It looks like the Kickstarter for that anthology has funded, so I’ll have my first published short story (aside from the ones I published myself relating to the Enchanted, Inc. world). I need to try writing more of those because I think it’s a good exercise, and it’s a good way to get my name out to new readers (and get paid for doing so), assuming I can sell them. You can still get in on it through Feb. 29 if you want to get the various rewards. If not, you can get the book when it’s published.

I’m really, really close to finishing the draft I’m working on. I should hit my target word count today, but there will still be more story to go, so I may write the ending next week instead of rushing through it to hit some arbitrary deadline. Rushing something and then having to take longer in revisions will probably end up taking longer than taking a day or two more to write a good ending.

I still have that journalistic instinct of doing whatever it takes to hit a deadline. It’s even worse for me because I worked in TV news, so there’s no such thing as “a little late.” We went on the air at six, whether or not the stories were done, so they had to be done. If you’ve seen the movie Broadcast News, in which a character has to run an obstacle course through the office to get the tape to the control room just in time for that story to go on the air, I’ve actually done that. It wasn’t my story that came down to the wire. I was just the intern they made run the tape. But there was no obstacle course. When they had a tape being run, they’d shout to clear the halls, and then people stayed out of the way so the intern had a clear path.

I suppose that’s obsolete now that everything’s digital. They can send the story with the push of a button, and it’s instantly ready to go on the air. No intern standing over the editor’s shoulder in the edit bay, ready to grab the tape as soon as it comes out of the editing machine while people shout, “Clear the hall!”

Anyway, I seem to still have that mentality about writing deadlines, even if I set them myself. It’s good to be prompt and to hit deadlines, but in publishing it’s not that tight. They can deal with books being weeks late (in fact, they plan on authors being at least a few weeks late). A few minutes won’t kill them.