PBW’s Left Behind and Loving it series continues. Keep checking her site for all the participating links! Plus she is giving away a ton of awesome prizes. Including some copies of Animal Attraction, woot.

Whic segues nicely into my topic, since I am working on the sequel to Animal Attraction, which has no contract and no deadline. I’d originally proposed a spinoff, not a true sequel, but one that had returning characters and a different protagonist/central romance. That got turned down, which is why my next book from St. Martin’s will be totally unrelated. But the world and characters would not leave me alone, so I proposed a true sequel after that; the ongoing story of Chandra and the pack, the panthers, new friends and enemies, and more complications.  Also declined. 

 So now I have Red Queen, which I have referred to here as "the crack book" slowly gaining chapters and pages because I can’t help myself and because so many readers said they wanted it. But there is no deadline, which means two things.

 It’s easy to put it on the back burner. It would be very easy to hit a hard spot and stop working on it all together. Because nobody is going to break my knee caps if I don’t sit down and write it. 

Having a deadline does give focus and purpose to work. You know it has a market. You know it has a due date. You know kneecappers will loom in your future if you can’t work out how they get from point A to point B. All of this does help push the tush into the chair and keep the fingers typing. 

 It’s entirely possible that I never would have finished The Gripping Beast, never would have published the Sirens series I had outlined (which is still shy 1 book and a spinoff, Harold and Dane respectively) at all, had I not sold the thing to Samhain. And then I HAD to finish it.

So there are obvious Pros to having a deadline. You have an external commitment to finish the work and you know it’s going to get read. You also know you’re going to get paid for the work. Work you may or may not get paid for doesn’t have the same urgency when you need to buy school clothes, trust me.

Are there any Cons?

Yes. A deadline may force work to get done, but it may also force it to get done too soon, without enough time for the idea to ripen or the book to deepen.  It might mean that you write a book that would pay the bills instead of the book you would rather have written but couldn’t sell, and perhaps that unsold book would have been better. (Or not; sometimes marketability really is a true test of whether an idea is ready and/or solid.) Sometimes the pressure of the deadline keeps your tush in the chair racking up word count instead of a pause to rethink, leading to chapters that have to be entirely re-written. And finally, you may be tempted to abandon good work because it’s too hard, nobody wants it anyway, and you have to do something else to pay the bills that doesn’t leave much energy for the spec project.

So what’s a writer to do? Well, if possible, always have a spec project while meeting the current deadline. Because you never know when you might get a chance to run with it. Also, it never hurts to have inventory. It can be epublished, self-published as a promotional free read,  or simply remind you every time you work on it that publishing is nice but at the heart of everything you are still a writer and writing for its own sake is its own reward. And not burying yourself in the maximum number of deadlines possible allows time for that.