Regency Romance Retreat
An anthology for the Summer Solstice
Caroline Bagshaw, Jen Yates and I had so much fun putting together our Christmas Regency Romance anthology, ‘A Tangle of Tinsel and Tartan’ that we’ve decided to repeat the process. Our next collection will celebrate the summer solstice. I have a perilous tendency towards procrastination and consequently am inclined to leave everything to the last minute. Sometimes that means there are several ‘everythings’ all needing to be pulled together at the same time! Thankfully Jen and Caro have a more orderly approach and we arranged to meet a couple of weeks ago for a one-night retreat to do some forward planning. While Jen and Caro had pristine notebooks, I rummaged around in my bag and uncovered a crumpled old jotter pad with a few spare pages. But my tattered jotter did the trick and I drove home feeling incredibly efficient with a rough list of all the jobs I need to do between now and the end of July.
An old church provided the perfect venue
We adored our retreat venue, St Mary’s Church an old church in Pio Pio village. St Mary’s has been restored with dedication to detail and offers the perfect place for writers. Even though our anthologies are comprised of shortish stories, there’s a surprising amount of work involved when putting together an anthology. There’s a title and theme to be decided upon, cover design, photo shoots for publicity and social media material. We are each also working on individual projects, so we talked about whether we should have a logo to represent the three of us as a separate entity. We threw some ideas around and in the end decided upon The Three Quills. Today, Caro presented us with a quill each which she discovered in a specialty paper shop in Auckland, New Zealand’s largest city. I’ll tell you more about The Three Quills once we’ve confirmed the details.
A Tangle of Tiaras and Titles
‘A Tangle of Tinsel and Tartan’ focused on a Christmas theme with either or both, a baby and a banquet to be included. The stories for our next anthology will focus on summer, garden parties, titles and tiaras. You can download a FREE copy of ‘A Tangle of Tinsel and Tartan here’ and we hope you’ll look forward to the summer release of A Tangle of Tiaras and Titles. Wherever you are in the world in these uncertain times, our thoughts are with you. Take care and keep safe xx
Excellent post. Loved seeing this venue too. Looks like a perfect place to retreat to and plan.
Thanks Gaylene! Yes, it was perfect and so special to see the care taken to re-purpose this old building. I hope to return again some other time.