Member-only story
Every writer dreads a deadline, yet at the same time we crave them to give us direction and purpose. I’ve been writing for a living for 30 years and have always had a contract or pre-order deadline, I often had an internal one that pushed me to do better than the deadline because I know I needed to in order to succeed.
The question is: are they good for me?
I survived a couple of decades in traditional publishing by not only meeting every contract deadline but writing one spec manuscript (not under contract) ahead of the deadline. Thus when a publisher didn’t renew a contract, my agent was already out shopping a new book.
As an indie author I would set a schedule and do pre-orders.
Now, for the first time, I don’t have a deadline. My only pre-order is loaded and ready for publication next month (Shane and the Hitwoman).
For the first time in three decades I sit here without a time lock. Actually, when you add in West Point (which ran like a watch with us literally standing in the hallway as Plebes shouting out the minutes until formation) and the Army, where, for example in covert operations, a covert meet that meant life or death had a window of two minutes before and two minutes after, then you walk away, my life has been full of deadlines.
