In my last post I referred to a short story collection I was working on with six other writers and was looking forward, with some trepidation, to digging out and polishing some old stories as my contribution. I’m now surfacing from that exercise and we’re hoping to begin the publishing process of Wild Atlantic Words in the next week or so. It’s been an interesting exercise, not least being navigating the tricky waters of editing and proofreading as a collective endeavor. Lessons have been learned and generally the process of working with others has been fun.

Would I recommend it? On balance, I think so, but I’d do it differently if I went that way again. It is one thing to meet regularly to share writing but quite another to pick up a complex task with a deadline when the participants are all good writers but may have different skills and preferences when it comes to design (e.g. which font to use? how far to indent?), competency in some of the murkier corners of Word (e.g. paragraph styles), and what a book cover should look like. We should, I think, have spent more time at the beginning working out some of the practicalities and thinking through a timeline to meet the crazy deadline we set ourselves – out for Christmas market!

I’d be interested to hear from anyone else who’s been down this path.