I have a love/hate relationship with deadlines. I'm pretty good at most of them, though there is frequently a last-minute rush and panic before I hit a major deadline. Finishing Flight is a good example, the last few weeks of December was a rush while I try to finish it.

This is actually why NaNoWriMo doesn't really work for me. I have a deadline (50k) words but I have trouble going past the deadline. When I did NaNoWriMo, I wrote 55k words and then everything stopped. That novel is still sitting on my repository in a folder called morning-zombies. I suspect I'll never get back to it.

The serial I'm working on is one of those. My goal is to post a chapter every week on Sunday. Six to eight thousand words each but I've written four and twelve thousand word chapters too. But, as soon as i write that chapter... splort... writing stops. It doesn't matter if I finished with two hours before the deadline or two days, I just can't seem to write ahead.

Last week, I hit that nasty wall in the serial. Normally, the "mid-hump" blahs in writing happen somewhere around the 60k word mark, but this one hit the 300k. But, I realized, I just want to be done. So, I pushed really hard to get past the one chapter to write two.

And succeeded, but it was painful.

Now, the big question is, can I keep doing it for 10-13 more weeks and finish out the entire serial. Or will I find myself slowing down and getting lazy until I'm once again struggling to finish before the deadline?

I'm hoping that I keep writing. While I have people "promising" to buy it when it becomes an ebook, I have other projects to work on and I think I'm looking forward to the end.