The Deadline of Death
When I first heard about the anthology Machine of Death last year, my first reaction was, "Oh, man, I wish I'd known about this in time to submit something for it." I loved the premise:
The machine had been invented a few years ago: a machine that could tell, from just a sample of your blood, how you were going to die. It didn't give you the date and it didn't give you specifics. It just spat out a sliver of paper upon which were printed, in careful block letters, the words DROWNED or CANCER or OLD AGE or CHOKED ON A HANDFUL OF POPCORN. It let people know how they were going to die.
The problem with the machine is that nobody really knew how it worked, which wouldn't actually have been that much of a problem if the machine worked as well as we wished it would. But the machine was frustratingly vague in its predictions: dark, and seemingly delighting in the ambiguities of language. OLD AGE, it had already turned out, could mean either dying of natural causes, or shot by a bedridden man in a botched home invasion. The machine captured that old-world sense of irony in death — you can know how it's going to happen, but you'll still be surprised when it does.
A few weeks ago, I found out there was going to be a second volume, and therefore I had a second shot at it. Great! I made a note to myself, placed it prominently in my workspace, and a little over a week ago, I asked myself, "say, when's the deadline on that, anyway? Oh — Friday, July 15th?" Urrrk.
So since I'd never actually read the first volume, I grabbed a copy and quickly read it. It was really, really good — I wish I'd had time to relax and enjoy reading it instead of mainlining the damn thing. While I was reading, I started brainstorming ideas, and came up with one I really liked when I was about a third of the way through it. I read on, desperately hoping that there wasn't already a story too similar to the idea I'd had, that I wouldn't have to abandon it and come up with something else.
Finished the book Wednesday night — well, 1:00 AM Thursday morning, really — and stayed up late the next two nights running, managing to slam out 4,000 words on Thursday night and 4,300 words on Friday. The deadline was set for midnight on Friday, and I finished writing at about 10:49. I knew I'd gone over the word count — they wanted subs to be under 7,500 words, so that left me a little over an hour to go back and trim the fat out of it.
I nearly lost track of time. I ended up setting an alarm for 11:55 to make sure I didn't miss it — that would have been enormously disappointing. In the end, I formatted the submission e-mail and fired it off with literally thirty seconds left before the deadline.
My heart was literally racing. It was tremendous fun, but hopefully I'll go a little easier on myself the next time I try something like this. Otherwise, there might just be a little slip of paper waiting for me that says, HEART ATTACK FROM WRITING DEADLINE.
