Lovely news: a retreat fellowship!

A few months ago I applied for the wildcard fellowship for a month's paid retreat at the gorgeous-looking La Muse Writers and Artists Retreat in southern France. La Muse offers one unaffiliated fellowship a year, during November. I had my fingers crossed and crossed again, the place looks amazing and is set up for writers to be able to focus on their projects without too many other distractions (apart from French food, French wine and every other French delight!). I put together what I thought was an interesting application: how many other ex-British former science journalists living in Israel and working on a series of linked stories about a young Irish girl in the 1950s and a flash fiction collection would there be??


Well, I got this lovely email this morning from La Muse:

We've selected you as the Runner-Up to the Wildcard Fellowship. It was a very tough selection process. Your application was really great, so congratulations.

As a runner-up, we'd be very happy to welcome you to come to La Muse at a 50% discount for the month of October. Just so you know, there is only one runner-up, and it's something we decided to offer specifically because of the quality of your work. If you're able to come in October let me know! Otherwise, we can take a look at other months in the near future.

So excited. So so so excited. Sadly, October doesn't work for me, it is chock full of Jewish holidays which require that I be around here. I am hoping that it will work out for me to go soon, I feel this urgent need, especially with the book coming out, that I get on with the next projects, and I just haven't quite got the space and headspace here to focus. I know I can get so much done on retreat - my two one-week stints at Anam Cara have shown me that. I only hope I'll be able to still play Scrabulous online! (see previous post).