Thank you to everybody who joined us at The Washing Machine Book Launch Event in Melbourne at the gorgeous Alluvial!

Thank you so much to all of you who joined us at THE WASHING MACHING BOOK LAUNCH EVENT at the Gorgeous Alluvial Restaurant at the Intercontinental Melbourne!💗💗💗💗💗

The gorgeous place where I spent most weekends of 2023 drinking coffee, cider, eating burgers or okonomiaki, and mainly pregnant with my baby, aka, writing The Washing Machine! 🤗🤗 😜🎁🎊❤💗

Thank you so much to the entire team from the Alluvial Restaurant for welcoming all of us at for this magical event!! Everything was so perfect, everyone had a lovely time, we will forever remember this evening!!💫💫💫💫💫💞💞💞💞💞

Despite the darkness and delicate subjects in The Washing Machine story, it is ultimately a story of love, hope and human connection.

This event was to celebrate life, love and connection.

The celebration will also include: Book signing, The Washing Machine Quiz with Merchandise prizes and Q&A – “What’s real? What’s fiction?”

Alluvial – why is this place so special for The Washing Machine?

If you read the book, you know that I started writing on the train to Blackpool on the day of the Queen Elizabeth Funeral. Yes, this is true, among many other parts of the stories, which I will be happy to answer questions in future Q&As about what’s real and what’s fiction?

When I returned to Australia, I was working full time Monday to Friday, and going to my favourite place in Melbourne every Saturdays and Sundays to write, and this favourite place was Alluvial! Yes, I spent nearly the whole year at Alluvial writing it! It’s a gorgeous place, it has 1800s neo gothic architecture, it’s in the basement, which was the perfect vibe to connect with all the ghosts in the story. They would usually close at 11pm, and that helped me to have enough time to write as much as possible before having to go back home. If you’re a writer you know, it takes time once you sit down to clear your head from all other life’s dramas and get into that world that you’re writing about, and when you start, you want to keep going! At least for me, that’s how it works!

I can tell you more about my writing process during future Q&A sessions!

I also wrote a great blog post about my writing process here, to inspire all writers out there juggling daytime jobs and writing.

https://shailla.medium.com/how-is-like-to-be-pregnant-with-a-book-4566d756f71d

New photo album by Joshua M.

Thank you Joshua for taking beautiful photos of this very special day 🙏💫🥰