Procrastination and the Joy of Deadlines

I'm a master of procrastination. I can find a million things to do before writing. The biggest problem with that is how much I love writing and want to be doing it all of the time. But for me, it comes down to a guilt issue. I feel guilty about spending too much time writing, despite my obsessive love for it. It really isn't about writing after all.  It's about me.  I feel guilty for spending too much time on me. That's why I love deadlines. With a deadline, I can bypass some of the guilt about me time. Writing without a deadline may result in a finished product but there was no real reason for this finished product to exist, except that I wanted it to be.  A deadline, on the other hand, is like an order.  I have to finish my project by this date imposed on me. I'm not doing something I enjoy just for my own amusement anymore. I'm doing it because I was told to. Deadlines are a joy to me.  I don't always make them, but I try, and any written word is better than none at all.

2012 - the year of the writer and that writer is me...I hope.

Yes, it's been a year since I last blogged on this site, which is funny since I am a writer and I didn't find the time to write here in 16 months. Well, truth be told, I had cancer and all the related treatments and that had the annoying side-effects of being both tiring and tiresome, as well as a real time killer. But I'm moving forward now. :-)

What I really need is a deadline.  I've found over the last year that my best work was done under pressure. I don't like the pressure but I do like the deadlines. I think because it reminds me of being in school and I was one of those kids that looooooved school.  Not just loved it, looooooved it. Well, not math class and usually not science class.  I knew I wanted and was destined for a career involving words, not numbers. But I always had my homework done ahead of time because I refused to miss a deadline.  As a writer now, I'm much the same way.  I can procrastinate my way into making procrastination a stunning new art form and I can use those excellent procrastination skills to never get a writing project done but give me a deadline that I can't fudge and I am ON it.  So now all I need is somebody to give me a deadline.  Please.  It doesn't work when I impose them on myself. If it did, I would never be a procrastinator.

So blogs full of tips, hints, and markets open to submissions are forthcoming.  Right now I'm just trying to calculate the appropriate length of a YA novel (I'm hearing 50-65K) and how long it will take me to reach that.  In my current Work-In-Progress (WIP), I am at 8100 words. So somebody throw me a deadline to reach 65K and I'm going for it.  Just as soon as I finish the laundry and update my Facebook.  LOL