I’ve been thinking about deadlines this week. My self-imposed deadline for the first-draft completion of ‘Fireborn’ just passed by over the last week and on self reflection I realized that the goal itself was perhaps not very manageable. I should backtrack … ‘Fireborn’ is the manuscript that I’ve been plugging away at for about five years. It’s a fantasy novel with a super-cool heroine, dilemmas, friendships, and death. The manuscript has kept me entertained for some time, and it is almost at the stage where it can start entertaining others as well. I cannot wait.

First, however, let’s talk timelines and missing them.

Let me explain.

In August, I had ten more chapters to write in order to complete a first draft. I was on vacation, writing all week, and had just finished one whole chapter. Good for me. It was then that I set the goal to continue this momentum over the next ten weeks to complete the first draft of ‘Fireborn’ by the end of this week. However, as I am sure many of you have already realized, I miscalculated on several fronts:

1. I work for a living. Which means that I do not have the luxury of focusing solely on writing my chapters like my uninterrupted vacation allowed.
2. My average chapter length is between 11,000 and 15,000 words. In a comfortable work week, I have time and mental capacity to write about 3000.
3. We are coming out of a pandemic, and I do not have the stamina to write that consistently and that hard.
4. I love shiny, distracting side projects. They are inevitable. They eat up time. And they are going nowhere.

What I learned from this experience, and I have learned this lesson time and time again, is to be patient with yourself and acknowledge what you are capable of at that time. If you make inflated goals, you are more likely to drop them when you cannot keep up with the schedule you’ve assigned yourself. I’ve reverted to the goal of 3000 words a week, every week, and I have maintained that successfully. It gives me the breadth to dabble in those shiny side projects – like learning how to design a website and write blog posts (no surprises) and also set aside time for important self care. With this new method, I’ve reduced my chapter hit count to five remaining, and I am going strong.

I like to think of deadlines rather like that heap of unfolded clean clothes that sits in the corner of your room for days [a week] until you feel like folding them. Don’t even try to pretend that I’m the only one who does that. We all know that it’ll feel better and be easier to properly fold, organize and store the clothing, yet when the time comes, there is always something better to do. So here is what I am working on telling myself: 

By folding laundry …

1. I am not losing time looking for matching socks.
2. I do not have to question how many days of clean underwear I have left.
3. It will not take me ten minutes to get dressed while imploding the tower of clothing as I try to find things.
4. I won’t wake up in the middle of the night and think that there is a strange man hiding in my clothing pile. No one wants that.

It doesn’t mean that I am a master of folding laundry now. The “folding period” is more of a guideline, not a deadline. Just like my writing goals. However, understanding how you interact with deadlines and guidelines will help you understand how to better work with yourself and you will start to set up your goals with more manageable timelines. Most importantly, through this whole process, I have made a commitment to myself to get this project done. It will likely mean some trial and error, with some willingness to make adjustments as I evolve through the process. And that is okay. In fact, it is freaking great. 

So I am continuing on with my 3000 words a week for the next five chapters. By my count, it’ll be a little under four months, and I can hope that perhaps I will not be so verbose with some of them! It’s a fine goal for me, and it’ll balance my current project expectations with work, life, and those fabulous-yet-pesky side projects.

I’ve been less successful with laundry. Let’s face it though, laundry is by far the most boring thing on the planet. I’d rather write about laundry then fold it. 🙂