Deadlines Deadlines Deadlines

I feel like every few months I come back to this blog with more promises that I'm probably going to wind up breaking. Well, now I don't have pesky school as an excuse for not living up to said promises! If only that were a blessing.

As a fresh college graduate who aspires to be a published writer and novelist someday, it would do me good if I actually bothered getting my works out there in the world. Here's where that's going to start, hopefully. My biggest problem with writing is speed - I go slowly, or sometimes not at all. I'm very good at tricking myself into thinking that a paragraph is a hearty day's work, which would maybe be more forgivable if the next day wasn't just a re-tooling of that same paragraph. It takes me weeks to get our 10-15 pages of a 1st draft, and I won't even be revising and editing anything else. As you can see, this production line has some quirks in the system.

So now I'm doing something that no sane person would ever do to him/herself: deadlines. Not just with blogging, but in general with my writing. For instance, the short story I'm working on now must be completed by tomorrow, at any point before going to bed. Will the story be good? Probably not. But it'll be a completed 1st draft, which is really what I need right now. Here's my general schedule of deadlines:

• Every Friday: something creative to blog, be it poetry, short stories, scripts, etc. My expectation is that it'll vary between poetry and fiction on a bi-weekly basis. So poetry today (at least 3, any less requires a longer poem to be involved), fiction next Friday, then poetry again, etc. till the end of time.
• Every Friday: a Nobody's Rambler blogpost.
• Every Other Saturday: a completed 1st draft of a short story. 

It's complicated, but it works out nicely. Today, I post 3 poems and a post on Nobody's Rambler. Tomorrow, I finish a short story. Next week I split my time between starting a new story and editing a story to be ready to post on Friday. That gives me one week to be heavy on writing, then the next week to be heavy on editing. 

Of course, all of this works out perfectly while I'm jobless and have nothing to fill my days except writing, reading, and applying to jobs, but if I come into roadblocks when I do find a job, I'll either adjust accordingly or kick my ass into gear. Either way, shit will get done! 

So that's my typical back-on-track blogpost. Let's see if I have a need to make another post like this in a few months like usual!