Writing Group Anthology

My local writing group is publishing its second anthology this month, The Wreck of the U913 and Other Dark Tales.

For the last several years, we have been meeting in person once a month, for a leisurely Saturday breakfast,

and exchange numerous e-mails. We have a core group of four members, with a few other people who have drifted through from time to time.

Last summer, we decided to venture into self-publishing with a Halloween-themed anthology, Swamp Mansion and Other Dark Tales, which is available on Amazon for 99 cents. Our goal was not to make a great deal of money (thank goodness—although we’ve pretty much covered expenses, we certainly aren’t making much!) but we loved doing it, and seeing our work “out there” was well worth the effort.

For this year, we debated producing a Christmas anthology, but decided instead to have a paranormal theme. Each of us wrote a story for it—although one ambitious member wrote two—and we presented them to one another at our monthly breakfast.

We discovered we had two werewolf stories. Both of them, interestingly enough, involving geriatric werewolves. One of them was mine. We could ask the other two to write werewolf stories go with an entire werewolf-themed volume, or one of us could write another story to replace one of the werewolf ones.

The non-werewolf stories were really good. One of them, the title story, concerned an underwater treasure-hunting team attempting to retrieve a suspected gold shipment in the wreck of a German submarine from WWII. That involved a lot of detailed research.

Another hit the classic themes of good deeds rewarded and bullies defeated.

We decided to shelve one of the werewolf stories. Since I had already started on another story that would

be appropriate, I finished that one up. In the aftermath of a riot in an aging prison, suspected participants are housed in segregation cells to await disciplinary hearings. Old solitary confinement cells in the cellar, which haven’t been used for decades, are re-opened. One of them may be a portal to hell.

Everyone participates in all stages of editing. While each author has control over his or her own story, we’ve never hit a place where anyone was in such disagreement that we didn’t all approve it.

When we were all happy with the stories, we moved on to other, practical matters. One of our members knows how to upload books onto Amazon, but none of us are comfortable with cover design or formatting, so we hired people to do that for us, as we did for the previous anthology.

The Wreck of U 913 and Other Dark Tales will be available on Amazon soon for 99 cents. Once again, we don’t expect to make much money off this. But we are having a great time. Look for a third one next fall!

Do you belong to a writing or reading group? Have you ever considered publishing an anthology of your works?