Without a Deadline

You loved college, right? I didn’t. That’s not to say I hated it or anything, just that it wasn’t as amazing as most people made it sound. Because I was always on a deadline for something. That’s what happens when you cram two majors and two minors (two degrees) into four years. Almost every semester, I took an overload of classes. During my entire college career, I took one class—yes, ONE—that was an elective (not necessary for me to graduate with those two degrees). And I graduated on time because there was always a deadline to keep me going, always something I needed to do for at least one of my classes.

Post college, for my first real job, I worked for a private company that processed umbilical cord stem cells. These stem cells could be transplanted into a child and (help) cure numerous forms of blood cancers, along with many other diseases. Every day at that job, we were on a deadline. Forty-eight hours after the baby’s birth, the stem cells would start to degrade, which meant we had to process and cryogenically freeze them before that forty-eight hour mark. Some days, it was a nearly twenty-four hour job.

Now, I work for a flavor company. Flavors aren’t life and death like stem cells—or even like how graduating from college felt—but I still have deadlines. I compound the small, initial samples that go to customers to test in their consumer products. These customers then decide if they want to purchase this flavor from my company. They’re often on a deadline, which means I am, too.

As for this whole writing thing, this whole God-how-I-so-want-to-find-an-agent-and-get-a-book-published thing, I don’t have deadlines, not really. There’s no one who needs me to send them a query letter for one manuscript or finish my revisions on another. There’s no external push to get this done.

But there’s an internal one. When I wrote my latest MS, I gave myself seventy days (one thousand words per day) to get it done. I blew that out of the water and finished in fifty-three days with seventy-six thousand words (see here). The reason I wrote so fast was because I loved what I was writing and couldn’t wait to get home from work so I could put my newest thoughts on paper.

I’m not so self-motivated when it comes to revisions. Sure, I’d like to enter that newest MS into Brenda Drake’s Pitch Wars contest in August, but even that’s not a firm deadline. I have to finish a query letter and revise the first few chapters or so by August 18, submissions day, but there’s no saying I have to be completely finished with the MS then. Because it’s several weeks after submissions day before the mentors’ choices are announced, which is the earliest I need to be finished with my MS revisions (assuming I were to even get a mentor).

Plus, revisions are tough. While my critique partners know all about constructive criticism and tell me what I’m doing right, the whole point is that they have to tell me what I’m doing wrong. I hate this. I mean, I know it makes my MS better and it helps me (theoretically) catch an agent’s attention, but it’s hard to see so many mistakes crammed into one file. To be honest, I’d rather go read a great book (currently Brodi Ashton’s EVERTRUE) or go to my third Reds game of the week (true story).

Despite these tempting distractions, I’ll get my revisions done. I’ll create some deadline and pretend it’s absolute. I’ll do those revisions by that date, just like I processed every cord, completed every lab, and finished every paper. Because I want this BAD. I want to be published and I don’t want to give up or slow down. I want to do whatever it takes to reach the end of my quest, real or faux deadline.