What’s the wildest reason you’ve ever missed a deadline? Asking because I almost missed mine last week because, against my better judgment, I turned on The Mountain Goats’ The Sunset Tree—an album most semi-depressed people will know for the superb “This Year” but which the depressed-depressed will know as a front-to-back no-skips masterpiece—approximately 23.5 hours before my revision was due. Rookie mistake!!! You want me to maintain composure with “there’ll always be a few things, maybe several things, that you’re gonna find really difficult to forgive” piping straight into my ears? I think not.
So I almost had to turn my book in a little late because when the dawn-of-the-final-day-24-hours-remain Majora’s Mask meme moment hit, I was actively crying at my desk. And not even about my book.
But I ended up making my deadline! I turned that book in (again) last week! It’s the same book as it was last time I told you that I turned my book in, but also, it kind of isn’t the same book? I did rewrite at least 90% of it:

But I don’t really want to talk about this revision, honestly! It was hard. I’m proud of how hard I tried. I wanted to chuck my computer down some very steep stairs at least once daily. I had a stress dream last night that my agent called to tell me that the book was “aggressively Catholic” (my agent would never phrase or deliver feedback this way) (also, and perhaps more pertinently, no one in this book is explicitly Catholic; the protagonist is literally just Italian).
So honestly I’d love to not think about it for a bit!! I do kind of want to talk about deadlines, though. As a concept, but mostly my experience with them.
Something weird about publishing deadlines is that—much of the time, but, crucially, not always—they are kind of fake. You do need to stay on some sort of schedule in order to be on track to publish by certain seasons/months, and your editor does have to be able to plan out time to read! They’re busy people!! But on a nitty-gritty specific-day level, the deadlines don’t get really strict until you get into copyedits and pass pages. Those deadlines are very real, and editors will make sure you know it, because you’re starting to bump up against print schedules, which obviously are very important when it comes to a book getting to shelves on time. If the book’s late getting to the printer, and therefore it’s late getting printed, and therefore it’s late getting shipped—those are some real problems!
But I’m not at copyedits, and I am certainly not at pass pages. This was a developmental edit, which means we’re still in the “we’re thinking we’ll publish in [insert season here], but let’s see how things go” phase. The deadlines are, accordingly, not specific in the same way.
Which is, I have to admit, really hard for me. The thing is, as soon as my brain catches one tiny whiff of “this isn’t real, and nothing really bad will happen if you submit it slightly late,” all bets are off. The pressure just isn’t there, and pressure is the only thing that has ever reliably gotten me to finish a creative project. That’s not a great quality, and I know it, but alas!!
When I did Pitch Wars (a now-defunct writing mentorship program), for example, I primarily applied because I wanted a date by which my book had to be finished. I applied in 2020 and did not get in, and honestly, I wasn’t all that disappointed, because I never thought that I would! I knew that draft was trash!!! Still, if I didn’t legitimately apply, my brain would realize the deadline wasn’t real, and therefore I wouldn’t finish the book. So, after not getting selected in the 2020 round, when I wanted to rewrite the book and try to make it not so sad and bad and boring (my first drafts are kind of always sad and bad and boring), I used the 2021 Pitch Wars application period to motivate me again. Except that time I got in.
The program involved a stressful few months (with a lot of deadlines!!!), but it was very good for me, too. It forced me to learn how to do a revision that wasn’t just chucking the whole book out and starting over wholesale; it forced me to learn how to recognize which of the bones were good bones and worth keeping. It introduced me to some wonderful people who I am still so grateful to know. And it got me to consider that it might be worth trying to query, at least—even if it went nowhere, the effort could be worth it.
Querying did go somewhere, which is very lucky, but sometimes I have to stop and appreciate that my entire current career is 95% owed to the fact that I just needed a fucking deadline, any deadline and I happened to see someone tweet about Pitch Wars back in September 2020.
I’m now at an imprint that is (in my experience, I know these things always vary depending on the author/editor/book/genre/year/any number of factors) not overly strict with deadlines. Artistically, this is good for me, because I’m a person who absolutely needs time to rethink and rewrite a book, after I know what I’m trying to say, and I just don’t think that can happen on a quick publishing schedule. Sometimes, maybe always?, the extra time is worth it.
Logistically, though, just because of how I personally work? The flexibility, while lovely, can be rough. I can never tell when I’m writing slowly because it’s what I & the book need, versus when I’m writing slowly because I’m procrastinating. It takes as long as it takes is a saying for a reason, but also sometimes it takes as long as it takes because I’m a piece of shit!
I’ve always thought about deadlines as a very consequence-based activity (meaning, “if I don’t turn in X project by Y date, Z will happen, and Z is bad”), but really, the biggest consequence of missing early-draft deadlines in publishing is often…your book just might come out later. Mine, for example, was originally supposed to be a 2025 book, and now we’re aiming for the second half of 2026!
To be clear, those delays can have huge consequences if you’re relying on an advance payment by a certain date. Delaying one draft can potentially delay every payment on your contract.1 However, because I have financial anxiety so bad it could probably be a diagnosis all on its own, I have carefully organized my life in such a way that I don’t need to depend on those payments coming by an exact date (which, of course, is not an option for many authors).
(Side note: you know those things that really come across in an author’s writing without being intentional? I am fully aware that “money anxiety” is one of my things, in that I’ve never written a character who doesn’t budget and I probably never will, because that character would give me a stomachache every time I sat down to write.)
For me, the timing of my payments is not life-or-death. Therefore, it is not an effective deadline incentive. Also, I know my editor and my agent will be as understanding as possible if I need an extension, which I appreciate about them and wouldn’t change for anything, but which is also…not an effective deadline incentive!!
Still, the timeline was quite reasonable, and I guess I just felt like…why can’t I finish this on time? If I can’t do it now, when can I?
I still felt, for the last two weeks of April, like it just wasn’t going to happen. Even though the situation was reasonable in theory, the BOOK was very fucking challenging to write. That challenging stuff is a large part of the reason I wanted to write this book in the first place, but man—some days I genuinely did have to set the whole thing aside.
I think that’s fine! I think that’s part of making art. What it isn’t, though, is conducive to hitting a deadline.
So, at the risk of sounding toxically positive, for the last couple weeks, I started trying to think about it less like “if I don’t turn it in by the end of April, [insert bad thing here] will happen” and more like “if I DO turn it in by the end of April, maybe that will make room for [insert good/productive thing here] to happen.”
I don’t mean, like, “if I turn this book in by the end of April, maybe it’ll give me good karma and I’ll magically become a bestseller/it will somehow be a better book than if I turned it in in May/everyone will stand up and clap for me doing the bare minimum.” What I mean is: maybe, if I turned that book in by the end of April, it would give us time to do another round of edits, where I can focus in on those subplots that I know still feel under-cooked, and therefore I’ll end up with a better book in the end; maybe we’d stay on track for a 2026 publication, and I think I would be really proud to make that happen, or at least know that I did what I could to make it happen; maybe, if the book still really isn’t working, we could have a non-panicked conversation about why, and figure out what to do about it; maybe I could have a fucking rest.
When my alarm went off in the morning for those two weeks, as corny as this sounds, I started telling myself I needed to get up right then, not three to ten snoozes later, because even though no one else was counting on me to do it, I’d promised myself I would try. And honestly, it seemed weird to me that I was sort of always crossing my fingers when I promised things to myself.
It worked for me. I mean, in full transparency, I have not gotten out of bed before 8am a single time since, and maybe it was just the pure necessity, but for those two weeks—it worked, and it was just as hard as hitting a creative deadline has always been for me, but it felt so fucking good not to be late to my own shit for once.
So I turned my book in, and I turned it in on time, and now it’s not my problem for a few minutes, except that I did get a copy printed and will be reading it soon, which I’m very nervous about. A couple friends have it right now, and that also makes me nervous. My editor has it, and that ALSO makes me nervous!!
At the same time—Sarah laughed so hard at this one line that I knew would get them, and that is all I’m ever truly going for when I write. Also, when I picked up my new spiral-bound copy, the print shop guy said he loves my title, and that he will personally call my editor and tell her so if I want!!! So how bad can it all be, really?

Notes & Miscellany
FIRST—one of my favorite reads of the year, Victoria Zeller’s One of the Boys, comes out next Tuesday, 5/13. You should preorder it! Preorder a signed copy, even!! It’s funny, and it’s beautiful, and it’s emotional, and I loved it, and I think you will, too. You know when people are like “I didn’t know how much I wanted this book until I read it”? I knew exactly how much I wanted a trans lesbian sports book with a protagonist like Grace, and then Victoria just GAVE us that! If you’re interested in getting this book into the hands of queer teens who need it (and helping out some queer orgs while you’re at it!), I also recommend checking out Victoria’s website—she and her publisher have partnered with a BUNCH of indie bookstores around the country to do book/donation drives. (Many of these drives are open past publication day, so if you’re not reading this until after 5/13, you can still participate!)
Zines are coming along nicely!! They’re printed & trimmed & folded & bound. Here’s all 275 of them. I’m now packaging them up in their little envelopes. If you didn’t see this on my Instagram stories—we raised over $3,200 for Transgender Law Center & Point of Pride!! Thank you!!!
We had a friend visit us for a few days, which is always lovely, and also we got to watch a bunch of movies, including This Is Spinal Tap and A Cinderella Story, which probably gives away that the friend was Alicia Thompson, because who else occupies the middle of that Venn diagram QUITE so thoroughly? We also watched 13 Going on 30 (hence the “Vienna” lyric title), which features one of the best childhood-friends-to-lovers lines of all time, which I mention so I can say: I’m going to be Alicia’s conversation partner next month at The Novel Neighbor in St. Louis, 6/13 at 6pm, to discuss her new book, Never Been Shipped, which I adore and which is the EPITOME of childhood-friends-to-lovers excellence. FTL is one of my all-time favorite tropes (maybe THE all-time favorite??), and Alicia used to NOT LIKE IT. So please know I’ll be grilling her over that (in a fun way), and I can’t wait. I’m getting the inside scoop on this scandal. I will remind you closer to the event, obviously, but just laying the groundwork now!!
I’m finally playing Wind Waker on GameCube. One game at a time, I will fulfill my transgender destiny and play every Zelda.2
I’ve been watching a lot of baseball (fork found in kitchen, etc. etc.) and I just want to say? I don’t care that this happened to this random man. It should’ve happened to ME.
My advance, for example, is paid out in sevenths. Sevenths!! Lol. Lmao, even. For a two-book deal, I got one payment as a signing bonus, and then for each manuscript, I get paid upon “delivery & acceptance,” which basically means “when it goes to copyedits,” then also on publication day, and then again on the one-year anniversary of publication day. I would argue that “one year after publication” is not so much “stretching the definition of ‘advance’” as it has “fully abandoned ‘advance’ as a concept,” but, y’know—that’s publishing!!
Except for the ones that I don’t want to play :-)
I am very much a "deadline or it doesn't happen" person, too. It's far from ideal, but at least you're making it work! I once read something where someone wanted to write a book but kept stalling out, so their spouse was like "if you don't finish it in six months I will donate a bunch of money in your name to your least favorite political candidate" and while it's not something I want for myself, I respect the process. (Also, I think if you're going to tie your mental health to anything sports related, Cal is a good choice this season!!)
as usual I have about a million things I want to say in reply to this, but for now: I was *so* happy I got to see you, I'm *so* glad we finally watched Spinal Tap together (along with many other great movies), and I am *so* excited for St. Louis!!!!!!! oh and also "It takes as long as it takes is a saying for a reason, but also sometimes it takes as long as it takes because I’m a piece of shit!" I feel friendship obligated to say you're not a piece of shit but also the phrasing of this did make me snort laugh lol