Writing can be - and maybe should be - stitched into your everyday life. But sometimes a short break, leaving all the quotidian rubbish behind, can free you to think, play, experiment and submerge in a project in a way which is very difficult when your mind is cluttered with the school run and the annual report.

So I'll be leading the first ever Itch of Writing Workshop Retreat from Friday 6th to Sunday 8th June, 2014, at Retreats for You in Sheepwash, North Devon, and I'd love to have some blog readers there too. For something about me and my teaching, click here.

We'll have exclusive use of Deborah Dooley's lovely, sixteenth-century house in the centre of the village, and I've called it a workshop retreat because - well - it's a mixture of the two. We'll have morning workshops, and the afternoons will be given over to private writing time, with a one-to-one tutorial for every writer. There will also be good home cooking, wine, open fires, maybe sun (hard though it is in Floody February to imagine Flaming June). There are some lovely walks in and around the village: I suspect they're saturated with plot ideas and sense data, from all the years Deborah Dooley has been welcoming writers to her home.

There will be a maximum of five writers in the workshop, and, in keeping with the spirit of the blog, we'll be focussing on prose fiction and creative non-fiction. Some exercises in the workshop will be able to use characters and settings from your work in progress, while others will be designed to try out ideas and techniques which are new to you. Every writer will also get a half-hour's one-to-one tutorial/mentoring session with me.

You should go home with new confidence, insights, processes and tools (not, of course, rules!) to help your writing develop and grow. You might even find you've got some new story ideas, and perhaps made some new writerly friendships.

The workshops will be suitable for writers at any stage and with any kind of current project, although absolute beginners might feel rather at sea.

For full details of the venue, workshops, prices and everything else, click here.

For some of my posts from and about my own stays in Sheepwash, at Retreats for You, click here.

For Retreats for You's own website, click here.