i’ve been spending pretty much every moment that isn’t consumed with social interaction or other obligations delving into the world of distant future. and as a result i nearly met my three-chapter deadline on saturday night. i still missed it by about 9 hours, but that was for what i am telling myself was a valid reason. looking ahead, though, i need to guard against all reasons for missing deadlines, valid or not. so how can i do that?
first, and most importantly, i need to understand that a deadline for delivery is not the same thing as a deadline for completion. no matter what project i’m working on, my results will suffer if i am shoving my work out into the universe without proper time to digest the final form and search for inconsistencies and imperfections, or more importantly, for over edits and over corrections.
second, i need to stop thinking of my time to complete a project in terms of how long i can wait to get started in order to meet the deadline. the existence of a deadline does not preclude me from delivering early, and if anything, early delivery adds to the value of my work, or maybe more accurately, it adds to the value of working with me versus the competition.
and third, i need to set realistic deadlines that are achievable under duress and that allow for unforeseen circumstances. sometimes the only thing we can do is hazard a guess at how long something will take because we haven’t actually done it before. and of course, as a result, sometimes our best guesses are way off the mark. for example, i was wildly underestimating how much time it would take for me to work through character sketches for first act of distant future, and i still have no idea how well-spent all of that time will prove to be since i have yet to include several of the characters i created. i am pretty sure they’ll all play a part, but that’s to be determined. the point is, next time i have a large cast of characters to create, i know to plan at least a week of time for rumination, and i know that until that is done, any manuscripting will be at a standstill since my workflow is so character-driven.
if you are following my distant future blog, you’ll probably notice some of this echoed over there later today, since most of this post relates to life lessons that also double as writing process lessons. i hope you’ll forgive my redundancy, but it will be therapeutic and useful for me to write this out more than once to cement these lessons in my subconscious.