So here’s another cool project I was involved in.
As some of you may remember, last year I spearheaded and edited an anthology of short stories, essays, and poems for the Concord branch of the New Hampshire Writers’ Project in my home state. After we decided as a group to assemble a writing collection, I asked people for submissions, worked with the individual writers to polish their work, and assembled the manuscript, which Gary Devore finalized and reformatted for eReaders and paperback copies.
The anthology was fun and super-rewarding to work on, and the group was so happy with how it came out that we decided to do another one.
I’m proud to say that the 2019 Concord NHWP Anthology came out even better than the first one did, and features work by 17 writers from the Concord NH area, including yours truly. This year my contribution is a short piece called “The Tetrapods,” about the crumbling downtowns in my part of Toyama, Japan, complete with pictures.
The anthology is absolutely FREE to read online, and you can grab a PDF or eReader copy from the New Hampshire Writers’ Project website. Or, if you prefer physical books (and really, who doesn’t?), paperback copies are also available from the publisher for a measly $4.34 plus shipping.
So stop reading this post and go check it out—or, you can keep reading about how this project came to be.
We Get High with a Little Help from Our Friends
I just wrote an entire post about how working with your friends helps you tackle bigger projects than you could handle on your own, and this year’s anthology is no exception.
It would have been next to impossible for me to go solo on the anthology while in Japan, since I’m not around to talk to the writers group members in person and the logistics of tackling a project like this without in-person meetings would have been a nightmare. I’m also a LOT busier now than I was when I assembled last year’s anthology, since at the time I was in between jobs and could easily devote several hours a day to editing and emailing authors.
Fortunately, though, a lot of good people from the NHWP group stepped up to handle the organizing, spread the word, and collect submissions. I still did the editing and worked with the authors directly (a.k.a. the fun part) but everything else was a team effort.
- Maria Fowler took on the MAJOR task of doing the ePub, PDF, and hard-copy formatting since she runs her own legit publishing business and knows way more about that than I do. She and I handled the proofing (the final readthroughs before a book goes to print) together so there’d be two pairs of eyes to catch mistakes. Maria also opened the cover design up to anyone who wanted to submit a photo—with the winner being Valerie Carter’s excellent pic of a lake at sunset.
- Piper Tallis was also instrumental in doing the organizing—writing the emails, handling submissions, communicating with me in Japan, and in general making sure everything got where it needed to be. I felt about a million times freer to focus on the actual editing work without having to write emails and handle questions all the time, so Piper was an enormous help every step of the way.
- Also, big thanks to Cheryl Barnhart, who wrote this year’s introduction. When we started brainstorming ideas for the second anthology I knew I wanted someone new to write the introduction so the project could become more of a group effort, with each year’s feeling different than the last. Cheryl’s introduction was a big part of making that happen.
The four of us got the chance to meet in-person back in August when I was in New Hampshire for my Japan talk, and we sat down for a working lunch where we caught up with each other about our writing, ironed out some problems, and made plans for final editing and distribution. We also decided the order of the anthology works together as a team, and it felt really good to hear different perspectives about which pieces should go where, and why.
It also felt good to work in-person with other creative people this time around—not because it was an actual tax-deductible business lunch like the big-time businesspeople have, but because it was four writers working together on a project and getting work done. The whole thing felt amazingly, and honestly, real.
What About the Editing?
Since Piper and Maria were handling logistics, we made plans for them to email me the submissions before the start of the Japanese summer vacation in mid-July. Once my classes were out for the summer I’d have a LOT more free time, which meant I could focus on the Anthology without losing a crazy amount of sleep or burning myself out in a fiery wreck of overwork.
In an ideal world, I planned on finishing all the edits during the two weeks in July between the end of classes and when I got on the plane back to America…which didn’t even come close to happening. One, the editing was way too large of a project to finish in two weeks (which I should have seen coming), and two, I had other things to do during that time (mostly because I was still behind from a hectic few months when I took on WAY more than I should have).
I ended up doing a good chunk of the editing back in New Hampshire, working in the mornings and afternoons in my brother’s basement where it was cool and quiet. It sucked that I had to spend so much of my vacation working, but I tried my best not to overdo it and made sure I scheduled plenty of time to see the family and friends I wanted to.
As with last year, the editing was a back-and-forth process with authors: I’d edit a piece, then email the changes back to the author for approval. Some of the pieces were in solid shape, but others needed several rounds of changes, and a few required in-depth conversations with the authors about exactly what they were aiming for and how to get there. I also started with the shortest pieces first and worked my way up to the longest ones: this was so I could start conversations with the greatest number of authors possible from the get-go and give more people more time to make changes, thus minimizing the odds of me being stuck waiting for a few final emails.
I confirmed the last of the changes in mid-September, then sent a super-rough version of the assembled manuscript to Maria to reformat. She worked her magic, and we all discussed some nitty-gritty formatting decisions: stuff like fonts, page numbering, and how big of a space to leave between the title and the first line. That stuff matters, and we wanted to make sure we had the best-looking book we could.
Finally, Maria and I checked over the entire manuscript for typos or final grammar issues with the help of authors—again, so we could get the best-looking manuscript we could. A lot of writers and editors tend to breeze through the final checks, but we didn’t want to, since it’s embarrassing to have readers catch your mistakes. I myself went through the entire manuscript three times before I felt confident we’d caught everything—though if you do find any mistakes, be sure and let me know ;-)
And that, my friends, is how to make a writing anthology happen.
What’s Next?
Now that the anthology is out we’ll be promoting it locally through the New Hampshire Writers’ Project and hopefully a few libraries and bookstores. (You might also see copies up in my webstore if I can get them to Japan cheaply enough!) I’ll also be helping with a few other social media/traditional media hyping, once again to make sure people see the anthology so they can check it out.
Finally, it’s looking more and more like the anthology’s going to become a yearly event, which I’m super-excited about: it’s fun to work on, rewarding to have as a finished product, and a great opportunity for local writers to share their work. It’s also opened up a lot of paths when it comes to working with writers in my home state, which makes me feel like I’m out in the world engaging with creative work and making things happen.
And that all feels pretty great.
You know what else feels pretty great…
But I Also Have a Day Job on Facebook
My Instagram where I post cool pics from Japan