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When you’ve spent millions of dollars building a robot rover
to explore Mars and the planets will only be in the right alignment to launch
during one small window of time every two years, now THAT is a deadline not to
be missed.
If you saw the movie 'The Martian,' you'll recall all the conversation and tension around the launch windows and when supplies could be sent and when a rescue mission could be sent...
I supported the business aspects of various real life Mars missions
and other projects at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory during my career there
and trust me, the project planning at JPL is intricate and leaves nothing to
chance, even building in slack time to handle those unforeseen glitches and
gremlins that always arise when trying to do complicated one time trips to
other planets. There were literally thousands, if not millions of interim ‘due
dates’ in the project plan prior to the actual preferred launch date.
Including dates for all the reviews and other meetings needed to keep an eye on the schedule.
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Do I apply all that rigor to my own career as a self-published
author? Not really. I still break big jobs into smaller deliverables and keep an eye on my critical path…yeah, and
I also still speak the project language, as you can see. I track my deadlines
on my Outlook calendar and on a handwritten weekly To Do List that is
constantly changing, evolving, scribbled upon and reviewed. (I need that
tactile feedback of crossing things off and eventually crumpling up the paper
and throwing it away to start a fresh list.) I HATE missing a deadline or
causing others to do hurry up work to accommodate my not building in enough
slack time.
Bu this applies to the posts I write for USA Today/HEA,
AMAZING STORIES and other platforms, including this lovely, well built,
friendly gathering spot.
When it comes to my own novels, I have a really rough
editorial calendar sketched out, about a year ahead, to make myself see one
cannot perform three actions simultaneously, there are not more than twenty
four hours in a day and yes, I need to sleep. So that means I CANNOT expect to
get the next novel in my bestselling Badari Warriors series released while also
completing another ancient Egyptian paranormal romance, much less also writing
the long awaited sequel to my one fantasy romance. Not in the same 30-40 days.
And my editor has an iron clad thirty days to go over each of my manuscripts
and she can’t edit three of them simultaneously either.
I have a bad habit of ‘magical thinking,’ which Wikipedia
defines thusly: the belief that one's
thoughts by themselves can bring about effects in the world or that thinking
something corresponds with doing it. So I like to believe I can do three things
at once!
At least as a self-published author, I’ll never miss any
contractually required deadlines. I just have to ensure the flow of words and
books keeps going on a regular enough basis to meet that other hard and fast
deadline – paying the rent!
