I have a little confession to make. Four weeks ago, I made a small mistake that snowballed massively.
My plan for the school holidays was to spend the days finalising a piece of writing for a competition. My leave started after work on June 28th; the submission date was July 10th. Easy. I gave myself the first weekend to do whatever I wanted and sat down on July 1st, at 7 am, to start shaping my writing.
I write by putting everything I want on the page and then reducing it by rewording, checking for duplication, and removing things that don’t belong in that particular piece of writing. I keep drafts, updating the number each time I make significant changes, so if I want to put something back in, I haven’t lost it.
This strategy, along with giving myself enough time to work on my writing, served me well at university. I had my assessments in front of the lecturer a week early so I could get feedback and make any necessary changes. That part doesn’t work in writing competition submissions because nobody gives feedback, but the plan to achieve my goals in stages is still valid, especially the bit about having it done by the due date.
Don’t get me wrong – I don’t hand in a single assignment before the due date, nor do I submit to any writing competitions early. I’m too worried I’ve done something wrong, and I check and check until it’s time to let it go. But the work isn’t left until the last minute, only its submission.
At 7 am on July 1st, Western Australian time, I also realised I hadn’t checked my second email for a while. My email company has a beef with one email address, which belongs to a publishing company. From time to time, I get microfiction accepted for 50 Give or Take through Vine Leaves Press, so I need their emails.
I set up a second email account for their communications but often forget to check it. Before starting to write, I had a peek for any news. The first email said, ‘You have three days to get your submissions in’. Confused, I checked the date of the email. June 28. Hmmm… I followed the link to the competition I planned on entering, and there, in big, bold, unmissable numbers, was the competition closing date – July 1st.
Everything in me sunk – my heart, my stomach, my jaw. Well, technically, my jaw dropped, but either way, I sat there staring at the number, my head spinning. July 1st. Today. Not July 10th. Far out.
I noticed a little asterisk next to the number: Midnight, UTC+2. Oh, good, another time zone. I did a bit of googling and discovered UTC+2 was six hours behind Western Australia. Midnight Monday at UTC+2 was 6 am Tuesday Perth time. That meant I had 23 hours to get my submission ready.
The problem was that I had written everything I wanted to say but sat way over the suggested 50,000-80,000 words. My tally was 106,000 words. That’s a lot of words to lose in less than a day.
My manuscript word count had been even higher, but leading up to the holidays, I had removed a few thousand. To lose 26,000 more in just under 1400 minutes would be a huge task.
Have you heard the term ‘Kill your darlings’? It means to stop using strategies you overindulge in (e.g., always starting a story with conversation) or descriptions you continually write (e.g., me giving as many characters as possible red hair because I adore it), or little stories within a larger story that you want to tell, not necessarily because they need to be there. I had planned to spend ten days removing such darlings, with the luxury of time and no obligations bar an appointment here or there. But now, I had less than one day. My only option was to be brutal.
I didn’t kill my darlings. I slaughtered them. I was merciless. I let my inner critic free, and it went to town: ‘You don’t need to say that.’ ‘You’re just storytelling.’ ‘This is your story, not this story.’ ‘Nice words, but they don’t belong here.’
While working, I was Messengering with a friend, so I know that by 5 pm, after 10 hours of writing (or is it unwriting?), I had only culled 8000 words. By 6:30 pm, another 2000 were deleted. I had just under 12 hours to get rid of 13,000 more – if I could stay awake and think clearly that long.
I’m not a night owl. I’m not a ‘write all night ‘or ‘get up early and keep going’ person either. Thanks to a brain injury, once I hit the wall, wherever it might be placed that day, I’m done. I feel sick, my legs can’t move, and I know if I don’t sleep, I will puke.
I tried to pace myself – breakfast when I started at 7 am, a shower at midday to help me think clearly and lunch at 4 pm with a 30-minute break to stare mindlessly at the TV.
By 6 pm, everyone who had gone out to work was home again. They all tried to talk to me, and each got the same response – ‘Please leave me alone. I made a mistake, and I have to get this in by midnight tonight.’ They all kindly walked away, holding their thoughts until I could concentrate on them properly.
My dinner was put in the microwave to wait until I could have a break to eat it. I’m not sure eat is the right word – I don’t remember how it tasted, and I only consumed it for the energy I needed to continue focusing. While I ate, my family got 30 minutes to throw their news at me before I headed back to the computer.
At 10 pm, my husband went to bed. So did the son who gets up early. Each dared to interrupt me briefly to say goodnight. The son with autism couldn’t handle that his mum, who is usually in bed by 9:30 pm, was still at the computer. He kept doing the rounds to check if I had gone to bed yet. Our last interaction was at 1 am, well after when he should have been asleep, to remind me I had said my submission was due at midnight. Then I explained it was midnight somewhere else in the world, and while I could still type, I would keep going.
By that time, I had gotten my work down to 84,000 words. Then I got stuck. Everything in the work was what I wanted to write. All the words left were important. Not everything packs itself neatly into a word limit! I knew it was a competition, but I noted the company had written ‘Should be’ next to the range. I figured if a publishing company meant ‘must’, they would use that word, and they’d chosen ‘should’, so hopefully, that meant there was some leeway.
I changed tack and went through my words, looking for errors, particularly in my use of full stops and commas in relation to speech marks. I’m not good at working out when the full stop comes before or after. While doing so, I found another thousand words to remove.
I submitted my work at 2:30 am, with just over two hours left. The word count was 83,000. I had somehow managed to remove 23,000 words in less than 24 hours. Then I put myself to bed, astonished that I had managed to function for that long and way too wired to sleep. Instead, I lay there congratulating myself on having a go anyway and telling myself just to breathe and try to relax. I knew Hubby would be up at 5:15 am, so I had very little chance of getting any sleep. But I was on holiday, and so it was all okay.
Well, it would have been all okay, except for the bit where I had three important appointments set for Tuesday. I hadn’t planned on working so long or going to bed so late, but sometimes you just have to go for it. I got through the day with a lot of giggling from exhaustion and a tear or two while talking to the physiotherapist.
I also kept my elbows covered because when I’d showered that morning to try to wake myself up a little, I discovered an unexpected consequence of writing for an extended amount of time. While typing furiously, my arms had been skimming across the armrest of my chair, and I had lost the skin off both elbows. I only realised when the hot water stung my raw arms instead of soothing them.
As with my other submissions, I don’t expect to win the competition. For me, the victory is in submitting at all, given my mix-up of the date. I checked that date three times in the weeks before my holiday, and each time, I saw the 1st as the 10th. I believe in my story, though, and I did whatever it took to get it submitted. But next time, I’ll ask someone else to double check the date!
A Glorious Mess 