Deadline Panic And This Scribble
By Mr.e

This page is still blank . . .

Don’t even have a timely topic to run through the grinder. I do have a deadline.

Hey, now there’s a burning issue. If necessity is the mother of invention, then while I won’t be inventing anything new here, I will attempt to poke around in that desperate sovereignty of the writer with the daring deadline style.

On the day of the deadline the feeling is really tense. The insatiable demand for written material within a secure delivery system and an established readership will soon come sucking into the void if left unfilled.

Much like the boy who throws chunks of meat to the beasts to avoid being devoured in a bloodthirsty charge, this writer is at this very moment considering concocting something that will keep that demand at bay.

It would not be wrong to state that deadline panic is a constant companion, always lurking in the shadows of the writers’ office. It never goes away once you’ve committed to ‘put out’ (read: write) with regular, fresh and new material.

Perhaps the earliest taste of the prize for beating the deadline came early on for me while doing a stint at a northern community newspaper.

We (the editorial collective) had just put the Wednesdays issue to bed. I was appreciating having met the deadline by some heroic effort. I remember having assumed that stereotypical pose of the newspaperman. Desk chair pushed back, feet up and crossed on an open desk drawer, cigarette in hand. Suddenly the putrid taste of bile jerked me out of that moment of lunacy.

… now I’m rolling … off on some tangent, down some long forgotten rail spur of my mind.

I recognized the nature of the beast I had agreed to ride. It covered great territory and demanded copious amounts of input to satiate a ravenous appetite.

I actually went weak when I realized that the same Herculean effort (on my part at least) would again be demanded two days hence when the weekend issue was due out. And twice again the next week and on and on and ...

That memory is etched in stone. It’s a moment I even fondly remember from time to time when I begin to think of deadlines with the same fondness I used to anticipate ‘bath days’ when I was a kid.

No, deadlines, now bereft of their literal (if it ever was) meaning, serve purely to keep this writer bouncing between the weekly goal posts as I scribble on.

They don’t intimidate me anymore even though the thrill of a fast approaching deadline elicits keen anticipation and the need to fill pages. The limited time to render these weekly missives serves to focus the mind and let it rip.

Some days the words positively fly out of my fingertips. Ideas gel and are sketched out in advance. Those are productive and good moments. My gaze rapt, my face washed in the familiar glow of the computer screen inspiration flows and the fingers do that staccato dance on the keyboards at the altar of the present age.

Assembling some fact, some fiction and cobbling together an interesting list of words worth reading is a fair challenge.
And someone will always be curious enough to read almost anything. Really.