means to be human, living now in our times. Each workshop features a chapter of the Tao, along with associated discussion content linking the chapter to our world today, a short story reading, craft development section, and a writing prompt.

Ongoing, I will write new courses and add them here. I’m really excited to develop a new community here around the courses and I hope you’ll join me!

It’s just £8 a month or £80 for the year to get all of these courses. Or you can become a Founding Member for £160 and also send me a story you write from each course to get detailed developmental feedback.

If you know any other writers that would be interested, please do share this with them.