Putting an anthology together: Part 3. Liberation

I wish I'd come up with a snappier title for this series of posts.

This week:
I've added 3 stories to the collection. One is a new piece, which has just come together in the last 7 days. It has a very long title. It's called Tips For Customer Service Workers Who Work With A Till Which Sometimes Goes Slow. And it really is a series of tips about how to deal with customers when they're having to wait a bit longer than they expected. It's completely autobiographical. We are a nation of queue obsessives and working in customer service I've observed some shocking queue-related behaviour. It's a tongue-in-cheek guide to coping with a waiting customer when you also have a line of other waiting customers.

The most exciting thing about putting an anthology together is the liberation in what I can include. Tips for... wouldn't be the kind of piece I'd send to a competition, and I've realised this week that these past few years I've been focused on writing single stories for competitions which need to stand up alongside hundreds (or more) of others, and that makes you write in certain way. The idea of a group of stories alongside each other working as a whole has much more room in it, and yes, they still need to stand up alongside the other collections that are submitted, but, well - I guess it's that word 'liberating' again, it's feels like it's possible to really be yourself in a collection, or that's what I'm feeling at the moment anyway.

The other 2 stories that have been added were already written - one was published a few years ago, the other is unpublished but needed an edit. I didn't think I'd be including the already published one, but when I read over it this week it was better than I remembered and I thought it could earn a place in there.

So - my little white cards have been added to (25 stories now) and re-arranged a little and look like this:

  And, excitingly, the word count has risen from 20,962 to:

Salt have just tweeted a reminder for the deadline with the number of days to go. I haven't been thinking in terms of days at all. It's 17. I will not think of it in terms of days again. Right now it's somewhere between 2 and 3 weeks - that feels better.