This Thursday marked the deadline for Jenni Moody’s and my first milestone on our novels. In case you haven’t been following along, Jenni and I are using a joint goal system to write our respective novels. The first goal was to have 10,000 words written by November 15^th. It seemed like a reasonable goal, and in fact it was, but still, I didn’t end up meeting it.

I got in touch with Jenni a few days before the 15^th and suggested we extend the deadline to the end of the month. Jenni, I think, would have been able to meet the goal—she was almost there by the time I asked for the deadline to be pushed back—but there was no way I was going to make it.

I was actually doing pretty well—building a steady momentum and feeling confident about my ability to meet the deadline—but then my mom came to visit for a week, and two days after we dropped her back at the airport I drove to Pittsburgh for the weekend to visit family and do a radio interview (I’ll talk about that some other time); then Amalie scratched the cornea of my right eye and I could hardly open my eye for a day; then Damien had minor surgery (he’s fine, don’t worry) and was recovering, leaving me almost solely responsible for Amalie for a week. Plus I had a bunch of papers to grade. Plus I had to do my tutoring hours.

Plus, Season Two of The Walking Dead became available on Netflix.

But the truth is, there are always reasons not to write. If you’re planning to wait until you have time to write that novel, I hate to break it to you, but that novel will never get written. And the real truth, even truer than that, is that I just didn’t manage my time well. I knew my mom was coming for a visit; I knew about the Pittsburgh trip. I knew when I would be collecting papers, when Damien’s surgery was scheduled for, when I would be scheduled for tutoring shifts. The only thing I didn’t know was coming was the scratched cornea, and that event—painful though it was—only caused me to lose a day.

So I should have planned ahead. I should have written extra words before my mom came. Then, I should have written extra, again, in that two day period between her departure and ours, for Pittsburgh. I should have restricted myself from watching The Walking Dead, or at least only allowed myself to watch it after I had written a specified word count for the day.

I could easily have met the deadline, but I didn’t. There’s no way to go back and change that now, so instead, I’m going to look ahead, to the new deadline, and make sure that I meet it. I’m going to remind myself that the culpability for this missed deadline lies with me, that the excuses I’m using are just that—excuses—that it isn’t fair to Jenni for me to keep pushing the deadlines back, that it isn’t fair to myself to keep not writing and not writing when the projects I want to write just keep piling up. That these stories aren’t going to be told unless I tell them.