Writing in Community: Badass Sisterhood Anthology

As many of you know, I am writing a book for new engineers and entrepreneurs that roughly follows the syllabus of the Computer Science Capstone course I teach at UW-Madison. That book is not published yet. However, as of November, I am technically a published author! I wrote a story for the Badass Sisterhood Anthology with a group of lovely women I met in an online writing community.

Writing in Community

Writing every day and making progress towards your goals is a lonely endeavor. I’ve found that I need someone to hold me accountable for my side projects, otherwise I get distracted. Writing is no different. In October 2021, I was lucky enough to run across an Akimbo workshop called Writing in Community. Nearly 400 of us from across the globe made a commitment to write every day. In fact, the original goal was fairly audacious — to self-publish a book in six months. Some of us did that. How? We used a shared platform and wrote a part of our book every, single day. Fifteen minutes of writing a day, little-by-little, our books took shape. Every day we read each other’s work and commented. We shared tidbits of encouragement, helpful feedback, and questions. Our writing got better (and done!) together.

Through this community, I found some amazing people. First, it was other authors in my time zone. Then, it was other authors writing business or technical books. Later is was kindred spirits. The Badass Sisterhood Anthology grew out of all of those connections.

The Badass Sisterhood Anthology

Our goal in writing the anthology was to learn a new self-publishing platform called Blurb. We’d put something together, run through the publishing process, and be more knowledgable for it. Along the way, we got to know each other.

I am truly proud of the book that came out of this process! When I finally got my hands on a copy and read it cover-to-cover, I got so much out of the stories that the sisterhood had written. There was a story about being injured before the Boston marathon, which spoke loudly to me as I was recovering from my own running injuries. There was a real life ghost story that made me rethink my belief in fantastical beings. We wrote poems, we wrote about caregiving, and we wrote from the heart. The story I wrote was a bit cathartic for me. It was about the pivotal moment that I realized I probably needed a divorce. It’s a great little book and I am so pleased to have published it with these ladies.

Sisterhood Authors

A big thank you goes out to Susan Walter and Laurie Reidman who created the group, edited the book and laid it out for publishing. They did the incredibly hard work that made this happen. My fellow authors were:

• Jackie Alcalde Marr
• Katherine Cartwright
• Wendy Coad
• Maggie Croushore
• Amber Field (me!)
• Micki Jean LaVres
• Ellen Newman
• Laurie Riedman
• Cecilia Roddy
• Terri Tomoff
• Susan Walter

These are some incredibly talented ladies. We have a travel blogger, coach, speakers, marketers, etc so I encourage you to check out some of their websites.

Want a Copy?

We didn’t write the book to make money. We wrote it to learn, and learn we did. Laurie and Susan found out that Blurb’s formatting capabilities were not user-friendly. When we got done publishing, we found out it wasn’t easily compatible with Amazon or other booksellers. All great things to know! We’re selling copies on Blurb right now at cost. You can pick one up here. If you do, I hope you enjoy it as much as we enjoyed making it!