The ABC Project

Hello, good evening and remain indoors.

Do you a) enjoy writing stories, b) want an incentive to write stories, and c) want to talk about literally anything besides the damn virus?

I want to organise a not-for-profit short story writing project, working title: The ABC Project (Anything But Coronavirus).

Basically what it says on the tin: anyone who wants to would contribute a short story about any topic they like, barring coronavirus (and adjacent topics, but I'll go into that a bit more later.)

So effectively it's for anyone who wants a distraction from it all and a motivation to write something at the same time. (Also, from a purely selfish perspective, if I can pull this off it might look really good on my CV.)

I'd like to eventually put together a volume for digital publication, and am currently exploring avenues for E-publishing. I'll be writing a followup post when the details are a bit more set in stone, and will also be going into details regarding word count limits, submission deadlines, and so on. (For the record, we'd probably be looking at something like a 2- or 3-month deadline.)

Once I receive a submission, I'll fix obvious typos and adjust the formatting if necessary, but won't make any other changes unless requested by the author. (I have a bit of experience with freelance copy-editing, so please let me know if you'd be interested in more in-depth editing or feedback.) If I find any content that's confusing or ambiguous (e.g. continuity errors, something that may or may not be a typo, etc.) I'll query it with the author but won't make any changes without their permission. It's up to my discretion which submissions are ultimately included, but submissions on any topic (barring the ones mentioned below) are welcome.

Rules and Guidelines (so far):

Prohibited topics are as follows:

• Coronavirus
• Pandemics 
• Quarantine or enforced isolation
• Social distancing
• Apocalypse (because of the potential overlapping themes; I'm well aware that this is not actually the apocalypse) 

A couple of other notes:

• No hate speech. 
• No erotica. I appreciate that this is a hazily-defined topic at times - the stories would be aimed at an audience of adults and young adults, so I'm open to sex as a topic as part of a wider narrative. But it shouldn't be the primary topic, and stories shouldn't be specifically geared towards turning readers on. 
• More of a suggested guideline this one, but: In my head, one purpose of this project is to give people some fun escapism in a deeply stressful and uncertain time. As such, I'd somewhat advise against anything too dark and despair-filled. Naturally, this is open to interpretation and personal taste is personal taste, so it doesn't specifically prohibit anything, but this probably isn't the right platform for your dystopia fiction, for example. 

There will most likely be some additional guidelines mentioned in followup posts, but these are the basic primary ones. I'm not going to drastically change the rules or the fundamental basics of the project, we'd just be talking about details I haven't fully established in my head yet. 

Anyone who is interested in contributing, please send me an email at josie.anybutcovidproject@gmail.com.

Let’s have some fun writing about Literally Anything Else!