My Sisters in Crime

Guppy Steering Committee at Malice 2014

This month is September Sisters in Crime SinC-Up for bloggers. The National Sisters in Crime (SinC) suggested a number of topics and that each blog link to another SinC member’s blog. My greatest writing challenge has been about making connections; I am not a natural networker in a time and age where networking is crucial.

The blog title, My Sisters in Crime, relates to SinC chapters to which I belong and to their members, my sisters in crime. (Feminine includes the masculine, plural the singular.)

I split my time between our home in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan and southern location (first Cincinnati area, now the Savannah area). There are no local writers’ groups in the U.P., and I wanted a support community during the time I spent there.

In 2007 a friend of a friend suggested the National Sisters in Crime and I soon discovered an online chapter, the Guppies.

The Guppies

The strongest links I have forged in the mystery writing community are because of the Guppies, an online chapter of SinC. Guppies stands for “The Great Unpublished,” which described the group in its early days. We have many published authors now, but the name sticks. When I joined, the chapter had around 300 members. Sometime this month we will surpass the 600-member threshold.

For a short while after joining, I lurked and read. It is my tendency to observe and learn. But I know that the more effort you put into an organization, the more you get out. I dipped my toe into the Guppy pond of opportunities and joined a critique group that happened to contain the then President (Michelle Martin) and the then Treasurer and future President, Kaye George. And since I was interested in getting a literary agent, I joined my first subgroup, AgentQuest. (I now belong to several subgroups.)

In 2009, The Guppy Steering Committee decided to assemble an anthology to give our members an opportunity to experience in a friendly environment the professional side of writing: meeting deadlines, judging stories, having a professional editor, getting a publisher, developing publicity. Partway into the process the creative types decided they needed someone to manage the moving pieces, and I volunteered for the role. (I seem to recall I thought my management experiences would help. It turned out that herding family cats was a more useful skill, but I digress.)

That, in turn, led to Kaye George asking me to join the steering committee as the WebGuppy, responsible for managing the website. I served in that capacity for more than three years before recently handing over the reins.

Through those volunteer positions I met and got to know more and more Guppies. At first, everything was online, but as I attended writers’ conferences, I started to put names to faces and the best part of the conventions became the continued conversations.

Fellow Guppies have provided me other opportunities. This Writers Who Kill Blog was the inspiration of E. B. Davis (who currently serves the Guppies by setting up the wonderful online classes we sponsor). Most of the current members of Writers Who Kill are Guppies (and Paula Gail Benson is also a steering committee member).

Speaking of Paula, she was responsible for getting me invited to the South Carolina Book Festival last year and Murder in the Magic City (and Murder on the Menu) earlier this year.

Over the years I have taken excellent Guppy courses on a variety of topics, including character arcs, publicity, writing a synopsis, characterization, plot structure, incorporating senses into scenes and many more. The semi-monthly newsletter, First Draft, alone is worth the $12 annual dues for the Guppies.

And Guppies have stretched me in other positive ways. At this year’s Malice Domestic Conference I joined with my sister Guppies and wore my pink boa to the Sisters in Crime breakfast. And because of a fellow Guppy’s suggestion (thank you Hank Phillippi Ryan) I wore a wonderful wolf’s hat to an “Extreme Weather Mysteries” panel (KM Rockwood was on that panel as well as another fellow Guppy, Annette Dashofy.) In January 2015 I’ll be teaching a course on Self-Editing/Revision for the Kiss of Death Chapter of the Romance Writers of America—because a fellow Guppy, Donnell Bell, thought of me.

Low Country Sisters in Crime

Late last year, another Guppy, Maggie Toussaint, notified me that she was joining with some other SinC members to form a Lowcountry chapter. Would I be interested? I missed the face-to-face get-togethers I had enjoyed with the Cincinnati Writers Project and jumped on the opportunity. Tina Whittle was the driving force for the group. I am now one of the founding members of our nascent chapter – and Membership Vice President. (Give a little, receive a lot).

I’ll end this love letter to my writing sisters, by saying thank you to those I have named and to the hundreds of others not named but who have helped me personally and professionally. It wouldn’t have happened without the Sisters in Crime and it wouldn’t have happened without My Sisters in Crime.

~ Jim

Links to other blogs.

I am sharing three, all of which are joint efforts and include Guppies and other SinC members.

Get Lost in a Story: http://getlostinastory.blogspot.com/

Jungle Red Writers: http://www.jungleredwriters.com/

Mysteristas: http://mysteristas.wordpress.com/

Spending Reading Time with the Unpublished

I love knowing other writers for many reasons—reasons I’m sure most anyone reading this shares.

Camaraderie. A sense of understanding. Tips and tricks. Book recommendations.

But, for me, one of the best things about getting to know other writers is getting a chance to read their work.

I find this to be something very unique and fun because I know the brain from which this great story I’m enjoying came. Sometimes, what’s in the pages happens to be a surprise. Other times, I can sit there and go, “That sounds just like so-and-so.” Either way, it’s delicious fun—no matter if the book is published or not.

For this reason, I spend a lot of time reading books that aren’t truly “books” but manuscripts.

I don’t really care if this affects my Goodreads numbers or if I can’t plow through a hot new book the second it comes out. I only have so much reading time and if it goes to something that’s really a manuscript and not a book, who cares? Because, besides the fact that I enjoy it and that I know writer friends find it helpful, there’s another benefit of this practice: It allows me to read all sorts of books without breaking a sweat.

Just in the past few months, I’ve read a time-travel sci-fi, a turn-of-the-century historical, a YA fantasy, a small-town mystery, a literary thriller, a war time historical, a contemporary mystery, and my Kindle is loaded with much, much more. This doesn’t include books I’ve copy edited through the publisher I work for or any of my freelance. And you know what? It’s been fabulous.

Sure, sometimes I like to break it up and read a published book now and again—fiction or non-fiction, it doesn’t matter. And sometimes I feel like I might say yes too often to reading books I don’t have the time to get to for another month or so. (Sorry to all the writers out there waiting on me currently.)

But I’m glad I can do this. I love that I can not only give other writers feedback but that I can also grow as a writer simply by reading someone else’s turn of a phrase, or characterization or plotting.

In fact, I dread the day when I’m going to have to be pickier about what I say I’ll read.

I know it’s coming, and probably has been for a while. I know that when I really get into the revision stage of my own projects (as I am now), that I’ll need to save my precious reading time for my own words. And that there might come a day when my editing schedule is so full, I won’t be able to “just read” a manuscript for fun as easily. But I’m relishing in the chance to read as many unpublished writers as I can while I can.

Do you read other writers’ manuscripts on a regular basis? How do you think the practice affects your own writing or writing process (or doesn’t if you don’t do it)?