Exploring beautiful Daylesford together armed with pens and cake
It was such a blissful and productive week, when the ALLWRiTECLUB organised its first ever writing retreat, with a week in pretty Daylesford, Victoria.
Eleven writers from our group descended on this oh-so-pretty country spa town during a chilly start to spring 2024. We arrived from every state and territory of Australia, armed with our works in progress, wine and plenty of cake.
There, while temperatures dropped to zero degrees, between lovely warm days, we embraced the magic of words, the wonder of toasty central heating, beautiful lakeside walks, and each other, to work on our manuscripts, in a delightful cottage with ten comfy bedrooms and a giant communal table.
We ate, we drank, we laughed, and in the evenings we shared our work and marvelled at how far each of us has come since we first met nearly four years ago.
The ALLWRiTECLUB first formed a writing group after baring our souls via manuscript swaps during the Australian Writers' Centre's six-month Write Your Novel online course in April 2021. We found that the brilliant mix of personalities combined with meeting online during lockdown under the guidance of our wonderful teacher Bernadette Foley, meant that we formed a special bond that we didn't want to break.
Come the end of the course, we decided to keep the conviviality and the writing momentum going, so we formed a group, named ourselves the ALLWRiTECLUB, and set up chat channels on the Discord app. Our very talented artist member Brigitta designed a logo and we even created our own merch, in the form of t-shirts, hoodies and tote bags.
Now, we meet regularly, chat daily and swap work constantly, enjoying the luxury of having a dozen or so pairs of discerning eyes on our short stories, synopses, competition entries and full manuscripts.
We love the spirit of the group, where there is always the opportunity of robust debates, vigorous chats, gentle feedback and kind encouragement, as we all charge forth on the long march towards publication. A few of us have got very close. Watch this space.
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