How To Be A Penniless Author – Do You Dread Deadlines?

Ah, I emailed off the little superfoods book to Jane Curry Publishing last week. What a relief!

Deadline met.

Call me old-fashioned, odd or even deathly dull, but I love a deadline. Especially when it’s passed.

That’s only because I know I will get the job done in time. This confidence has come with experience. Mistakes experienced!

When I wrote ‘Sydney For Under Fives’ edition one for Pan Macmillan in 2000, the deadline had to be delayed by a month. My eldest son has been diagnosed with ASD that year and we’d started a huge early intervention program.

Life was bloody intense and strenuously stressful.

I let Jane, who was the publisher at Pan at the time, know about my delay well in advance, whilst sobbing. She understood.

When I did hand the book in it was 10,000 words longer than the contract stated, and I was absolutely whacked.

How silly of me to overwrite so much!! Two of the chapters were not needed at all and were removed from the next two editions.

Hope I learned my lesson there. These days I fight my natural tendency to over research and to waffle on too much. I aim to be professional, timely, calm if at all possible.

Which is totally up to me, isn’t it?

Learning to be a good enough mum has also taught me to be a good enough writer. To try not to over-dramatise the process but to just f**!ing get on with it. Get the job done well and on time.

Then reap the rewards of post-deadline bliss. Actually that means catching up on all the domestic disasters that neglect has produced!

And believe me, here at Casa Catastrophe we are drowning in domestic disasters.

Publishers need their authors to be timely and to stick to the publishing plan. You can get away with delays when you’re super-succesful and making everyone a heap of cash. Or if you’re a genius.

But sadly I am neither, just a good enough… everything!

 Most days I try to be good enough, 

but some days I don’t work that hard!

What about you?

And do you dread deadlines?