Ian M Rountree

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The Trouble with a Lack of Deadlines

March 11, 2010 by Ian 2 Comments

I really dropped the ball on The Dowager Shadow this week, and it’s killing me.

I went nearly a week without a post, and then three in a row, missed a day… And so on. Now, we’ve hit the end of Chapter Two, and Chapter 3 begins on Friday. Posts are scheduled right up until the end of the month, but it hurts anyway because it’s a funny way to behave for a project that’s finished for all intents and purposes, but for breaking it up and posting it all.

So why did it happen?

The same reason any beginning project has hiccups – I didn’t set myself appropriate deadlines, and let other things get in the way of the project. You must have had this happen, am I right?

That’s the trouble with fluid deadlines. If you don’t have a schedule – an editorial calendar, or a goal for full publication – you’re bound to let something slip eventually. Luckily for me, that was this week, when Dowager Shadow has all of twenty subscribers and no one is commenting, rather than two months from now when it’s finally got traction.

But isn’t it amazing that this happens at all? I mean, productivity happens when you want it to, doesn’t it? And I wanted the novel do go off without a single hiccup, which was why I spent six months planning the launch before I launched. Silly, right?

But what I failed to do – what so many of us fail to do in our planning – was set hard and fast goals.

And how can you win if you’re not keeping score?

If you’re unfamiliar with The Dowager Shadow, or need to get caught up, check out the Table of Contents page and start from Prologue One, “Shadow Hunter” – it all follows from there.

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Filed Under: Blog Tagged With: blogs, dowager shadow

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