Deadlines, Published or Not: Critical Tools for Writers

By Donnell Ann Bell 

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”  ~ Douglas Adams

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Amusing quote, and if you’re a writer, no doubt, one you can relate to. It may have even been relevant back in the day when competition was less and publishers had a small stable of authors. They had no choice but to wait. For the author, for the delivery of mail, for the printing press, and the invariable steps publishers went through to make a book ready for market.

Don’t look now, folks, but it’s 2015. Like it or not, due to ease of technology (anyone remember carbon paper?), books are being written—and published—whether they’re good, whether they’re edited, or whether they’re ready for an audience. I can literally string a bunch of sentences together, and if I’m willing to pay, slap a cover on them, self-publish them, and call myself an author.

I choose not to do that, and I hope I can convince you to follow a more polished direction as well. Am I telling you not to self-publish? Not at all. What I am suggesting is that you give yourself a fighting chance: hone your craft, work on your project and while you’re carving that path, give yourself deadlines.

Okay, but deadlines are for people who have a publishing contract, right? Again, not at all. Deadlines are something we writers set to finish a book in the first place. I will write 3,000 words a day. I will have Draft One finished by xx. I will send it out to readers by xx. I will devote xx amount of time to research and xx amount of time to writing. What’s more, I will not – I repeat, I will NOT keep working on the same three chapters over and over again. Setting daily deadlines is instrumental. That is, if you wish to have a successful writing career.

I’m on deadline. I have no time to let anything go whooshing by me. Not in this competitive market. I want readers to buy my books. More importantly, I want them to remember me when the next book comes out. It’s 2015 and the publishing era has exploded. If writing truly is your passion, and you want to call yourself an author (a writer who didn’t quit), set daily and monthly goals. Will you fail on occasion? Of course. But the good news is you’ll pick yourself up. Like anything, goal-setting is about repetition and it is habit forming. What’s more, published or not, it fills you with a huge sense of accomplishment. Write your goals on your calendar. Set affirmations. Send yourself daily reminders, including 'have I completed my word count today'?

The world is filled with distractions. Thanks to the Internet, attention deficit is at an all-time high. As commander of your ship, you are in charge of your destination. With all due respect to Mr. Douglas’s funny quote above, I infinitely prefer . . .

A goal is a dream with a deadline ~ Napoleon Hill

Happy 2015.

About the Author: Donnell Ann Bell is the author of The Past Came Hunting, Deadly Recall and Betrayed, all of which have been e-book best sellers. Buried Agendas is her newest release. She is honored that The Past Came Hunting and Betrayed were chosen as part of the Pikes Peak Library book club; further she loves to visit with readers. Along with veteran police officer Wally Lind, Donnell co-owns Crimescenewriters, a Yahoo group putting law enforcement experts together with writers. Like her on Facebook or contact her via her website www.donnellannbell.com   

A Little Zebulon Fiction

By Robert Wyckoff

Winter is coming, and the deadline for entering The Zebulon Contest is fast approaching. November 2nd, noon MST. Is your entry ready?

If you’re still undecided about entering, consider M.B. Partlow’s list of reasons to enter a writing contest: http://www.sfsignal.com/archives/2014/09/why-you-want-to-enter-a-writing-contest/#more-99395

If you’re still undecided, consider Rezi Edwards and her story of entering The Zebulon.

***

Like any highly evolved, adolescent, pimple-bedazzled Homo sapien, I was born in the watery confluence of two stories. That’s me floundering in the river right there: Resina Edwards. Nineteen year old non-prodigy.

My father’s story—or his river if you’re interested in extended metaphor—flows straight and true, through mountains and not around them. Arthur Edwards is my provider of physical necessities, the renowned astrophysicist, and the stalwart defender of the logical and the mundane. He wears his emotions on his lab coat sleeve—and his sleeve is always starch white.

I admire my mother’s story for her lovingly sculpted prose and meandering plot. Annabella Dahl had been my muse, the elementary school teacher, the author, the wandering warrior of words and worlds. I remember she laughed only with her jade eyes because she believed laughing with her throat was cliche and revealing.

Nineteen years ago, when tectonics and erosion allowed my parents’ rivers to meld, to spring forth the Resina River, they fought like rapids for my name. My father the amateur DNA researcher championed ‘Amber’ because—and I couldn’t make this up if I tried—he liked the Jurassic Park movies.

“Scientifically absurd and unrealistic,” he reportedly said. “But I’m quite in love with that chap’s mosquito-amber cane. I want one.”

My mother couldn’t stand naming her child anything remotely common, so she convinced him to name me Resina. As in, you know, amber resin.

Massive, exasperated sigh.

So here’s me. My friends call me Rezi. Or they would if my friends existed.

More sigh.

I’m sick. Not like oh-surprise-this-is-a-tragic-cancer-story sick, but dizzy sick. From spinning in my computer chair.

I stick my feet—fuzzified in adorable green alien slippers—down to slow my spin.

“EEEYYEERRRH,” I say, trying very maturely to mimic squealing brakes.

I stop. I wait for the world to quit swimming.

When it does, I’m looking dazedly at the alarm clock on my desk. 11:30 A.M., November 2nd, 2014.

I have half an hour to enter this…

I squint at the computer monitor.

Zebulon Contest…thing.

If my life was a story, this would be a ticking time bomb plot. Thirty minutes before the human ambassadors fail in negotiations, and the aliens abduct all of our cows. Thirty minutes left for Rezi, Badass Space Pirate Princess, to steal aboard the mother ship and sabotage the cow-beamers, thereby ensuring the survival of American fast food culture.

Thirty minutes until the real Rezi, nineteen year old girl from Nowheresville, Suburbia, must make the ultimate choice.

I sigh, looking at the two windows open on my monitor.

Submit my sci-fi novel to this writing contest? Or submit this college application to MIT? Novelist? Or astrophysicist?

Hmm…

Whoops. Another ten minutes lost to The Navel Gaze. Twenty minutes left.

I whirl to face the windowed wall of my bedroom/office/Lair of Eternal Navel Gazing. Beneath my old One Direction poster—which is now scribbled on to read ‘No Direction’, with the boys colored green and wearing jetpacks—is a half-sized filing cabinet. Heaps of never-submitted, half-complete novels and short stories litter the top and base of the gray metal. I’ve never considered organizing them into the cabinet because that space is reserved. Special.

My mother’s old photo album lies within.

I deliberately keep it hidden, yet easily accessible. In my darkest moments, when my ship’s out of oxygen and I’m lost in the void, I take the album out to remember her smiling jade eyes. She injects air into my lungs and direction in my bones.

But when I’m only slightly adrift, systems not critical, seeing her in only two dimensions fogs me up and turns me about. Scrambles my nav systems. Makes me really damn sad.

I consider taking her out of the cabinet, but only briefly. Star Rezi One isn’t quite that lost on this mission.

I sigh, turning back to my computer. Ten minutes left.

Jiminy, propped up in a sitting position behind my alarm clock, seems eager to say something.

“Hey, Conscience. What advice do you have?” I say, picking him up in one hand.

Jiminy Space-Cricket is a doll my mother gave child-me, presumably because she was tired of watching Disney’s Pinocchio approximately eight billion times a week. But I’ve since made some wicked cool alterations to this little green man. In place of his top hat, suit, and opera gloves, I donned him in an astronaut suit I Frankensteined from a futuristic Ken and Barbie set.

This is how I make friends.

“Let your Conscience be your guide,” I say in a squeaky voice, tilting Jiminy’s space-helmeted head in a sagely fashion.

“No duh, dude,” I say. “So guide me.”

Jiminy says nothing.

I stare at him, and finally begin the same argument I’ve cycled through a hundred times. “My father would tell me to think of my mother,” I say. “Her writing never amounted to much more than financial strain on the three of us. She was depressed. In the end, she was too depressed.”

Jiminy says nothing, and I feel like shaking him.

“In the end,” I repeat, feeling the familiar itching heat in my jade eyes. “She was too depressed.”

Jiminy says nothing.

“My mother would say….” I feel the cool wet slide down my cheek. I remember how she rocked me to sleep, singing. “When you wish upon a star….”

I swallow hard. The alarm clock is blurry now. Five minutes left.

My voice is broken as I sing. “Makes no difference who you are, anything your heart desires, will come to you.”

The glow-in-the-dark stars on my ceiling seem to whisper to me. The final frontier. Astrophysics. Science Fiction.

“If your heart is in your dream, no request is too extreme, when you wish upon a star, as dreamers do.”

I grab the computer mouse. It’s stupid, I know—but it’s shaking in my hand. Depression is stupid. It doesn’t always make sense.

But writing helps. It’s my reserve oxygen supply. A heat shield for my plummeting ship. A wishing star to steer by.

And now it’s time to find out if I’m any good at it.

The mouse cursor twitches over the submit button. I’ve checked the formatting a hundred times. I’ve put in the sweat and tears and blood.

One minute until the cow-thieving aliens win. One minute until my river changes course forever.

I take a breath.

I close the window, and hit the submit button on my MIT application. Then, mouse hand darting, I open the Zebulon Contest window. And I hit submit.

I hold Jiminy tightly. He doesn’t seem to mind.

In the end, there was no decision at all. Rivers on Earth flow one way: downhill. But I’d like to think that on some worlds, perhaps, rivers flow up.

Toward the stars.

* * *

The moral of the story? A cow is abducted every minute you procrastinate.

Find out details about The Zebulon Contest here: http://www.pikespeakwriters.com/contest/

About the Author: Writer. Game designer. Cubicle monkey. Robert Vincent's hardly started on his writing career, but has already won honorable mention in The Writers of the Future Contest and has won the PPW Zebulon Contest. He attributes his lack of publication credits to poor bio-writing skills. Robert's currently working on his epic fantasy novel, living in Colorado Springs, Colorado, with his beloved Companion Cube. Find him at http://robertvincentfiction.com/

Working From Your Future

By J.T. Evans

When faced with a deadline, many people wait until the "crunch" at the end to get things done. This usually involves sleepless nights, loads of caffeine, and stressed out nerves. There's a way around this. I call it "working from your future." In essence, don't front-load the work or put it off until the last minute. The best route is to make steady forward progress.

I'm going to borrow from my software engineering background for this post. When faced with a large project on a deadline and a list of features to code, I use the following method to ensure I make the release date imposed upon me. Here's how I approach large projects in writing (and pretty much everything else in my life): 

1. Find your deadline date.
2. Find today's date.
3. Do the math and figure out how many days you have to accomplish your goal.         
4. List the steps necessary to finish the work. (Outlining, research, world building, character building, photos, maps, writing, etc.)
5. Assign a number of days (or hours if you want to get that detailed) on how long it will take you to finish each item in the list. Don't fret too much over the days/hours assigned. They're flexible (to an extent), and are just there to assist you in planning.         
6. Do the math and figure out if your workload (as measured by time) will fit into the number of days you have to accomplish the entire project. 

If you don't have enough time to finish the project by the deadline, you have a decision to make: 

• You can ask for an extension to the deadline. Asking your editor/publisher earlier (rather than later) for extra time will give you some goodwill and might lead to an extension.
• You can look at your list of tasks and see if you can drop something. In other words, do you really need that detailed map of the world for your writing? If not, drop it.
• You can also look at your list of tasks and see if you can shave a few days/hours off of an item or three by doing a little bit less work on them. Sometimes, you plan for a deep research dive that isn't necessary. Just hitting the surface details of something is sufficient to get you started.

Once you have the list figured into a time period that will fit your deadline, then you need to order your list in what must be done before other things. Obviously, things like research and outlining should come before the actual writing. The best thing to do is to work from the future. Put the final act of work (writing) at the end of the list. Put the item with most dependencies just above the final item. In other words, you'd probably put outlining right above writing, and then photos above that, and then world/character building above that, and so on. Research is usually the first thing on the list. By building the list from the bottom-up, you can figure out the order in which things must be done.

Keep in mind, this is how my brain works. Your list may look much different from my own. Do what works for you. Just give the framework a try. Plan the last thing you want to do and work from the future to today. You may be surprised how such a weird way of looking at things will free you up. By taking a project (e.g.: research, plan, develop, and write a novel in three months), and chopping it up into consumable sizes, you'll be really surprised how much less stress you'll experience.

I hope this helps you plan your future projects! Let me know how this works out for you in the comments below.


About the Author: J.T. is a writer of fantasy, science fiction, and horror. He has been actively been writing since he discovered a local writers group in 2006. He joined the Pikes Peak Writers in late 2008 and attended his first conference in 2010. In that time, he has worked his way up the ranks in Pikes Peak Writers from "chair mover" and "auction guard" to webmaster and president of the organization. He has a story published in An Uncommon Collection, and is expecting two more short stories to be published soon. He is working on his second fantasy series, and will push the first book from the proverbial nest when it is ready.

October News, Events, & Links

PPW Events

This month, we're delighted to present two Write Brains, both free, as usual! We request you RSVP to each (RSVP is mandatory for the online only in order for us to send you the link to the online venue). Please put the date or topic in the subject line so we know which one you're RSVP'ing to (or both, if you'd like to RSVP to both). RSVP to rsvp@pikespeakwriters.com.

October 8 will be the bonus Write Brain, thanks to our partnership with Delve Writing. Presented by Chris Mandeville, NaNo What? Everything You Need to Know About NaNoWriMo will be online only from 6:30 PM to 8:30 PM. Since 1999 writers have been hunkering down for the month of November to attempt the monumental task of writing start-to-finish a 50,000 word novel in only thirty days: National Novel Writing Month, known affectionately as NaNoWriMo, or just "NaNo for short. November is just weeks away--find out now what NaNo is, what it can do for you, what you're "allowed" to do under the official NaNo rules, what NaNo "pirates" do, and how to have a successful NaNo experience whatever you do. Whether you're new to NaNo or a seasoned "WriMo," join us for tips and tricks that can help you be an uber-productive writer any month of the year.

In addition, we will be announcing the plan for NaNoTryMo at this bonus Write Brain! NaNoTryMo is the Pikes Peak Writers version of NaNoWriMo meant to encourage you, whether you're following the NaNoWriMo track or setting your own version. We'll be partnering with Delve Writing to bring a new twist to NaNoTryMo.

On Tuesday, October 15, we're pleased to welcome Jeanne Stein and Mario Acevedo at the Business of Arts Center in Manitou Springs. In conjunction with the Business of Arts Center and the Second Biennial Cross-Creations city-wide Gods & Monsters collaboration, they'll present Writing Monsters With Depth: Making Your Monsters Human. Vampires, werewolves, witches, fae—all traditional monsters that have become the heroes of their own stories. How does  a writer make a “monster” sympathetic, and who really is the villain when it’s a showdown between a mortal and a monster? Mario Acevedo and Jeanne Stein will bring their expertise on writing monsters with a depth of humanity to help you learn to do the same. The monsters aren't always the bad guys these days, and it's necessary to write them in a way that readers can identify with them.
More information available on the PPW Events tab above.

The September Write Brain, Advanced Plotting with Chris Eboch, can be found HERE. It will be transitioning to a password protected file soon, but we'll put that information on the website and the blog tab above.

Writer's Night will be Monday, October 28, 6:30 to 8:30 P.M., in the Principal's Office at Ivywild School, 1604 S. Cascade Ave.

PPW Open Critique will occur on Wednesday, October 16, 6:00 to 8:30 PM, at the Cottonwood Center for the Arts. The first 8 to RSVP may bring 8 pages of their manuscript to critique. More information on the Events tab.

Other "Local" Events

Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers has two online classes this month, in addition to their monthly free programming Saturday, October 26, 1:00 to 3:00 PM. Diving In, Characterization and Motivation will be presented by Courtney Koschel.

Colorado Springs Fiction Writers has various meetings throughout at the month at different locations. Visitors are welcome. 

Pikes Peak Romance Writers will welcome Terry O'Dell on Sunday, October 13, at the BAC in Manitou Springs. She'll present "What is Voice?"

Pikes Peak Pen Women will feature Kerstian Lieff, who will talk about the memoir she wrote of her mother's life. October 19, 11:30 AM to 1:30 PM, Blue Sage Café. $23 for non-members. RSVP required at info@ppb-nlapw.org.

The Rocky Mountain Chapter of Mystery Writers of America will have Dr. Jane Bock speaking about forensic botany and the Casey Anthony trial Thursday, October 10. $20 for the presentation and dinner.

KRCC/Radio Colorado College 91.5 FM welcomes Ira Glass of "This American Life" to the Pikes Peak Center October 12. Performance is at 8PM, doors open at 7PM. "This American Life" is an award-winning public radio program that "creatively documents the complexities and absurdities of life in contemporary America." Glass will talk about the program, what makes a creative story, and more, combining live narration on stage with pre-taped quotes and music.


Publications Open for Submissions and Contests:
Please note: Inclusion of links in this post does not equal sponsorship by Pikes Peak Writers or a relationship between the two entities.  Please always be sure to pursue due diligence before submitting anything to a publication or contest.

Pulp Empire and Metahuman Press have announced a set of ongoing anthologies accepting submissions. They're open until filled, except the Doc Claus Christmas anthology, which has a deadline of October 15. 10-15% of profits go to authors as royalties.

Vagabundo Magazine is seeking bloggers/columnists to write about adventure travel. You will not be paid as a blogger, but you will get dibs on writing columns, which do pay. They also expect photos with your stories.

Long Count Press is putting together an anthology with the subject of dying earth sword and sorcery fantasy. Deadline is October 31. Pays $20, plus e-book copy, plus royalties.

Kraken Press is seeking submissions for their 50's themed horror and dark fantasy anthology, American Nightmare. Short stories only. Deadline October 31. Pays in pro rata share of 15% of list price, plus one contributor copy.

Cease, Cows is holding a flash fiction contest. Guest judge is Stephen Graham Jones. Cost is $5 to enter. 1000 words or less. Prizes will be awarded as a percentage of the money brought in for the contest (details on the website). Deadline October 15.

Kazka Press holds a monthly flash fiction contest entitled 713 Flash. The October deadline is October 20, with a theme of Out of Time. Pays $15 per accepted story.

Bad Day Books is holding their 2013 Assent Publishing Rogue Writing Contest. Novella and novel submissions in horror, thriller, suspense, and apocalyptic. Deadline October 31. The prize pack is pretty phenomenal, including a publishing contract, marketing, author marketing coaching, etc. Aside from the contest, they are also open for regular submissions for publication in those same genres.

Mystery and Horror, LLC is seeking short stories for their Mardi Gras Murder anthology. They'd like mystery short stories set during Mardi Gras. Open submission period is October 21 to January 5. Pays a contributor copy, $5 advance on royalties, and discount on additional book purchases.

Contrary Magazine's winter issue deadline is December 1. They accept fiction, poetry, commentary, etc. Pays $20 per piece.

Pseudopod takes horror submissions of short stories for their podcasts. They also take flash, but prefer short. They pay $100 per story and your story is performed in audio format for their podcast. Flash fiction pays $20. They're always open for submissions.

PodCastle is the same as above, but takes fantasy stories. Same pay and open submission period.

Quirk Books is holding their Looking for Love Fiction Contest. Entries should be novel-length unconventional romance. First prize is $10,000 and publication.

Submission and Contest links originally posted on The Warrior Muse.

About the Author:  After years of letting her writing fall by the wayside, Shannon Lawrence has recently thrown herself back into it. Her main focus is fantasy and horror and she has just finished a Young Adult Fantasy novel. She has a flash fiction piece featured in the anthology Sunday Snaps: The Stories, and her short horror story "The Blue Mist" will be in the March 2014 issue of Nightfall Magazine. She has also discovered a love of photography and enjoys photographing the breathtaking Colorado scenery and wildlife, as well as her children. She blogs about reading, writing and photography at www.thewarriormuse.com.