Deadlines are immutable. Life is essentially, unpredictably, mutable.

Neither of those statements is entirely true, of course. Deadlines can be moved or missed, and while life is unpredictable it’s going to happen whether you like or not.

However, for a writer–this writer, anyhow–they feel true. Our calendar is planned around them, hammered down into our schedule like spikes. On the 14 March the latest WIP is due at the publisher, on 9th July the edits are due, by 12 December we need to send out blog posts.

Meanwhile goes on around us, without us, as we click-clack away on our keyboards. Birthdays, vacations, sick pets, and family emergencies don’t take schedules into account. OK, so vacations could but once you start carving out chunks of ‘these two weeks I’m frantic because I have to finish, and these three I’m a mess because I need to start writing’…people lose patience.

So how do I cope with that?

Badly, probably. I’m not the most socially competent person in the world. However, the thing to remember is that you give up your life to write? You’re going to end up a really bad writer. People always say you need to be a reader to be writer–and that’s true–but first of all you need to be.

When I first started to freelance, I worked from home for 11 days out of 14. I was busy, I talked to people online, but I wouldn’t see anyone but the postman from one day to the next. People, I got weird. Ok, weirder. Plus my writer suffered. I could still pull it out when it came to locations and actions, but interactions? That got..stale, because I wasn’t doing any of it.

Isolation isn’t great for you as a person either!

So, you need to find some compromise between the immovable (deadlines) and the unstoppable (life). Mostly that means you have to make some sort of compromise, a sacrifice of time to one or the other.

Sometimes I put my head down and write until the wee hours of the morning to try and get ahead of a due date. That earns me one ‘sod it’ shopping trip at the weekend. I’ll go to a family Christmas party, but I leave a bit early (or I don’t because my family’s Christmas parties can be wiiiiild, but that’s basically research at that point!). When I went on vacation this year I put the deadline aside so I could go out and have fun, but I also carved out two hours a night that I wrote in. No faffing about. Just words.

Discipline, I suppose, but that’s not something I’m known for!

You don’t just have to be disciplined though, you have to be realistic. Sometimes you can dig in and grind out the deadline, but it’s not always possible. When it isn’t you need to accept it and not kill yourself. Ask for an extension. Work with your publisher to rejig your schedule if you need to. Otherwise you risk ending up on a hiding to nothing, constantly playing catch-up with an ever-shrinking number of days.

….This sounds a little crazy, but sometimes I actually have nightmares about that. They’ve replaced the old ‘I forgot I had an exam’ stress dream, and instead I submit my latest novel and get an email back that ‘your next book is due tomorrow! Look forward to reading it!’.

Arrrgggggggh!

So, basically, the whole deadline thing be summed up in a few words. Do as much as you can, but accept it’s not the end of the world when you can’t.

I mean, I say that. I’ve been late with a deadline, and I was basically a neurotic mess one distraction away from an explosion. However, that’s me!

And hey, I know that every job as project deadlines and schedules. However, a: I’m a writer so I’m focusing on my experience, and b: writing tends to be quite unstructured except for these set deadlines–no clocking in, no progress meetings, no performance reviews–that the deadlines loom large.

Like right now for example! I should have really factored Christmas shopping into this!