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Defeat by Deadline

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
Not everything is a success story.
Today I had to cancel the pre-order of the tenth book in my series Lost Dogs. There was too much book left to write, and not enough time left to write it. It was a pretty tough decision to make, but the difficulty lay in the making, and not in whether or not to do it.
The other option was to release an unfinished book, and that just wasn't going to happen.

It feels a bit like failure to not be able to deliver the book on time, as I'd said I would, but I guess that's part of life.

I believe the book will be better for it. I know I will be less stressed, and I think that in the bigger scheme of things, it won't be that big a deal - but it's still no fun. Sometimes, bad stuff happens, and we just have to deal.

It's a life less, but one I wouldn't recommend.
 

skip.knox

toujours gai, archie
Moderator
I hate writing deadlines. I haven't done pre-orders and don't plan on doing any. I might if it were for a book I'd completed, but that happy day has not yet happened.

Anyways ... learning experience! (I can hear you grumble from clear over here <g>)
 
A pre-order for a book that hasn't been written yet? I don't think writing deadlines like that are a good idea. Some stories turn out to need more work than expected.
 

Demesnedenoir

Myth Weaver
I hate writing deadlines but they love me... so to speak. A hard deadline, if reasonable, is a great motivator for me. The trouble enters when life doesn’t give a crap that you have a deadline, heh heh.
 

Svrtnsse

Staff
Article Team
Anyways ... learning experience! (I can hear you grumble from clear over here <g>)
Totally a learning experience. Most of the grumbling about it is behind me now, though. It took quite a lot of time work up the resolve to pull my head out of the sand and admit it wasn't going to work out.

A pre-order for a book that hasn't been written yet? I don't think writing deadlines like that are a good idea. Some stories turn out to need more work than expected.
It worked pretty well for me for the previous books, but it really only takes one bad link to break the chain, so to speak.
Most of my books so far have been novella length, and I was able to meet the deadlines without too much trouble, so I was feeling pretty confident in myself. Life happened, though, and this book is going to be in the 80-90k word range, with a more complex story than the previous ones.
I'll definitely try to avoid putting myself in this spot again. I know it's my own fault, but I still want to talk about it. Maybe it'll make someone else think twice before trying to do the same thing.

The trouble enters when life doesn’t give a crap that you have a deadline, heh heh.
True story. Life didn't care about my deadline, and neither did the story.
The only one who really cared was me, and I decided it would be easier to bend than to break. ;)
 
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