how to choose and meet writing deadlines begins with using the calendar

How to Use this Deadline Calendar

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.

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.

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June, 24 2023
Midsummer Day
According to The Old Farmer’s Almanac, today is known as Midsummer day. This is an ancient festival, relating to a special day of the year we celebrated this past Tuesday the summer solstice. A solstice is an astronomical event that occurs twice each year – once in winter and once in summer – when the tilt of the Earth’s axis is most inclined toward or away from the Sun, causing the Sun’s apparent position in the sky to reach its northernmost or southernmost extreme. In this case, of course, we in the northern hemisphere are tilted toward the warmth. Midsummer celebrations are pre-Christian in origin and vary from culture to culture, though many include the belief that mid-summer plants had miraculous healing powers and they therefore picked them on this night. Last night was Midsummer’s Eve – the night before Midsummer’s Day, a time for fairies and magic. Sound familiar? Dos it sound, perhaps, Shakespearean? It should.

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.