As I write this post, my self-imposed deadline looms three days away: September 11, a date fraught and ominous.  I could try writing about All That, but instead I wanted to think about deadlines.

I began this blog four years ago, posting every week. So afraid was I that I would miss a deadline that I wrote five posts in advance, to have a cushion, before I went online. I was glad I did. Mastering Typepad, the blog host, took a couple of weeks, with many inquiries to customer service.

 

I have always given myself a deadline and announced it at the end of each post. Deadlines make you accountable to someone else. Without one, it’s hard to persist. My novel, for instance, has no one waiting for it. The sheer momentum of the story, the eagerness to see what happens next, the delight in seeing what I’ve written the day before – when these fail me, there’s nothing left but discipline and desire, and sometimes both disappear.

This summer all the air went out of my balloon, and for the first time I missed my blog deadline. I offered myself both reasons and excuses.

 

image:businessinsider.com

First, I went off to my fiftieth high school reunion. The weekend was rich with material. Between meals and parades and long conversations, the blog easily wrote itself. Then I lost my notebook on the trip home.

I could have recreated the piece, but upon reflection, I decided my thoughts were too snarky. This was an elite boys’ school that in 1974 had swallowed up Abbot Academy, the girls’ boarding school I attended and loved.

 

Draper Hall, Abbot Academy

On the first night of the reunion I was taken unexpectedly by white-hot rage, but the next morning, I calmed down and realized the 68-year-old men in their tie-dyed reunion t-shirts were not to blame for the loss of my alma mater.*

 

image: Tom Hafkenschiel

My reluctance to offend trumped my need for self-expression. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all, my mother told me, seriously hampering my development as a writer.

Second, two of my friends died this summer. Neither death was unexpected, but still…

 

image: Time.com

 

And finally, minor injuries and illnesses, combined with a complicated family trip, provided flimsy but effective excuses for procrastination.

Once our travels were over, I made several false starts, but none of the ideas caught fire, and I let them fizzle out. In the end, a month after the missed deadline, I posted the following apology: ‘To anyone who breathlessly awaits my monthly promised posts – I’m sorry…. I will be back by the end of August.’ The minute I wrote this, I felt confident again. It was a great relief. I was still a writer; I would be back. I immediately started writing, and posted my next piece on August 14.

I checked Thesaurus.com for a synonym for deadline, to avoid the tedious repetition of the word,and found exactly nothing. The closest they came was “time limit,” which is not the same thing, and lacks intensity. The Online Etymology Dictionary speculates that the word, first used in 1920, may have derived from the practice of Captain Henry Wirz, the notorious Civil War prison commander of Andersonville, who ordered guards to shoot any prisoner who crossed an imaginary line twenty feet or so inside the stockade.

 

Andersonville prison  image:georgiaencyclopedia.org

No one shoots a writer who misses a deadline. Instead she enters a strange state of listlessness. There’s no reason to start a piece on any particular day, and the days keep going by, filled with brooding and laundry. I’ve tried the ‘Write every day, regardless’ approach, and it works, but I keep letting go of it.

 

The Brooding Girl   image: Jean-Baptiste-Camille-Corot.org

FILLING MY DAYS

A Labor Day weekend plagued by adolescent angst has me in low spirits, and even with only three days to deadline I fiddled around on Facebook and played three games of Free Cell before beginning to write. As you can tell, I also zipped back to the internet, avoiding writing by consulting dictionary and thesaurus, but at least that provided some material, and I didn’t linger.

 

Goddamn Free Cell

I can’t say I am happy when I am writing, but I am certainly happiest when I have written. Writing makes me happy, and deadlines make me write.

 

*Alma mater: I wrote these words and thought, Oh! It means mother of my soul – how poetic, how true. But it doesn’t. According to the Online Etymology Dictionary, it means bountiful mother. Mrs. De, our fierce and peculiar Latin teacher at Abbot, would be ashamed of me.