Welcome to my Deadline Formula Calendar, where you are going to learn how to choose and meet writing deadlines, makes those deadlines every time and finally establish real accountability for your writing. Here’s how: Use your cursor to hover over a date. See the description of something that happened on this date? These are some of my favorite emotional high holy days of the year.
What are your emotional high holy days? First read through some of mine, think about that question and then keep reading below the calendar.
| Mon | Tue | Wed | Thu | Fri | Sat | Sun |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| « Mar | May » | |||||
1April, 1 2024All Fools DayNow here’s a day for us all to write an essay. Oh, right: Maybe you’ve never been foolish about anything. For me, parenting is the single life subject in which I’ve never learned anything by being right. How about you? I’ve got a Parenting Category on my blog, to which I’ll be adding my various published columns on that hottest of topics. | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 |
| 8 | 9 | 10 | 11April, 11 2024National Pet DayI love my dog more than I love most of my friends, and he certainly makes more sense to me than they do. Got a pet story? Here’s your day. See my dog memoir — or dogoir — category for some inspiration. | 12 | 13April, 13 2024Thomas Jefferson bornOn this day in 1743 was the birth of Thomas Jefferson. President, statesman, and author, Jefferson was also a great scholar of the natural world. In his time, his gardens were a botanic showpiece, a source of food, and an experimental laboratory of ornamental and useful plants from around the world. Jefferson grew 170 fruit varieties, including apples, peaches, and grapes, in Monticello’s two orchards and cultivated over 330 vegetable varieties in his 1000-foot-long garden terrace. Do you garden? Use this as Creative Inspiration. | 14 |
| 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21April, 21 2024Birth of John MuirOn this day in 1838 was the birth of John Muir, known as America’s most famous and influential naturalist and conservationist. Dozens of places are named after John Muir, including the Muir Woods National Monument, the John Muir Trail, Muir College (UCSD), and many schools. He is inspiring. Have you seen my blog category Creative Inspiration? It’s where I post such items to provoke you to react to such anniversaries. |
| 22 | 23April, 23 2024Full Pink MoonToday is the full moon. April’s full moon is known as the Full Pink Moon. We take our names for the full moon from the Native American tradition, this one referring to the herb moss pink, or wild ground phlox, which is one of the earliest widespread flowers of the spring. How to write something that is uniquely yours? Maybe this will provoke you. | 24 | 25 | 26April, 26 2024The Birth of Frederick Law OlmsteadOn this day in 1822 was the birth of Frederick Law Olmstead, the nineteenth century’s foremost American landscape architect. Most of us know him for his work on New York’s Central Park, completed in 1864 and involving moving 5 million cubic yards of dirt, blasting rock with 260 tons of gunpowder, and planting 270,000 trees and shrubs. Do you garden? I do, though not on Olmstead’s scale. You? | 27 | 28 |
| 29 | 30 | |||||
All of our high emotional holidays come to us yearly, and all of them present opportunities for you to write Op-eds, personal essays, posts for your blog or guest posts on some larger public blog. And if you write those pieces well enough, people will notice and you’ll develop a following, perhaps even in the form of a publisher or an agent, and that book you’ve always wanted to write will get written.
How to Use this Deadline Calendar
Here’s the key to this calendar: Learning how to choose and meet writing deadlines begins with knowing that you need to write those pieces in advance of the event. So choose one date from here — or from your own year — but choose one that gives you the time to write and submit to a large online or print publication.
Let’s give it three months. Here’s why: You’re busy. Perhaps you need to learn now to write an op-ed or how to construct a personal essay (have you seen my recorded class on the latter?). Perhaps you are writing a book-length memoir from which you can extract a short section to turn into an op-ed or essay. Even better. Best yet, in fact. Two of my four books came from shorter pieces I wrote and published, both arguing what I believed about something large but doing so in a small format. Both led to profitable book contracts. Want the same success? Of course you do.
Would you like more on how to choose and meet deadlines? I have a course for that. Check it out here.
