Debra - Deadlines & Daylight Savings

I have exactly 18 minutes to make my deadline for a short story.

I would have had an hour and 18 minutes but Daylight Savings swooped in like an over-eager buzzard and ripped off a large chunk of my deadline clock.

So, I'm playing the deadline game.

I really have 8 hours and 18 minutes as long as I email my story by tomorrow morning.

Wait. No. I only have 7 hours and ...now 16 minutes because the editor is in Eastern Standard Time.

Welcome to the warped world of writing where everything is measured by "how long 'til deadline."

The good news is that as soon as I finish the blog which gives me a much needed break from the story, I can settle back in for the last push.

I'm at that stage of any story when all the pieces are in place. Snippets of dialogue are written either in my scene notes files or in my head. You know where it's going to play out and what the characters are going to do. Everything you've set up has brought you to this place. You can see the finish line. You can't control how long it takes to get there but it really is just a matter of fingers on keyboard.

Lest you think badly of me, I couldn't change the fact that my deadline was in my busiest season of the year as a consultant. I couldn't change the fact that my son called yesterday and said, 'I think I broke my hand." Anybody been in an emergency room on a weekend lately? Yep. We were there a while. Not to mention the time it took to convince my son that a wait-and-see policy might not be the best thing for your dominant hand. (No, not broken on first xray reading. Nasty sprain. Sling for 3 days unless they call after the second set of people read the xray, which is standard.)

I wasn't able to write while there but I did get a ridiculously tangled skein of thread untangled and rolled. Woohoo, me!

And I took a movie break before that because I had all Saturday to write. Ha.

The ends of stories and books are like mirages sometimes. You can see them but you can't quite touch them and the camel train is heading down the track straight for you.

What do you do when your plans go kaboom! Do you push more? Accept that life is life and you'll finish when you finish? Are you someone who simply can't continue to work because the quality suffers? Are you someone who amazes yourself by writing/doing some of your best work which pushed to the wall?