Whoosh! There Goes My Writing Deadline (Douglas Adams Understood)

I asked for an extension. For the first time in 15 years

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Yesterday evening, I had a deadline. My two-year-old daughter had a fever… the kind that makes you tap the thermometer twice because surely a small human cannot be this warm and still demand chocolate. She was on me, glued to my chest like a tiny, very hot koala. And I sat there at 11 p.m. with a half-finished draft and I did something I have never, in my entire professional life, done before:

I asked for an extension.

I’m writing this today, on that extension. And I’m still a little wobbly about it, honestly.

Because here’s the thing: the woman who would have sat at her desk until 4 a.m. to deliver on time, that woman is gone. I’m writing her obituary in this post. She had a good run. She was very productive. She also needed a stern talking-to and possibly a nap.

A brief history of me never asking for anything

Let me set the scene for those of you who don’t know me yet.

Corporate me? Never asked. 15 years across agencies and offices. Statements due before a 6 a.m. news cycle? I worked till midnight to get them right. Deck for a 9 a.m. board meeting and the data came in late? I worked till midnight. Once I worked through a migraine because I genuinely could not picture the sentence “I need to push this.” My brain did not contain those words in that order.

MBA me? Also never asked. Group projects, individual papers, case studies the night before a 9 a.m. class… I worked till midnight, turned things in, never flinched.

Here’s what’s changed since then, and it’s not subtle: I have two kids now, and sleep is non-negotiable. Not in a cute Instagram-self-care way. In a I-cannot-function-as-a-mother-or-a-writer-on-five-hours way. Midnight is my edge. Past that, I’m not producing better work…I’m producing tomorrow’s mistakes. That math doesn’t work anymore.

So part-time-business me, yesterday? Looked at my desktop screen. Looked at my daughter. Looked at the cursor blinking like it was personally disappointed in me.

Did the math:

“if I push past midnight tonight, I am useless tomorrow with two small humans who need me. And typed the words: “Hi — would it be okay if I sent this tomorrow EOB? My little one is sick and I want to give this the attention it deserves and to my sleep.”

Hit send. Immediately wanted to throw my desktop into the sea.

The reply: “I totally understand how life gets in the way sometimes..”

THIS! For a thing I have spent 15 YEARS believing would end my career, my reputation, …possibly the company.

What Douglas Adams knew that I didn’t

You know who I thought of, sitting there with my feverish koala?

Douglas Adams. The Hitchhiker’s Guide guy. The man wrote nine books and missed approximately every deadline attached to them. Editors had to physically lock him in hotel rooms to extract manuscripts. He spent ten years not writing his final novel, mostly in the bath.

And the most famous thing he ever said about deadlines was:

“I love deadlines. I love the whooshing noise they make as they go by.”

I used to read that quote and think what a slacker. Like, with affection…but also with the smug certainty of a person who has never missed one. I would never. I love a deadline. Deadlines are my muse.

Reading it last night, holding my kid? Hit completely differently. Because Douglas Adams wasn’t bragging about being a slacker. He was telling on himself with humor, which is a thing writers do because the alternative is crying. He knew he was bad at deadlines. He talked about it openly his whole career. And he wrote Hitchhiker’s Guide anyway. He created Marvin the Paranoid Android anyway. He gave us 42 anyway.

The deadlines whooshed by. The work still happened. Different timeline. Still happened.

“Under pressure, diamonds” - a slogan I have beef with

When I worked at the world’s leading CommsMarketing agency Edelman, there was a wall in Frankfurt. Big. Green. Very corporate. Very “I will be photographed in front of this for LinkedIn.”

It said:

“Pressure makes diamons.”

The Edelman philosophy back then was:

“The pressure you’re feeling isn’t to break you. It’s to make you”

Listen, writing superstars. I have thoughts.

That line works great on a motivational mug. It works less great when you’re crying in a bathroom at 9 p.m. trying to turn around a media statement. Under pressure, diamonds assumes the pressure is the good part… that the squeeze is what makes the magic. But that’s not what I learned in 15 years of squeezing.

What I learned is: under pressure, you finish. That’s the actual benefit. You produce a thing. The thing is usually fine. Occasionally it’s great. Sometimes it’s a shapeless coal lump you’ll spend Monday cleaning up. The pressure didn’t make it brilliant. You made it as brilliant as you could despite the pressure, because you are good at what you do, and pressure is the reason it had to exist by Tuesday but not the reason it was good.

The honest version of that wall would say:

“Pressure makes mostly fine work, occasional brilliance, sometimes a tension headache and a snippy email you’ll regret.”

But that doesn’t fit on a wall in a marketing agency… of course.

What I’m starting to believe instead, at the ripe age of having-a-two-year-old, is that brilliance comes from craft and rest and reading a lot, none of which fit on a green agency wall.

Pressure just gives you a finished draft to edit later. Which is valuable! It’s just not a diamond. It’s more like a rock you can polish on Sunday. haha

What other writers acutally say (Greatest Hits)

This morning, I went looking for company in this. I found it. Here’s the wisdom of the craft, ranked by how hard I personally felt each one in my chest:

Dave Barry, humorist and truth-teller:

“Like all writers, my greatest inspiration, my ultimate muse, is a deadline.”

The muse is fear. We all know.

Rita Mae Brown:

“A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it’s better than no inspiration at all.”

This belongs cross-stitched on a pillow in every writer’s office.

Jerome K. Jerome, Victorian writer, spiritually he is us:

“A deadline is negative inspiration. Still, it’s better than no inspiration at all.”

Rick Riordan, the Percy Jackson guy, dozens of bestsellers:

“Deadlines just aren’t real to me until I’m staring one in the face.”

If he can admit it, you can stop pretending you’re “just doing research” three weeks before something is due.

Karl Kraus, who was apparently in a mood the day he said this:

“A journalist is stimulated by a deadline. He writes worse when he has time.”

Brutal. Suspiciously accurate. Give me three months and I will write you a worse personal essay than I would have written in three days. Someone needs to study this scientifically.

The 2 kinds of writers (according to yours truly)

After polling my own brain at 11 p.m., here are the two camps:

Type A: The Corporate Refugee. This was me until yesterday. Trained in agencies and offices where you do not, will not, cannot miss a deadline. Will reschedule a dentist appointment. Will work through a migraine. Will ship something rather than ship nothing.

• Upside: stuff gets done.

• Downside: cannot tell the difference between “this genuinely needs to be tonight” and “I have manufactured this urgency in my own head because resting feels illegal.”

Often confuses self-punishment for professionalism. Often confuses being available with being valuable.

Type B: The Whoosher. Spiritual disciple of Douglas Adams. Vibrant inner life. Notes app full of brilliant opening lines. Relationship with deadlines best described as “open.” Will write the best thing you’ve ever read. Will deliver it eleven days late. Genuinely does not understand why you’re upset.

Most of us are Type A in our paid work and Type B in our personal projects…which is why my novel is on chapter three but my client deck got delivered at 11:58 p.m. with a smile emoji.

What I learned this week

Three things, and then I’ll let you go and hope to see you in tomorrow’s conversation with subject line writing rockstar Jay Schwedelsohn:

#1 A finished mediocre thing beats a perfect thing that lives in your head

The piece I just sent, written one-handed under a sleeping koala toddler, it’s out in the world. The brilliant version I would have written with eight hours of sleep and no responsibilities does not exist, has never existed, will never exist. Because I am a person with a life and two kids and a thirty-something body that needs sleep.

#2 Asking is not weakness

When I sent that text yesterday, I thought I was confessing a failure. What I actually did was give the other person a chance to be human with me. She was.

The thing I have been bracing against my whole career was, in this case, a door that opened the second I knocked. I’m not saying every door does. I’m saying I never even tried the handle for 15 years.

#3 The woman who worked till midnight every time, no matter what, wasn’t a hero. She was scared.

Scared of being seen as less-than. Scared that if she said I can’t once, the whole edifice would collapse. (Spoiler: it doesn’t. Yesterday’s edifice is fine. Today’s edifice is, frankly, better, because I slept.)

She wasn’t wrong to push hard, she was good at her job, some even said “brilliant” and she delivered. But somewhere along the way, “I’ll get it done” stopped being a strength and started being a reflex. Two kids later, sleep non-negotiable, that reflex doesn’t fit my life anymore. And maybe it never really fit yours either.

You’re allowed to ask. You’re allowed to be a person.

A toast, Superstars

To you, writers, authors, creators, the whole brilliant, sometimes-anxious, sometimes-tired-out lot of you. You who deliver. You who whoosh. You who do both, depending on the week.

May your deadlines be reasonable. May your extensions, when you need them, be granted in four minutes flat. May you raise a glass…of water, of tea gone cold for the third time, of hot milk with honey if you’re soothing a small human … to the version of you who finally, finally asked.

And if a deadline whooshes past you sometimes…well. The man who invented Marvin the Paranoid Android is right there with you, holding the door. You’re in good company. The very best, actually.

Tell me yours in the comments… What’s your worst deadline story?

Have you ever asked for an extension? Did the world end? (It didn’t, did it.) Are you a Whoosher or a Corporate Refugee? Did you also hate the green wall?

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xx, your fellow club member who is, somehow, at thirty-something years old, finally learning that she’s allowed to be tired.

Hey, I’m Kristina, the heart of the The Online Writing Club.

I started writing on the internet in December 2020, newborn in arms, during one of the most disorienting and beautiful seasons of my life. What began as a creative outlet quietly became something I never expected: a 6-figure business, a global community of 18,000 writers, dreamers, builders, and work I genuinely fall in love with every single day.

In my corporate life, I’m an award-winning marketing professional and brand strategist. Here, I pour everything I know about writing, growing an audience, and building something real into every post, every lesson, and every conversation.

If you’ve ever believed your story deserves to be heard and want to get paid to be you, you’re exactly who I built this for.