In April of 2019, my friends and I from the WFGC released the Hotel Blog-Hop Anthology. As a spearhead of that project, I learned several lessons about people, leading, and what goes into creating a project. This is Part I of What I Learned. Have a laugh at my expense and, just maybe, avoid some of our mistakes.

What is the WFGC Hotel Project?

The WFGC Hotel Project is a blog-hop/ anthology of stories which was unleashed upon the world on April 10, 2019. The story however, begins in February. As you might expect, the theme of the project is a hotel. What is WFGC you ask? It stands for Write Fight Gif Club, a group of writers on Twitter who support each other. Often, we help with writing questions. Sometimes, if you prefer, we also provide procrastination.

If you haven’t read the anthology yet, links to all the stories are on the WFGC website.

My Role

I sparked the idea of the project by having a short story that I didn’t know what to do with. When I asked WFGC members what I should do, talk of publishing a group anthology started heating up. The reality of the idea set in eventually, but many (including myself) were already excited. We decided to do a free blog-hop instead of publishing a paid anthology that would require contracts, rights, the whole nine yards.

I became the de facto “leader” of the project. I was to be the one to keep these forty or so interested writers invested in the project, follow through on commitments, and ensure the project came to fruition. Which it did, with a grand total of 18 stories!

I did not do it alone.

I did not do it alone. Fellow WFGC’rs Rhiannon Amberfyre and L.C. Marblewood handled damn near all of the registries and people tracking required for this project. Brian C. E. Buhl developed the timetable which we worked, almost exclusively, off of. Chris Henderson Bauer actioned our very short (not her fault) marketing campaign. What did I do? I answered questions, developed the Blog-Hop logo, wrote the project’s Survival Guide (with live updates as they happened), and created the projects website which is, essentially, a blog.

So what did I learn from this role?

People will lose the fervor of the initial idea and leave the project.

If you’re doing this for the first time, you have no idea what you’re doing.

Eventually, you must solidify ideas the group can work with, and this often includes compromise from your original vision.

 

Compromise

My initial idea for the project was simple: every story takes place in the same hotel, but within each room, absolutely anything can happen. It was even going to have the tagline: Every room tells a story. Why could absolutely anything happen? Because we wanted our authors to have room to write in any genre, and allow anything to happen, so long as the hotel as a whole wasn’t destroyed in the process.

Ultimately, it was decided that this vision was too limiting. Many people wanted to be able to exit the room and still have events happen. Several wished to have their characters meet with other author’s characters to create a sense of unity. Some people wanted to write stories outside of a singular hotel. All good ideas, and my initial vision did not support them.

We managed to make all of things possible, though it did steer my own story in a specific direction…the hotel needed to be a quantum, metaphysical space, and my story allowed that to happen…at least canonically.

This is what I learned about compromise:

The initial idea is not always best for the group.

I need to better my ability at persuasion.

Most times, it’s better to say yes, than no.

 

Everyone Needs to Understand What’s What. What?

The first three days after deciding we were actually going to do this were hectic. No, that’s an understatement. It was chaos. Forty people were throwing out ideas, nobody wanted to say no to anybody, and there was no plan of action. Attempting to answer those questions without a roadmap was pointless, but I was trying anyway (along with Rhi and L.C.).

We knew we didn’t want to limit genres pretty much from the get-go, but nobody understood how that was going to work if we kept to a single hotel. Many questions revolved around due dates, and on that we had absolutely no clue until we were almost a week out. We lost several people during this time. Not that I blame them. People are busy, have lives. If you cannot give them a simple piece of information such as “when do you expect me to get this to you,” they are not going to commit.

Rhiannon and L.C. came up with the idea of allowing people to “register into the hotel,” by assigning them a room number within our theoretical hotel. This worked wonders. People knew they were being kept track of, and would receive information as it came about.

I then created the Hotel Project Survival Guide, which put all known information in one place. I put that on Google Drive and allowed all interested parties to download it. It occurred to me soon after that the Guide would need to be updated regularly, and that is when I decided to create a website for the project. I’d never created a private one before, but thankfully, the process did not prove all that difficult.

This is what I learned about organization:

People need a clear plan of action, and it will be easier on everybody if that plan is already established.

When people do not have an actionable timetable, they will not commit b/c real life is hectic already and they don’t need to add stress to their life.

Simple systems which insure people will be informed and up to date create a sense of safety and take much of a project’s stress off your people.

This is Part I of What I Learned from the WFGC Hotel Project. Part II is also available. Thanks for reading!

 

Hi! I’m James Neal, dark fantasy author with a novel on Amazon.

Granted, toilet paper is on there too…

 

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