17 Things Not to Do When On Deadline

1. Buy books you want to read. (Books you don’t want to read are fine.)

2. Leave the house. (Ever!)

3. Invite house guests to visit. (Obvious, right?)

4. Have house cleaners come (You will be tempted to chat. Believe me, even if they are not English-speaking. You will act out scenes from your book to ask them if it is working.)

5. Get a new puppy.

6. Peruse the web to find new hobbies.

7. Use time when you are stuck to do a marathon viewing of Buffy, The West Wing, or X-Files. (They won’t help. No, really, they won’t!)

8. Google symptoms of the new disease you believe you have. (It isn’t cancer, Tourett’s, renal failure, or lesions in the brain—I swear!)

9. Decide it is time to organize your high school memorabilia because, after all, you are writing about a kid in high school, right? (No. Not your high school. Just, no.)

10. Clean out your refrigerator. (As far as I can tell, it is NEVER time to clean out the refrigerator, but YMMV.)

11. Decide to do some yoga on the bare carpet. (First of all, carpet burn. Second of all, it gives you a chance to look at the state of the carpet. Bad plan.)

12. Look for recipes on-line. (You don’t have time to cook. Trust me! Now is the time for a raw-foods diet. Not with fresh fruits and vegetables, either!)

13. Go on tumblr. (There is never a good reason to be on tumblr.)

14. Go on youtube. (Ditto above.)

15. Call a friend for help. (You will lose all your friends this way.)

16. Do laundry. (There is really no point. See #2 above.)

17. Think about what prize you will buy yourself when you are finished with the deadlined project. (You will never be finished!)

And it goes without saying: Writing a list of things not to do while on deadline!