Time Management Tuesday: Organic Writers Have To Accept That We Use Time Differently

Yesterday I finished participating in what I'm calling May Days in October. I'm part of a Facebook group that uses the month of May as a set-aside time to work on something special. And now we do it again in October.

My hope was to at least finish a couple of chapters in the project called 143 Canterbury Road and blueprint several more. Maybe even get all the way to the end. I did satisfactory revisions of two chapters, blueprinted three more, and then realized that I needed to develop four characters a lot more, which would then generate more material about them. That new material would then need to be threaded into the work I'd already done. 

So much for my May Days in October plan.

Why Having To Stop Or Even Begin Again Isn't A Bad Use Of Time

A lot of writing books advise writing to the end of a draft before revising. I don't know if I've ever done that, and I definitely don't try now. 

Being an organic (pantser) writer, I can't separate plot from the whole story and create that by itself. I have to work with the whole story organism, using character, voice, point of view, and even setting to generate ideas and plot. The best I can hope for is to stay a few chapters ahead of myself with what I'm going to be writing and have some general feel for the whole story. I can't just work to the end of a draft, because after a certain point, there's nothing for me to work with. There is no end. Or there might be an end, but a giant gap before getting to it. 

Stopping to rework characters or give someone a voice often generates all kinds of new material and plot points. I may have to do multiple do overs, but if you look at my hard drive, you'll see that each new version is usually longer than the last. That's because I got more to work with each time I stopped.

So I'm not disappointed about what I didn't do last month. I'm excited about what I'm going to be able to do because of what happened last month. 

You Have To Be Able To Remain Unattached To Work Like This

In order to work like this with any degree of equanimity, you cannot be terribly attached to finishing a certain number of chapters in a certain amount of time or to maintaining any part of a story the way you originally saw it. You have to be able to ride the wave. 

Time Management Tuesday: Using Blueprinting To Get Ready For National Novel Writing Month

Right now I am in the midst of May Days in October, one of the two times a year I get together with some other writers on Facebook and set aside some time to work on something specific. You might call it binge writing. 

One of the things I'm doing this time around is using the blueprinting method I learned about from Wendy Maas at a NESCBWI conference workshop in 2016. What it does is help generate material. I don't use this anywhere near enough. If I did, this particular never-ending project I've been working on for three years might be in my rearview mirror. I'm finding it very helpful right now. In addition to revising two chapters during the last ten days, I've blueprinted two new ones. I might stick to the blueprinting and get the rest of this book worked out this month.

If You're Doing NaNoWriMo You Might Want To Try Blueprinting

National Novel Writing Month is just a couple of weeks away. Writing a 50,000 word manuscript in one month is a lot easier if you know what you're going to write. Blueprinting can help you with that. 

As part of my Original Content 20th anniversary observance and to offer a helping hand for anyone prepping for NaNoWriMo I am republishing a blog post on blueprinting, which includes a link to an article Wendy Maas wrote on the subject.

  

Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Time Management Tuesday: There's Always Time For Blueprinting

Or almost. It's definitely something you can do when you don't have time to do much.

I sometimes lump blueprinting in with outlining. It's different, though, in that it's a method of generating material for new writing, while outlining is more about organizing material you already have.

The Basic Blueprinting Method

As described by Wendy Maas in a workshop I attended in 2016, blueprinting involves coming up with eighteen events that could happen in your book, which become your chapters. Then for each chapter, come up with ten things that could happen in it. For each of those ten things, use who, what, when, where, why questions to elaborate upon them.

There's more to it than that. Take her workshop. Or read her article on the subject.

How It's Been Working For Me

I've used this quite a bit for an adult book I'm working on. I don't worry a lot (or at all) about getting the numbers right. But the system is very helpful. When it's working particularly well, I can practically drop my blueprint notes right into paragraphs.

Why Can Blueprinting Help During A Time Crunch...Like December?

Blueprinting can help when you don't have a lot of time because you can do it in bits and pieces. You can work on coming up with a few things that could happen in a chapter at any time, wherever you are. In the car during a twelve hour road trip, for instance.  You can answer who, what, when, where, why questions about the items you came up with in odd moments. Make some notes on your phone, tablet, or any scrap of paper nearby. If you can grab ten or fifteen minutes, pull the notes together.

When you can get back to regular work time, you'll have at least a part of a blueprint to use. You can get back to producing content a lot faster.

Also, just tinkering with your blueprint whenever you can will help keep your head in the game, because you won't have gone days or weeks without even thinking about it.

Time Management Tuesday: I Made A Mistake With This Year's May Days

 Last year I described May Days as "that month of the year when I get together with some Facebook friends to set aside a time, in this case the month of May, to work on something special."  Notice I said some thing.

At the beginning of May this year I sat down with my bullet journal and listed seven things I wanted to do. Seven. While planning is good, that plan was not.

I did three of them, did three things I hadn't planned to do, and barely touched the chapters of a book-long project that I really wanted to work on in May. I did get to them the first few days of June, which sounds like a Hurray!, but realized that I needed to go back and do some tweaking to make a basic change to my main character in order to proceed.

If I had only worked on just those chapters during May, I would have found that out earlier, presumably, and been further along in that project that just never seems to end.

Now I did get some short-form work done and published last month, but a set-aside time like May Days can mean some intense work on something special and I missed that opportunity by trying to do too much. 

I guess we can say not all is lost, because this experience should tie-in with the book we're going to be reading this summer. 

But that begins next week.

Time Management Tuesday: Living Chaotically

I just finished up another May Days, that month of the year when I get together with some Facebook friends to set aside a time, in this case the month of May, to work on something special. For some people it's finishing a draft, for others it's editing, or getting started on something new. Our leader checks in once a week with encouragement. There's a lot less enthusiasm at the end of the month than there is at the beginning, but, nonetheless, a good-ish time is had by all.

I Love Set-Aside Times

I use the term set-aside time for blocks of time set aside for a special project. You see them a lot in writing. National Novel Writing Month is a famous one. Last November I wrote flash for a month. Last summer I wrote it for six weeks while taking a flash writing workshop. I've been doing May Days for years, and my May group gets together in October to do it again.

Set-Aside Times have a couple of benefits.

• Concentrating on one thing helps you to slow down. You're not frantically juggling multiple tasks and can thus be more productive with one of them. Working harder on just one thing is a relief.
• Working on one thing for a relatively short time helps us to manage chaos. At least that's what I speculated last year, and last month it actually worked for me.
  

 

My Plan For May Days

For this year's May Days my goal was to get through first drafts of 3 chapters, which I thought might get me to an important turning point in the story. Recently I had only been doing 2 chapters a month, so this would be a push. I wasn't thinking in terms of writing every day or of writing a certain number of words. I was thinking in terms getting to a certain point.

Living Chaotically

As so often happens for me, I started May Days unable to work for the first four or five days of the month to tend to family. I can't even remember how long I had to put off starting, but it was a significant chunk of time. 

 

I was experiencing my old friend, chaos. I took a breath, didn't give in to the what-the-hell effect, began again, and leaned on whatever other tricks I'd learned for dealing with chaos.

Then I learned another one, which I'm calling Living Chaotically. 

Remember, I was only thinking about getting to a certain point in my manuscript. The only way to get there, I decided, was to give in to the chaos and give up my weekends. If I couldn't get to the end of a chapter or some other good stopping place by Friday, then I would have to give up the order I've established in my life--no working on weekends--and get to those points by working then. Essentially, I was adding more chaos.

But only for the month of May. I thought I could live with this kind of chaos for one month. And I could.

What Did I Get For Living Chaotically?

I didn't actually get to the point I wanted to get to, because I added at least one more chapter. And then I was noticing that the point I wanted to get to was coming too late in the story. And then I realized I needed to start another draft. 

Since I am a big believer in not pushing through to the end of a first draft when you know something's wrong, that was exciting rather than despair-making. Beginning again, in my experience, always leads to moving forward. 

So I was very happy with my May Days. I got some significant work done, but more importantly, I found a method I plan to use again to deal with and become comfortable with chaos.

Time Management Tuesday: Managing Chaos With Set-Aside Time

Back in 2012 I did my first writing project with my May Days Facebook group. I started calling setting aside big blocks of time like this for particular writing activities...ah...set- aside time. I've written about it a few times here over the years. In fact, just this past August I wrote about this issue in relation to an article by Anne Marie O'Connor in which she referred to set-aside times as "concentrated blocks of time." I was hopeful organizing time in that way could help writers slow down and become more productive.

Well, my group gets together every October, too, so I have started a new set-aside period for working on one of my goals for this year, the "YA thriller that could become an adult thriller." Since I'm now thinking in terms of chaos, I'm hoping set-asides will be useful for that, too. 

Why Set-Aside Times Could Slow You Down

To quote me: "Sometimes you have to juggle multiple projects--editing one thing while submitting another or marketing still something else. But finding blocks of time you can dedicate to just one thing slows you down, because you're not racing to work on multiple tasks. And that can increase productivity, because you can see some work getting done."

Why Set-Aside Times Could Manage Chaos

Organizing time like this could also help with managing the chaos of our lives long enough to do something. Mainly because we're only trying to do the something for a specific, and relatively short, period of time. Looking forward to our future, which we, of course, expect to go on forever, it's hard to get a handle on controlling things, because will power and self-discipline are finite. And time management is situational. We can't foresee what situations are going to arise over the next year or multiple years that will have an impact on how we are able to spend our time. Did you see the 2020 Pandemic coming? I rest my case.

But shorter periods of time are much easier to deal with chaos-wise. We can make a good guess about what's going to happen in the next month and plan for it. We have a good chance of extending our will power that long. Or maybe we can do it for a week? Or a long weekend? 

Can Set-Asides Counteract Chaos?

I've actually signed up for a 5-day mindfulness event this week. Because:

• Yeah. I am chaos. What could possibly go wrong with doing two set-aside activities at once? What? You say two simultaneous set-asides contradicts the whole issue of dedicating your time and energy to one thing? Won't that cause chaos? Those of us who are chaos just grab for the gusto.
• The mindfulness event is short. It's 5 days. I'm not planning some big mindfulness activity for the rest of my life. Talk about looking for trouble.
  

So my hope is that the shortness of this new event will counteract my running toward chaos with arms wide open.

Because when struggling with chaos, my thought is less is always going to be more.

Time Management Tuesday: May Has Thirty-one Days

Remember The What-the-Hell Effect?

It's two o'clock in the afternoon. I haven't done any writing. What-the-hell, the day is shot. I might as well quit until tomorrow. Yeah, you've heard about this before.

The What-the-Hell Effect relates to self-discipline and self-discipline, or lack thereof, has a big impact on managing time. Dealing with the What-the-Hell Effect involves being mindful and always keeping in mind that there's no reason to quit until tomorrow when you have a couple of hours of light left! Metaphorically speaking.

Time is gone. You can still do something with the time you have left.

We've Been Down The What-the-Hell Effect Road Before

I wrote about the What-the-Hell Effect seven years ago in relation to the May Days project I often take part in. And damned if I'm not going to write about it again in relation to this year's May Days.

Seven years ago, I missed chunks of my May Day work time because I was sick. This year we had a modest family health emergency that involved us hauling out of here at five the afternoon of April 30 and spending Friday May 1st helping out with some young relatives. Everything has resolved itself well. But, you know, it was the first day of this new May Day initiative, and I knew I had some other family things coming up I wanted to do and it just seemed like, well, what-the-hell? That's over.

Except that May has thirty-one days. I repeat, thirty-one. I lost two days last week, one of which was a Saturday and, let's face it, I probably wouldn't have worked then, anyway. And, yes, I may lose three to five more work days to family. Out of thirty-one.

Okay, I also have more pandemic work to do, since I need to make some more masks in odd times, and there's always vegetables to cook and freeze before they go bad, because it's going to be a while before I get more food in.

Still, May has thirty-one days.

I worked multiple hours yesterday and for maybe an hour this morning. I might be tied up Friday, but I should be able to get some hours of work in tomorrow and Thursday.

After that, there's three more weeks left to May.

The What-the-Hell Effect isn't so much about the time you've already lost, often for legitimate reasons. It's about the time you still have and could lose.

Work some of it. Any of it. That's all you've got to do.

Time Management Tuesday: The Dark Side Of Temporal Landmarks/Units Of Time

I try to do what I call a "story/essay idea a day" thing in my journal. My theory is that creativity begets creativity, and that the more ideas I come up with, the more I will come up with.

Sometimes this works better than others. Sometimes I have long dry periods. Sometimes I have ideas, but it's just so inconvenient to open up the journal on my laptop, or I'm not home, or there's some other perfectly logical and legitimate reason why I can't get these thoughts done. And then they are lost. Perhaps they are out there in the universe, and they will go to someone else, because I did not accept them. Oookaaay.

And then there is what happened last month. I was coming up with ideas, but in a major impulse control failure I decided that I would start writing them down at the beginning of May. No idea how much I lost that way.

A Powerful Date, A Powerful Temptation

We all remember what temporal landmarks are, right? "...special occasions and calendar events (e.g., a birthday, a holiday, the beginning of a new week/month), which demarcate the passage of time and create numerous “fresh start” opportunities at the beginning of new cycles?" And we also remember the significance of beginnings? How we "get excited about our plans for "new" blocks of time?" It's going to be so terrific when the beginning of the year, Easter, summer vacation, the beginning of the school year, or the first of the month come and we get a fresh start. As our old friend Kelly McGonigal tells us, we think of the future as a wonderful place where we'll accomplish great things. You combine that with an upcoming temporal landmark that's combined with the beginning of a time unit?

Well, clearly you'd need to be tougher than I am to deal with that.

What Was The Problem Here?

 

Temporal landmarks and the beginning of units of time can work for us if they initiate a new surge of work, create enthusiasm. May 1st was the beginning of a May Days writing project for me. In the weeks leading up to it, I prepared.

I didn't prepare to start the story/essay a day project on May 1st. Instead, I waited for the temporal landmark/beginning of a unit of time to arrive.

Preparing is doing something. Waiting isn't. And that's where I made my mistake.

Time Management Tuesday: A Change In Process During May Days

Another May has come and gone, and so has  May Days, what I call a set-aside time, meaning it's a unit of time I commit to working on one project. I did better with working every day then I think I've ever done before. 

In order to do that, though, I had to work around a lot of family stuff on weekends and sometimes on week days. (There is family stuff here all the time.) I was working in bits and pieces, I had to work in a motel room a couple of days, and I was frequently working at the kitchen counter while something was cooking. What I found was that I was having breakout experiences all over the place. So I started running with the bits and pieces plan.

The last few weeks instead of getting my usual life activities out of the way and then getting into my four or five hours of work time, I took a look at my manuscript first thing in the morning and then did something else. I went back to the manuscript, then went back to something else. Over and over again while I was at the "something else," I worked out problems with the manuscript or came up with new idea.

This is a first draft. I have trouble with first drafts. Generating new material is not my favorite thing to do. I'm wondering if maybe when I'm in a first draft situation this is how I should be managing my time. Maybe this should be first draft process for me.

I'm sticking with this method for the time being, hoping to get an entire rough draft done in the next couple of months.

And, yes, I know there are lots of people these days who do a rough draft in six weeks, who do an entire book in a few months. Zen tells me that desiring what others have or are able to do will only lead to unhappiness.

What Did You Do This Week, Gail? May 8 Edition

• It's been all Mummy May Days all the time this week. Getting any work done on Wednesday and Thursday was a major achievement because of family stuff. Today I finished up what I wanted to do this week and have a plan lined up for the next chapter. This addresses my first goal for the year. I've written about the value of regular work over and over again here, though I'm a big believer in doing what you can do and not beating yourself up over perceived failings. Nonetheless, I'm thinking writing every day would be a terrific habit to have. I've heard it takes six weeks to form a habit. May Days only lasts four.
• I also watched this terrific presentation on content marketing by Jane Friedman.  There are a lot of on-line conferences out there, with a lot of presenters. As with all kinds of conferences, quality varies. This was pretty amazing in terms of the quality of the information, the slides, and the presentation. Turns out that what I was doing last month for Saving the Planet & Stuff was content marketing. And I didn't know. This would have related to my sixth objective for the year, marketing STP&S, if I'd seen it before last month. Though I'm thinking this is news I can use in some way, at some point.

Time Management Tuesday: Keeping Your Head In The Game

I am using my May Days to put a lot of time into one project, something I've done the last two May Days. The same project, I'm sorry to say. But, once again during this May Days I am experiencing the value of trying to write every day on the same project. It's incredibly helpful for organic writers like myself. We have trouble isolating plot and planning out what we're going to do for an entire story. We deal with stories as a whole organism. If we have to stay away from that organism too long, it takes us a while to come back up to speed, because while we have a feel for our whole story, we aren't good on the details that are coming up. It's hard for us to pick up where we left off.

The May Days project forces us to write every day. For me, this meant spending some time at my laptop in a motel room between biking excursions this past weekend. Writing every day increases chances of having a breakout experience (at least it increases my chances), and I had one on a bike the next day. This led to taking notes on it while having lunch in a sandwich shop (my work for the day) and that led to a much easier transition back to work on Monday.


Whenever I find myself in a situation where I'm writing every day, even a tiny amount, I think, I've got to keep this up! Not because I accomplish so much (I did mention that I've been working on the same May Days project three years in a row, right?) but because it keeps my head in the game.

That is a huge plus for time management.

Time Management Tuesday: Yes, Yes. Another May Days Project Is Coming Up

My May Days Facebook group is powering up again. You remember May Days? I've been talking about it here since 2012. Part of what I like about taking part in this event, as I've said before, is that it gives me an opportunity to indulge in obsession. Sort of the way I did this past month with the Annotated Saving the Planet & Stuff. I think of these blocks of time as set-aside time to work on specific projects. Like the An--you know.

I've written here before about the significance of the beginnings and endings of units of time. I'm really feeling that significance right now. I've been worn out from this STP&S promo month for a while. How much have I been looking forward to the end of this project? A little more than a week ago, I thought the month ended this past weekend, because it was the first weekend I didn't have any family commitments. Commitments done, month done, right? Imagine my disappointment when I realized I had another four days to go.

So while I'm anxious for this April set-aside time to end, I'm also looking forward to the beginning of the next set-aside time, May Days. As far as new work is concerned, this month I've mainly done revising. I'd really like to move forward. That's my plan for May Days.

What I want to move forward with is the mummy book that I worked on last May. And the May before.  I'm not foolish enough to think I can finish it next month. (Though I did meet a writer this weekend who can do a rough draft in six weeks, and I already have five chapters.) But it would be terrific to get it done by fall. Making some serious progress in the next few weeks would go a long way toward getting there.

Note that with both these monthly projects, the Annotated Saving the Planet & Stuff Earth Day Promo and  Mummy for May Days (a name!!), involve two of my six  goals for this year.  I am staying on task!

Time Management Tuesday: What Can You Do With A Month?

This is National Novel Writing Month, which I'm not taking part in this year, though I did back in 2004 when I said...wait for it...wait for it..." I see this as an opportunity to force me to structure my time better." (I'm telling you, the time thing has always hung over my head.) However, I did just finish a month-long writing unit with the May Day folks. I didn't finish a novel during that time, though we don't try to in that group. We try to use these month long "set asides," as I sometimes call them, to generate some work or do something specific.

The Original Plan

As I'm sure you all recall, I planned to do four things:

1. Sprint at least five days a week
2. Generate two pages of material as many days of the week as possible
3. Allow the two pages of new material to include new scene planning, if need be
4. Learn to do what I'm going to call skim writing, meaning I'm going to try not to stop to get obsessive about perfecting factual bits, names, etc. I want to leave ______ or bold placeholders, which I hope will help me move ahead generating material that will provide the solutions for those blank spaces and placeholders that I can then go back and correct. I get bogged down much, much too often with those types of things for my taste.

That may have been too many objectives for a one-month writing goal, but I did pretty well with the first two, and made an effort, at least, with the third and fourth ones.

The Best Results

1. Sprinting, or doing a quick, intense writing session, has been great, and I'm hoping it is becoming part of my writing process. I've been doing a twenty minute sprint in the midst of my workout period because I've been walking outside for a half an hour after whatever else I do in the morning. The sprint comes before the walk, and walking after the sprint can often lead to breakout experiences related to the work done during the sprint. Just this morning, for example, I realized while out in the street that I needed to change the house one of my main characters lives in in order to make it do more to define him.
2. I started a new book, which I haven't done in a year or so. I'm three and a half chapters in as a result of the October set aside, and didn't get further, even though I'd started before October, because a lot of my new work involved rewriting chapters one and two.

What Next?

 I can't continue working on this project several hours a day because I'm preparing to attend a master class retreat in less than two weeks, and that involves another, completed novel that I need to bring myself back up to speed on. But part of what you gain from working intently on a writing project, as we did last month, is the involvement with the world of the book. That's particularly important for organic writers like myself who don't have a plot outline to anchor us and bring us back to that world, if we've been away. Even with an overall, big picture idea of what's going to happen, a lot of our plot evolves as we're working, as we're deeply into the project. Walk away and when you come back you'll find yourself having to make a big effort to figure out where you were going with this thing.

What I'm trying to do to prevent that is continue with those sprints. I'm doing what I call "mummy sprints" (the book was originally about a mummy; not so much now) as many days of the week as I can. No, I'm not suggesting I'm going to write a book in twenty minutes a day, though I imagine a person far more patient than I am could. What I'm hoping to do is to stay in this project mentally so that when I can get back to it, maybe at the end of this month, I can simply continue working.

And, yes, I should have finished chapter four by then.

Regarding NaNoWriMo

Speaking of NaNoWriMo, as I was in my first sentence, oddly enough, I got some ideas just this past Saturday for my 2004 NaNoWriMo project, which I've barely touched since then. I'm trying to get some notes down on that.

And Facebook Friend Kimberly Sabatini is doing NaNoWriMo this year and has shared a little news of how she's doing. I'm hoping to hear more about how she's using this time.

 

Time Management Tuesday: Another Month-long Unit

My May Days buddies like to make another month-long group binge-writing effort in the fall. This year I'm working with them during the month of October. The plan, once again, is to write two pages a day, and report how we're doing each Monday.

I have probably discussed the issue of whether or not two pages is all that difficult a daily task. It's not. The issue is that writing has become something writers do less of than in days of old. That bugaboo marketing, in all its many, many manifestations, takes up a lot of time, but so does teaching for many writers, workshop planning, public appearances, and submissions. Finding time for the real creative work involved with writing can be an effort, even if you don't have problems with staying on task. It's particularly difficult if you're trying to get started on a new, book-length project.

My plan for my own personal Octoberfest, as I'm calling this month's unit of time, is to:

• Sprint at least five days a week
• Generate two pages of material as many days of the week as possible
• Allow the two pages of new material to include new scene planning, if need be
• Learn to do what I'm going to call skim writing, meaning I'm going to try not to stop to get obsessive about perfecting factual bits, names, etc. I want to leave ______ or bold placeholders, which I hope will help me move ahead generating material that will provide the solutions for those blank spaces and placeholders that I can then go back and correct. I get bogged down much, much too often with those types of things for my taste.

And, of course, I hope to be able to wring another blog post or two from this experience.

I have already done today's two pages. Now I need to go off to do some marketing/networking types of things.

Time Management Tuesday: The May Days Set-Aside Time And The What-the-Hell Effect

Well, my May Days experience has not been all I'd hoped for.

The conference I attended at the beginning of the month didn't cut into my May Days project work time all that much, since I was home one day and worked on it during a three-hour workshop at the conference on Sunday as well. However, those five days I spent getting sicker and sicker last week were definitely not part of the plan. I did May Days work three of them, at least once with a laptop in bed, but then lost the rest of the week, any hope of squeezing some time in on the weekend, and yesterday, too. As our May Days leader pointed out yesterday at our Facebook page, we've reached the halfway point for this project.  I  think I have nearly four pages of intro and a number of pages of notes for characters and scenes. 

Back in February, I wrote here about the What-the-Hell Effect. My understanding of the phenomena suggests that guilt over willpower/discipline setbacks is the big instigator in the "What-the-Hell Effect"--individuals feel guilt and frustration, a little self-hate, maybe, over what they see as their lack of ability to stay on task and figure, What's the point? What the Hell, this initiative is shot, I might as well give in.

I'm not feeling guilty over picking up a bacterium. However, losing time for any reason is always a frustrating setback. In this case, the loss isn't just related to The May Days, but to every other work and personal task I needed to do these past six days. This May did not work out the way it was supposed to. Things are not the way they were supposed to be. Since The May Days can't be what I'd planned, should I accept that they're a lost cause?

Well, that's a pointless question for me, because I'm too obsessive to give up on a short-term project like this. I said I was going to do this for a month, and I'll do it for a month, if I have to finish it on my knees. Or in bed, as I did last week. But for those readers who want to make a more rational decision, consider this:.

I still have a half a month.

Yes, we can do some rah-rah talk here, get a little Zenny about putting last week into the past (which, you know, is where it is), but the hard fact is that giving in to the "What-the-Hell Effect" in this case means losing half a month of work. When we're talking about time management, giving in to the "What-the-Hell Effect" always means losing the time we would have worked if we had picked ourselves up off the mat after our discipline slip and kept going.

To make a long story short, I'll be working for a while on my May Days project today.

Time Management Tuesday: Another Year, Another May Days Set-Aside Time

Last year, I took part in The May Days, a Facebook group in which members encouraged each other to write two pages a day. On May 8th, 2012, I explained why writers might actually need a push to get them writing--a lot of the work writers do isn't actually writing. After I finished my month, I decided I liked what I called this set-aside time for specific projects, or binge writing.

What I liked about The May Days was the way it appealed to my own joy in obsessing on a project or topic. I don't have the endurance to obsess indefinitely, but a set-aside time--Oh, I'm there. Seriously, I once did one of those week-with-no-TV things. I made two kids do it with me. I love this stuff.

Since last May, though, I've been reading The Willpower Instinct  by Kelly McConigal. She talks about willpower (and lack thereof) spreading through groups. I'll do more on that next week  In the meantime, I will just say that there appears to be some support for group writing initiatives like The May Days helping writers stay disciplined.

Well, tomorrow is May 1st, and our group is starting another May Days project or binge. Last year I didn't even hear about this until the day before, so I had done no preparation at all. This year as part of my New Year's planning I actually had a May Days goal and objectives:

"Goal 6. Work on an outline for "mummy book" during May Days (I wasn't prepared for May Days last year. I hope to be this year.)

Objectives:

1. Finish reading Wired for Story because I think we organic writers often don't know what our story is prior to writing, which makes plotting difficult.
2. At least skim The Plot Whisperer for same reason
3. Go over old research for this project and continue with more."

I did finish Wired for Story, though I've only read a few pages of The Plot Whisperer. (This is not a comment on the quality of the book. I just haven't been able to get to it.) I didn't go over the old research I've collected over the years that I've been thinking about this book. What I did do:

1. Visit UVM's Fleming Museum, because right now a college museum figures into the setting/story
2. Read half of Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking for character development research
3. Register for a 3-hour plot workshop this Sunday at the New England Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators Conference
4. Realize I can use the find-the-story posts from OC's Weekend Writer series to help with early find-the-story work
5. Make a few journal notes over the past year for this project

While it can be argued that I am better prepared for May Days this year than last, I am still not in great shape. For one thing, I'm going to have a lot of trouble writing on May 2 through 4 because of family and conference commitments. That's really early on in the project to be veering from the program. The plotting workshop on May 5 seems like a great idea, particularly since it comes early in the set-aside period. However, the workshop description asks participants to bring a work-in-progress to which they can apply the information we'll be taking in. I am going to be scrambling the rest of today and in whatever time I can find tomorrow to scratch up enough material to be able to say I have a work-in-progress.

Hey, a work-in-progress is in the eye of the beholder, n'est-ce pas?

Stay tuned to learn what Gail has to show for her May Days experience at the end of the month.