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Missing the Deadline

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Image credit: Mohamed Hassan on Pixabay

I set a deadline for completing the second draft of my novel: I would finish Draft #2 by January 31.

As of today, February 2, I have not finished it. Nor will I be able to do so this week, or probably next week.

In all fairness, I’ve had many things to do this week, primarily work. Still, when I set the deadline, I knew I’d be working, and it seemed reasonable anyway.

As regular readers of this blog know, I’m a huge fan of things like planning, scheduling, and setting deadlines. Having a deadline is what lights a fire under me. Otherwise, I’d meander along life’s path, talking about how I’m going to do this or that “someday”—which, of course, rarely comes.

So why didn’t the deadline work for me this time?

I could point to a number of causes, but probably the main one is the simplest: I failed to plan for delays.

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Slogging Toward Success

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Two years ago, I wrote a story entitled, “The Women in the Club.” It was about the family of a man who committed a heinous crime. The story felt a bit edgier than what I normally write, but I believed the topic was worth talking about. My writing group loved it.

I began to send it out both as a regular submission and a contest entry. Every time it was rejected, I edited again to see if I could make it just a bit tighter, sharper, clearer.

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Keeping On

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Photo credit: Fabien WI on Unsplash

Yesterday, I finished the #1000wordsofsummer 2022 challenge. Today, I was fully prepared to sit down at my desk and do billable work, just as I should.

Instead, I brought my breakfast and my Surface out to the porch, and I worked on my novel-in-progress.

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Don’t Waste Your Time

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Photo credit: Aron Visuals on Unsplash

“Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think the university stifles writers. My opinion is that they don’t stifle enough of them.” ~ Flannery O’Connor

From the time I was twenty until I was forty-six, I barely wrote a word of fiction.

God, what a waste.

A devastating college workshop experience left me convinced I had nothing to say and didn’t know how to say it anyway. On that dark February evening, I sat in stunned silence at a conference table as a handful of seniors mocked my story mercilessly. No one else spoke up (although one student told me later, “I didn’t think it was that bad.”). The professor did nothing to stop the train of ridicule, nor did he ever say anything to suggest that my writing wasn’t hopeless. He gave me an A in the class, but I’ve never believed it.

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