I love deadlines.
And no, I’m not going to add the, “I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by,” made famous by the late Douglas Adams.
I thrive on deadlines.
Unfortunately, that means I also get frustrated when they do whoosh by.
It has been a challenging couple of months. Like most, my life was disrupted by COVID-19 restrictions and the ever-shifting landscape that came with them. There was a period of over a month where predictions and models and changes in policy created rapid-fire change that threatened to puncture the tyres of any deadlines I might set myself.
Our football (soccer for those who prefer the less ambiguous term) season was cancelled. I was working from home. There was no chance of directing a production at my school this year. So I set myself an aggressive deadline of the 3rd of July for completing the first and second drafts of my new novel, tentatively titled Disciples.
Within a month, all of these decisions were reversed. And my tyres got shot out good.
I had to reconfigure all of the paperwork for the football (see above for alternate interpretation) club. We started back at my school with students from Week 3 rather than Term 3 as had been predicted only a few weeks beforehand. And the rapid relaxing of rampant restrictions forced an overabundance of alliteration – but also meant that I could now direct a show for my students.
Despite my best efforts, my deadline whooshed by.
It was a self-imposed deadline. It didn’t really matter, right?
In the grand scheme of things, no. I did not contract COVID-19, I still had a full-time job and my family still put up with me.
But that whoosh sprayed a shovelful of disappointment all over me. As someone who prides himself on meeting deadlines, missing mine by six days (come on, you can figure it out yourself) made me more critical than usual of my writing.
Chapter 24 is the worst thing I’ve written in this series. And now I’ve painted myself in a corner. I don’t know how to fix it.
I sent it to my alpha readers anyway.
Complete with a plea to help me fix it.
And now, it’s the waiting game. But, once the manuscript was gone, all of that stuff stopped worrying me. I had missed a deadline and the world did not end. We will solve the Chapter 24 problem. And I found myself with time to revamp the website and get excited about the release of Disruptions on July 31st.
I love deadlines. But maybe the whoosh is not such a bad thing after all.