First off, to anyone who's getting a little annoyed at all the Roses blogs, I understand. We are, as a group, collectively VERY excited about the project we've been working on, and the effort for some has been tremendous. So, bear with us for a couple more days, please, and I promise, you won't regret it.

So far in people's blogs you've seen mention of the story's premise, or of our efforts to write our tales, or thank-yous to the other authors on the projects FOR those efforts. However, I haven't seen much mention, yet, of exactly what this project has entailed for so many of us in terms of stretching our boundaries as writers.

And, trust me, it has.

When I first came up with the idea for the Dozen Roses project and started recruiting authors I had a handful of loose concepts for stories and characters already in my head that I used as sort of prototypical examples of what we should be aiming for when I was describing things to the interested authors who responded. I went in expecting to get, three, maybe four other authors, and to have to write multiple Rose stories myself, do the interstitials, and most likely do all the formatting. However, I was blessed to get more interest shown than I'd anticipated, with at one point our author list being large enough we were only one Rose short of having a one-story-per-author collection! While a few people, expectedly, dropped out before completion of the project -- and no hard feelings there -- we still ended up with a lot more participation than I'd feared.

This quickly proved to be a good thing, since it became obvious that I wouldn't be dedicating as much time to the project myself as I'd hoped. In the end rather than writing three or more Rose stories myself, I wrote one, and instead of doing interstitial elements and formatting other authors 'Rose' to the occasion and took those challenges on. In the end I may have had the initial idea... but my fingerprints on the final project are far less evident than, I think, most people would expect.

I consider this a good... no, a GREAT thing. Most of the other authors did two stories each, and we have all the other work they've put in on top of that, from feedback to one another on the state of our stories, input about or from other characters' reactions, and more.

On top of all that, quite a few f us have used this project as a chance to experiment with characters or storytelling styles outside our normal works, something that I hope all of you, as readers, will see and enjoy. Many were the PMs, either between individual authors or in the something like 1K group PM messages, where we would be running ideas by each other or re-confirming that our stories were coming along okay, because so many of us WERE trying to write characters who reflected different life paths, different personalities and experiences, than anything else we as individuals had tried writing before.

My own Rose is, I feel, a fair example of this. I went in expecting to write multiple Rose stories, and so for my first character decided I'd see about writing someone a bit off kilter. What I ended up writing, instead, is a VERY different take, I feel, on the concept of an LGBT character, one whose struggles are anything but typical. It's not grimdark like some of my work, nor is it fluffy-cheesy-happy like MOST of my work. Instead, it's something different: a struggle to write, but a worthwhile exploration of a character I don't think I could ever do in any other context.

One Dozen Roses is gonna have a LOT to offer people when it comes out. It isn't a single narrative, or genre, really: it's, instead, a sort of sampler of a variety of (admittedly MtF focused) transfic, based in reality as much as possible, that shows both many different authors and many different lives at work.

I hope you, as readers, enjoy it as much as we, as authors, have enjoyed working on it.

Melanie E.