Well, I made it a few months into the new year, posting once a week. I was writing every day—one hour each morning before I moved on to answering email and editing and answering email and submitting and answering email and looking at contracts and royalty reports and answering email.
And then I just stopped doing the one hour a day of writing. Fell off the wagon. Took my fingers off the keyboard. Stopped opening my blog.
Derailed by a deadline
I had a big, hard deadline that I had to meet and I let everything else go and focused on that one job. I suppose I was facing what authors sometimes face—deadlines coming fast and suddenly they’re out of time.
Some authors post stuff like this on Facebook:
I have a big deadline looming. Going to hole up at our cabin (in the Poconos/on the beach/in some other fab place) for two weeks to get the job done.
Yeah.
That’s not my story.
I was holed up in my stuffy little bedroom with my laptop. I stopped sleeping like a normal person—pulled several all-nighters. I quit walking my poor dog. I may have stopped showering, even. (No one in this house will ever leak that kind of information, so you’ll never know for sure.)
I still failed to meet my deadline.
I had to extend it for one week (which turned into ten days), and I worked on nothing else but that one job (I probably took a couple of showers somewhere in the middle of all that. Not sure. It’s all a blur of pain and agony).
Writers sometimes miss deadlines
When you sign the contract the due date is so far away—you have six months or a year. Plenty of time. But then, for some strange reason, you look up one day and see you only have three months. And, oddly, you can’t make the plot work or you can’t make the character likable.
You labor.
You worry and sweat.
You glue yourselves into your chairs and you squeeze out words. Only they all come out sounding wooden. Your pages are full of clunky, ugly sentences set in drab paragraphs.
And then, you suddenly have thirty days.
And then ten.
And finally, you are asking for an extension on the deadline.
The more extensions you get, the worse you feel and the harder the work is and the worse everything sounds to your overwrought, critical ears.
But the deadlines are good for us
Writers are often their own worst enemies. Many of us will keep tweaking a work to death until someone pries it away. Some us never think our WIPs are done simply because we can’t manage to make any of them perfect. This is why we need deadlines. They force us to finish a thing and move on.
I was working last month on a new Udemy course, on plotting novels that will keep the pages turning, and after I had edited the living daylights out of the audio, I almost threw it away. I was bleary eared and sleep deprived, and I was sure that Udemy would turn it down due to bad audio quality. I was about to tell them I couldn’t make it in May, and I’d have to give it another shot in July, but I decided to send one video through and see if they could give me any helpful advice. They wrote back to say the video and audio quality were exceptional.
HUH?
They went on to say that the content was also exceptional. And the delivery was exceptional. Really? I didn’t even know it was possible to get an exceptional score from them. All I’d ever gotten on the previous two courses was an acceptable rating.
And here I thought the course needed to be trashed.
So . . . if you have worked on a project so long that you have come to hate it, pass it off to a reader and see what feedback you will get. It may not be as bad as you think it is.
I went ahead and published the Udemy course and it’s gotten some kind reviews. If you’d like to give it a look, I’m extending the Grand Opening sale through June (I figure since I miss all my other deadlines, I might as well miss this one, too and let the sale go for an extra month(1)A word (or a couple of hundred words) about Udemy prices: They often run sales so I never know what my course will be selling for, but if you wait you can eventually get almost any Udemy course for ten bucks. So I have a hard time selling my course for more than ten bucks at any time, simply because I know if you wait a few weeks, you’ll be able to get it on sale. Why do I list the courses for 185 dollars, then? 1) I think they’re worth that, considering that students have lifetime access to me in a private Facebook group. I charge a bundle for phone consults and Udemy students have me on retainer, kind of, and 2) I have to price that high to compete with the other writing courses. If you are a new to Udemy and you see my course at 30 bucks on sale for 10 and you the other guy’s course for 200 bucks on sale for 10, which one will you buy? So? That’s the story of the Udemy pricing system. It’s not a system I like a lot, however, I do like to make money, and Udemy pays my bills for me. So there you go. You can get the course for ten bucks by clicking on this link.
All those exceptional ratings notwithstanding, it’s not some great work of art—I need to disabuse you of that notion. It was hard for me to produce, but that doesn’t mean the course is brilliant. It was hard because I’m a lame video editor, that’s all. However, many people have told me it was just what they needed to fire them up and get them plotting their next novel or to help them fix a broken novel with which they’ve been struggling. So go check it out. You may want to take it for a spin.
And that’s partly what I’ve been up to lately. What about you? Are you all still writing? Have you stayed on track? Are you meeting your goals? We’re halfway through the year already–wow!–and I’d love to hear about how you’re doing.
References
| ↑1 | A word (or a couple of hundred words) about Udemy prices: They often run sales so I never know what my course will be selling for, but if you wait you can eventually get almost any Udemy course for ten bucks. So I have a hard time selling my course for more than ten bucks at any time, simply because I know if you wait a few weeks, you’ll be able to get it on sale. Why do I list the courses for 185 dollars, then? 1) I think they’re worth that, considering that students have lifetime access to me in a private Facebook group. I charge a bundle for phone consults and Udemy students have me on retainer, kind of, and 2) I have to price that high to compete with the other writing courses. If you are a new to Udemy and you see my course at 30 bucks on sale for 10 and you the other guy’s course for 200 bucks on sale for 10, which one will you buy? So? That’s the story of the Udemy pricing system. It’s not a system I like a lot, however, I do like to make money, and Udemy pays my bills for me. So there you go |
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sallyapokedak
??? Chime in . . . the choir is not complete without your voice? Who stole my comments section and replaced it? Where did my smiley faces go? (I’m fond of the little guy on the toilet!) Hmm. Stay away from the blog for a month and look what happens! Bah! I must deleted something in my last round of hacking. :(
Kristen Joy Wilks
Hey Sally,
I am actually taking an old novel through your course as we speak. I read several books on making the plot complicated and totally did that … and it was a mess. Getting back to the basics of plotting in your class was just what my story needed. I also got some fabulous insights on my main character. Will it be a work of YA art by the time I”m done??? I don’t know. But it will be better and that is really all we can do after all. Make the story better, every day.
sally apokedak
Yay, glad to hear that your story is getting better. I sure thought the new beginning was a great improvement. You have such a good voice—I just think you were rushing it a bit.
And I hope you like the next course–or maybe it will be the one after next: Character. I want to expand on that.
Thanks for commenting and for taking and leaving reviews on my courses. And for the review on my novel. I appreciate all of that.
Rebecca LuElla Miller
Yes, this comment section looks different.
Great post, though. I love what you’ve said about deadline. I love your example of your class and I love your explanation about the pricing. I’m one who also loves the course. Well, well worth it and you’re kind to keep the sale going.
Becky
sally apokedak
Thanks for chiming in!
So glad to see you back on the Internet. God is good.
Kristen Joy Wilks
Let’s see: “Are you meeting your goals?” Well, I’m plugging along and writing almost every day. So I count that as a win. I did take a break from revising stuff (revision is the neverending story, isn’t it?) for two months and wrote the rough drafts for 2 fun stories I’ve been thinking about for awhile. Now … back to revision and I have a whole bunch of stories to revise now that I’ve added to the ranks of my books in waiting that need attention. But it was great to just create and not worry that everything was perfect. Of course they weren’t perfect, Rough Draft, the name says it all!
sally apokedak
Good for you. Keep at it. Is your sister still writing? Do you two egg each other on?
Kristen Joy Wilks
Right now my sister is building a custom made chicken coop for her daughter and finishing up remodeling her parents bathroom. Yes, she is quite the carpenter and mechanic, too. But she does egg me on to finish my projects and I stand amazed that she literally does everything well. The funny thing though, I walk into the auto parts store and the guy behind the counter asks me about my car project as though I know what I’m doing (I then have to say brilliant things like “Our tire fell off and I don’t want that to happen again. Can you give me a bolt or nut thingy to keep it on?”) and she walks into the auto parts store (knowing exactly what she is doing) and they talk to her like she’s a three-year-old! It’s Amazing.
Kathy
I’m chiming! Just bought the course. I’m ready to start my next novel. (Because I know that’s what one should do while trying not to watch one’s in-box for responses about the previous novel. *sigh.)
Anyway, I’m thrilled to have this to move me along. Almost as good as buying a ticket to Realm Makers to hear you in person. But, I’ll stick with this.
p.s. Are we not talking about The Button Girl on the blog? Because I stayed up way past my bedtime a couple of nights with that one.
sally apokedak
Oh, thanks for buying the course. I hope you find something helpful in it.
And, thanks, too for leaving a review on The Button Girl. Yes, we will be talking about it on the blog. I just didn’t want to come back after five weeks and hit people with a bunch of stuff about me and the things I have for sale. Ha ha. Well, maybe I wanted to, but I thought it would be boorish of me.
But you should feel free to talk about The Button Girl to your heart’s content.
You might even want to provide a hand dandy link to The Button Girl, the next time you mention it.
Kristen Joy Wilks
Ha!
Debby Zigenis-Lowery
Great post and Awesome graphic/quote. I had to pin it twice: once to “writing life” and once to “made me smile.” Thanks also for extending the discount on your course.