By Dame Toni
I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.
Douglas Adams, English humorist & science fiction novelist (1952 – 2001)
News flash: Life doesn’t stop for deadlines.
I probably have no business complaining about having a deadline. Having a deadline means I have a contract, and having a contract means I am being paid to write. And while, in my rational moments, I recognize that this is a good thing, I’m now down to 72 hours and there are several big chunks of my book missing. As in completely missing. As in not written yet. 
In some novel I read (can’t remember the title right now) there’s this chapter in which an author goes into a kind of writing trance and writes around the clock for three days. He’s so engrossed in the process that he’s not even aware of how much time has passed, or if he ate or slept (his family has been dropping off food and drink, taking away dirty plates and cups, and throwing a blanket over him when he naps on a loveseat in his office). At the end of the three days he looks at his finished (brilliant) manuscript and barely remembers how it came to pass.
*Sigh.*
I wish I could snap my fingers and go into that kind of trance. In the past, I’ve gotten carried away while writing, but never for more than an hour or two. And, even if I could make it happen at will, I live alone, so there is no one to toss the occasional sandwich at me.
And then there’s life. A cat disappears and evokes hours of fruitless searching. The company that I’ve been trying to talk into hiring me as a permanent, part-time employee has their own killer deadline, and the office manager calls me in a panic. Because I need to demonstrate my reliability (and pay the past-due cable bill), I agree to help out. The car breaks down. The roof leaks, and the weather turns rainy. I run out of cream for my coffee and have to go to the grocery store. Fox airs the series premier of Terra Nova. My brother has a family emergency and needs my help.
Those of you yearning for book deals, first, be careful what you wish for. Second, impose deadlines anyway. Yup. Make your own. And, when life happens, deal with it.
An old critique partner of mine, back before she got published, had been writing aimlessly for years. She spent a lot of time at it, but if you asked her what she did, she would say, “I’m a housewife.”
Once she started working with our critique group, she started making deadlines for herself, so that she would always have new pages to show us. One day she came to a critique meeting and told us a story. She said that she’d accompanied her husband to a formal business function, and was being introduced at the opening cocktail party. When someone asked her what she did, she said, “I’m a writer.” She didn’t plan this consciously, it just came out. She told me and our other critique partners that, once she started giving herself goals and specific deadlines, she started to really feel like a writer for the first time.
She had tears in her eyes when she told us about it.
So, if you haven’t already, go ahead and make yourself a deadline. I dare you.