deadlines that (almost) kill.
My obsessive solution to the forever dilemma of meeting creative deadlines.
coming up for air ☀️
creative deadlines: a madwoman’s perspective 💀
weaving a tapestry…with interruptions 🧶
quick Revelle updates🎡
next time you’ll hear from me♥︎
1. coming up for air☀️
Hello, my sweets. We’re halfway through autumn, but I’m still wrapping my head around the fact that summer has ended. Most of my summer was spent getting this manuscript to where I needed it to be. But I did manage to squeeze in an amazing family vacation with my many cousins and their partners/kiddos. I finished re-reading revisions on the plane, hit “send,” then disembarked and made memories with our party of 40+.
My editor was able to squeak out a little more time for us before Book 2 went to copy edits, so I officially handed it in a few days ago. Since then, I feel like I’ve been waking up from a strange fog.
2. creative deadlines💀
Creative deadlines are strange, deeply personal experiences. I often feel like a madwoman for how intense I am about writing; specifically, about writing as much as possible so that I’m maximizing the quality of a book before it’s due. And maybe I am. Or maybe this is normal, but I haven’t spoken to enough authors about their process—especially authors who don’t write full time, or who take care of loved ones, or who have other reasons they have to divide their attention. All I seem to hear are interviews with super famous, prolific, (inevitably male) authors who go to their writing caves while other people manage their lives. Good for them, I guess?
For those of you who have been following my book journey for a while, you’re no stranger to how long I’ve been working on the 2nd book of my YA contract with HarperCollins. I’ve referred to it as Revenge Book, Gilded Age Book, Book 2, and most often, The Book that is Trying to Kill Me.
(It has a title now. It also has cover sketches! I should be able to share it very, very soon…)
If I lived in a cabin in the woods—with no friends, no family, endless money, and endless good health—I think I’d be a super fast writer. Seriously. I rarely decide to stop writing because I’m tired of it, or because I’ve hit the point where I’m doing more harm than good by pushing myself. Actually, I’m worse at maintaining any semblance of balance outside of my writing. So a cabin in the woods would be an ideal work environment for me.
Alas, I am not a rich hermit. Even more complicated, I actually enjoy my life outside of writing. I’m a psychologist, and a parent, and an extrovert, and an avid reader, and a (former) athlete. There’s so much I like to do on a daily basis—so much I actually NEED to do on a daily basis—that I have to be extremely disciplined to ensure I have enough time for writing.
I’ve been itching to find a metaphor to describe my own experience of writing on deadline, and I’m ready to (attempt to) share it below. Remember that this is my experience, and I have no idea if any parts of it are universal to other writers, or to creatives in general, which is part of why I feel drawn to share it.
3. Weaving a tapestry… with interruptions🧶
Imagine you are weaving a tapestry with ten different colors of yarn (yes, I know tapestries are not likely made of yarn, but I am a mere writer with zero other artistic abilities). The tapestry must be completed by a certain time, and you are a Rule Follower, so you’re going to meet that deadline. (Also, if you take too long, you fall off the board game that is Published Author Land and enter Forgotten Author Wasteland, where publishing abandons you and no one will ever buy a book of yours again. Or so they say.)
The tapestry will eventually be the result of thousands of hours of weaving. But you can’t weave the entire thing at once without literally dying, so you must break your weaving into countless smaller sessions. At the start of each weaving session, you need to review your grand plan for the tapestry, then pick up all the yarn balls, along with all of the loose strings of yarn currently hanging off the tapestry. Then you need to balance them all simultaneously, on various limbs, and begin to weave in a manner that continues the pattern set in the previous session. It’s so much work simply to start weaving that you avoid any reason to set the yarn down again. No lunch breaks. No bathroom breaks. Nothing. That deadline clock is ticking, and if you have to take a break, you must put down all ten balls of yarn, interrupting the pattern you were weaving then pick them up again, reacclimatizing yourself with the pattern so that you can continue the pattern of each yarn color seamlessly. Which is super hard and time consuming.
But life makes you put them down. Over and over.
Every time I start a writing session, I need to remember exactly where I had positioned all ten balls of yarn—and how I was planning to weave them—before I can continue. Sometimes, that requires me to study the last bit of the pattern I made (rereading my last chapter or two). Sometimes, I need to look over the grand plan I made (my elaborate spreadsheet outline). Sometimes, by the time I’ve balanced all ten balls of yarn, I hardly have any time left to weave, and I want to cry.
Creative deadlines require an immense amount of discipline, because in order to keep those balls of yarn in position, I need to maximize my writing time and minimize my distractions. I’m also raising two little humans (who are growing so tall, “little” is quickly becoming an oxymoron). I don’t want them to miss out on things because I’m locked in my office with ten metaphorical balls of yarn. I don’t want to miss a single family dinner, or a single one of their hockey games, or after school snack catch ups, or homework help, or a single bed time kiss because of my deadline.
That means that I don’t write while my kids are home. I’ve tried! There are still moments when they’re playing so nicely, I can’t help but sneak into my manuscript and begin to balance those balls of yarn. But inevitably, by the time I get everything in weaving position, the door bursts open with a skinned knee, or a bicycle tire that needs air, or even a question that needs answering. I end up frustrated and snippy, and no good writing happens, to no fault of theirs. Even with another capable parent home, there’s an awareness that life is happening around me, and it’s really hard to shake that.
In order to wear multiple hats during deadlines, I have to cut out every distraction. I block social media. I silence notifications and put away my phone. I don’t watch tv. I don’t watch movies. I don’t read unless my editor has my manuscript (and then I read voraciously and torture myself with “I should add *this* to the book, etc etc). I get up before dawn to exercise until the deadline gets too close, and then I write so late into the night, I can’t get up at dawn. I don’t return phone calls (sorry, mom) and I don’t remember to pay bills. I don’t shower (kidding? sort of?), or go grocery shopping, or to doctor’s appointments, or do anything that would require me to put down my yarn at an inopportune time. I’m either writing, or being a therapist, or being a parent.
But here’s the twisted part: I also kind of love it? As stressful and harrowing as deadlines may be, they require me to commit fully to being a creative person. I get to spend hours each day lost in my own imagination. Deadlines supercharge my creative process. They demand results, and I dig deep into the well to meet them. Every walk I take with the Nessie Puppy is a walk I’m either voice memo-ing with writer friends about craft things, or listening to music that keeps me in character, or trying to hammer out plot points and character arcs. I dance when I nail a scene. I cry when I hurt my characters. Deadlines in a very full life require me to prioritize the things that matter to me, which means I carve out a lot of the BS. The friends I see are well worth the time. I can’t afford to waste time, so I don’t doom scroll, or talk to people I don’t want to talk to, or do anything that doesn’t matter to me..
If you’re rolling your eyes at me, fear not; I am, too. Hard. I mean, come on! Plenty of people toil away at jobs they can’t stand, simply because they must. I have a supportive partner—whose job provides our health insurance. My day job is extremely flexible and extremely limited in hours. And I’m far from the first person to pontificate about the unique challenges of work/life balance, especially for women. But I’m still going to hit “send” on this newsletter because, as cliche as it might be, this is my lived experience. Maybe part of me hopes I’m not alone in it.
Meeting a deadline is like coming up for air. Handing a book in is like getting out of the ocean completely, after 2.5 years of swimming. It’s been so long, I don’t even know what to do with myself… other than invent my own deadline for the next book. 😈
4. Revelle’s Spanish edition releases !🎡
This month, Revelle’s Spanish edition released in Argentina and Spain, hurray! My understanding is that it’ll be in stores in Mexico soon, too. Being tagged in reviews by Spanish-speaking readers has been such a thrill. Foreign translations are one of those authorly dreams that still hasn’t sunk in, and I get a jolt of surprise every time I see it.
5. Until next time♥︎
Usually, I like to close out my newsletters with things I’ve been enjoying, but I’ll save that for the next newsletter, when I’ve lived a little. Thanks for sharing this journey with me.
I only barely weave, but as someone who occasionally tries to knit complicated multi-color objects, your balls of yarn analogy works! I think my graveyard of half-knit sweaters and my graveyard of half-written manuscripts have a lot in common.