Ceaseless Way, ceaseless learning

Monday I polished up the manuscript for the Ceaseless Way collaborative anthology I’ve been working on. Things still look good for getting it out this fall, which got me thinking about what we’ve learned about working on a collaborative project such as this.

•Don’t hesitate to seek help. Copying and modifying SFWA’s collaborative agreement template made things a whole lot simpler.

•Don’t make things too complicated. As I said in the previous post about the anthology, we lost a couple of years trying to work out a long-term legal structure for future anthologies. It wasn’t feasible, given we weren’t going to pay for lawyers.

•Take initiative. Kat, who launched the project, was always clear she wanted it to be a team effort rather than her as editor, the rest of us as contributors. That led us into the shoals a lot of collaborative/consensus efforts encounter — when things bog down, nobody’s pushing to get them going again. Fortunately my friend Ada Milenkovic Brown tackled the collaborative agreement. I’ve tried to contribute too.

•Face to face helps. We started out communicating entirely on Discord or occasionally through FB messages. A few months back we switched to monthly Zoom meetings. Being able to talk in real time made a huge difference to our ability to assign (or volunteer for) tasks and plan what to do next.

•Don’t insist on having it your way. I suggested a cover artist; we’re going with someone else. That’s cool.

I’m not sure there are many people out there who need that advice (this is not a common way of putting anthologies together). But here it is anyway. For illustration, here’s some chalk art TYG and I encountered on a neighborhood sidewalk.

#SFWApro.