Judgement Day (Patricia Potter)

Today (Friday) is Judgement Day.

Every writer has those. The day the book is due. Well, for me, really past due. But this is the day that is the absolutely the last day I can fulfill that nasty little delivery clause in my contract. The day my career hangs in the balance.

Some call it Deadline Hell.

There are two kinds of writers. The plotters and the fly-by-the seat-of-the-pants crowd. I am of the latter persuasion.

I do not say that proudly.


The simple fact is I am one of the latter because I am lazy. The plotter spends hours upon hours plotting out their characters, plot and conflict. It is labor intensive on the front side.

Our crowd goes in another direction. We figure that if we develop strong enough characters they will take over and do all the work. We are the optimists. Our characters are going to save us from ourselves.

I am here to tell you it doesn’t always happen. A funny thing happened on my march to this judgment day. A bit player tried to upstage my hero. He wasn’t even in the synopsis (which never bears any resemblance to the final product anyway). He was a device. Necessary to make a point. However, he became intensely disgruntled with that role and shouldered his way into a secondary role.

Not to be content with that promotion, he persisted. Then everything fell apart. The hero was not a happy camper. He rebelled. He stopped telling his story.
A week before judgment day I had a hero wanna-be, a resentful hero and a heroine bemused by the whole mess. No one was doing what they were supposed to be doing.

Time marched on. Unfortunately the story did not. I tried bribery. I will give that wanna-be a book of his own. He knew I was lying, though. I had already decided my next historical project was to be a western series, and my nemesis was a 16th Century blackguard.

Two days before judgment day, and the stalemate continued. Nearly eighty pages to go, and I have no ending. Too late to join the plotting crowd.
Try that and I would have to write a whole new book.

Probably no one knows panic like a writer does at deadline

So there I was. Three-thirty in the morning with two days to go. Staring at a blank screen. Remember all those movies about writers when they sit there and crumple pages in their hand and throw them into the waste basket? I wanted to throw the computer into that basket. Fortunately, it’s too heavy at that time of morning.

Okay. I surrender. I’ll give him a book of his own. As long as he stops outshining my hero and leads me into the path of creativity again. No, I will not wait until I finish the western series. He can be next. I swear.

The keys on the computer start to work again. Frantically. The hero has to shove the interloper aside in his rush to save the heroine, but all is well, and the heroine saves them both.

I know not sleep. I finish at 10:45 p.m. on the night before it HAS to be in my editor’s office. The Fed-Ex office is ten minutes away (thank the saints I live in Memphis, the headquarters of Fed Ex). They are my best friends. They are not surprised to see me roll up, tires screeching, as they start to lock the doors. This has happened before. Frequently.

Each time I finish a book, I swear to join the plotters. They do not have to cope with rebellion. They have matters under control. I am thinking this on my way home from Fed Ex tonight, having had six hours sleep in the past fifty hours.

My wanna-be, though is already banging on my brain. Give me my head, he says. And, sigh, I suppose I shall.

It is now three a.m. I hope you were not expecting much.

G'night.