There is no getting around the fact that it is July today. Good lord. And me with a book due... way too soon. Terrifyingly soon. The terror corresponds directly to the number of pages written. The more pages written, the less terrifying it all is. And, sadly, vice versa.

What do you do when you are under deadline, again? Well, I can tell you what you don't do. You don't do a lot of the housework, unless you are procrastinating, at which point scrubbing things seems like a perfect plan. You don't answer email, or voicemail. Not because you don't want to, but because it all gets swept away in the shallow-breathing and sweaty-palm stuff. You spend long hours weeping over your keyboard, torn between wanting to hit your daily word quotas and wanting the book to be, you know, good. Fearing the twain are never to meet. You consume your body weight in caffeine, and that's just in the morning to get going. You cannot stop eating. Especially if what you are eating contains a high level of sugar and/or chocolate. You periodically disconnect your computer from the internet, or at least from email, and allow yourself only strictly monitored forays into anything else. I.e., research sites only, no Facebook or Twitter. You forget how to speak to your spouse, much less your friends. You find yourself staring off to space in the middle of conversations, sorting out some plot or character arc in your head. You are certainly unpredictable, and undependable. You might be where you said you'd be at such and such time--but on the other hand, you might forget all about it. Or the very idea of leaving your desk may fill you with agitation. Not because you're so excited with the writing happening at that desk, but because the one thing you know to be true about anywhere that is not your desk is that you will not be adding to your word or page count. You stay up too late and get up too early and sometimes even dream stressful dreams involving your book. And on and on this goes, as you become more and more like a grunting cave person the closer you get to your deadline.

This is why, when you ask a writer if they adequately recognize how lovely and sweet their life is--since they get to loll about at home typing as the muse hits, dressed in pajamas if they like, answerable to no one and nothing-- they smile that private smile and agree with you in that unsatisfying way.

We all have fantasies about that writing life, you see. The trouble is, most of us have one or two days like that a year. The rest? A descent into madness and despair, complete with cave person tendencies.