D is for...Deadlines

Today's post is brought to you by...the letter D!

I have always loved deadlines. Yeah, I know, I'm weird like that.

At school, I was the kind of girl who handed in her work BEFORE the deadline, and then enjoyed the feeling of having nothing to do, while others in the class were up until midnight trying to get it done (or not done in some cases). This continued throughout uni, although I'll admit that I did sometimes leave it to the day before to hand things in, instead of being strangely organised and handing it all in a week before. So yeah, I guess I've always been a fairly organised person (unless it's not work related, then I'm the most disorganised person ever).

It wasn't until I realised this, and began to apply deadlines to my own writing, that I actually began to get anything done. I'm still not very good at self-imposed deadlines, because I know they can be moved (i.e. when I haven't bothered to do the work) - but now I get my friends or The Engineer to make up my deadlines for me. The reason I published Synthetica on the 1st April is because I got the Engineer to choose the publishing date for me - if he hadn't chosen it, it would probably still be languishing on my laptop, nowhere near ready for publication. He's also the one who set me the task of writing the first draft of my novel in three weeks. It was painful at times - there were times when I could've cried because I thought it was never going to end - but I did it.

I think with self-publishing especially, deadlines have a special kind of importance. Because you're working at your own pace, sometimes you have to challenge yourself to get certain tasks done by a particular deadline. When you self-publish, the only one responsible for managing your time correctly is you.

But don't take this to mean that you have to set yourself ridiculous deadlines all the time. Only you can know what kind of pace you're capable or comfortable working at; whether that's writing an entire novel in a week, finally finishing that stubborn chapter you've been working on for months, or even just throwing down some ideas for your next book - it's up to you.

I am definitely a deadline person - some people are, and some people aren't, and that's okay. All you have to figure out is what works best for you and your writing.

So how about you? Do you like setting deadlines while you're writing? Why/why not?