The Mayhem Gang

I started TOASTING FEAR, my work in progress, in May. Setting a goal of querying agents by September was unrealistic. I knew that at the time and set that goal by design because of self-knowledge. I procrastinate. I’m a pressure writer. With a deadline, I produce. Swearing to sit down, think out my plot and write, I do, but what I write ends up as a new short story, a new blog, or ideas for new novels and shorts. An aspect of procrastination, self-sabotage, isn’t all bad. It’s an effective way to avoid a goal, like setting a date for going on a diet and then eating twice as much before that date. Taking the opportunity to try out delicious recipes, creating culinary masterpieces, the dieter achieves different goals while avoiding the pain of losing weight.

By July, I hadn’t written a new word, continuing to edit and caress the chapters that I’d already written. When Betsy Bitner, the critique coordinator for the Guppies, (The Great Unpublished, which is actually a misnomer because many Guppies are published) a subchapter of Sisters in Crime, solicited for new novel critique members, I grasped the opportunity. Having critique partners to keep me on a writing schedule would force me to produce. Has it worked? Yes.

For the group to work, all members had to be at the same stage of creation. One member dropped immediately because she thought her manuscript was polished, but later rejoined the group anyway. The rest of us admitted to not having our first drafts completed. We decided on a week interval in which to complete our reviews of approximately twenty pages of manuscript. This schedule allowed three weeks for those of us not finished our manuscripts to produce at least twenty pages and complete three reviews. I thought this was a reasonable schedule.

We are now up to the start of submission five, or about page 100, and already changes have occurred. The member who thought her manuscript polished has re-dropped out of the group. Of the remaining three, it is clear that one of us has a complete manuscript. We remaining two are scrambling to produce because we now have two weeks to complete twenty pages of script and two reviews. Writing sometimes flows more easily than at other times. The schedule will be daunting. I think another factor affecting our production is that we have started those chapters that are hardest in a mystery to write; the investigation.

This week we took a week off, enabling some of us to catch up. This change has initiated in two worthwhile results. Taking the week off has resulted in a more relaxed, realistic and forgiving attitude. Recognizing that writers are human beings in need of slack time may make us better critique partners. Writers aren’t machines and things come up that prevent us from keeping to the straight and narrow: jobs, attending conferences, sickness, etc. But now that I have no more previously written chapters for review, as I did in August and September when I was ahead of the cycle, I have to produce, and I am. It is what I envisioned when joining The Mayhem Gang.

Many writers are now participating in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo-or-NaNo for short). I think for the very same reason that I joined a critique group: to provide motivation to write. Do you procrastinate? Do you need a critique group or NaNo to produce?