crazy-woman-with-cakeWhen last we spoke, I was about to lock myself away in a condo in Palm Springs. My task: bang out an entire book on free and low-cost tools in a week. I arrived ready, with everything lined up to fly through the writing of the main part of the book. No problem, I thought. All that’s left is work.

Friends, it wasn’t pretty. I began with a fairly regular schedule: 54 minutes of work every hour, I planned. My alarm would go off (an old-fashioned car horn courtesy of my iPhone), and I’d run around the condo (like a ninny, if you want to know the truth), stretching my legs, getting my blood flowing, keeping the brain cells firing. The first couple of days, I worked diligently until about 6, then I’d change into workout clothes, take an orderly stroll down to the gym, and workout for an hour while watching very bad television. It was working exactly the way I had planned.

But I kept measuring my progress with a frown. Why was I not making my daily goals of 6,000 words? What was taking so long? This part of the book was supposed to be just cleaning up the database that my assistant and I have been working on for weeks. It was supposed to go so smoothly. Before I left I even told D.J. that I thought I could finish early.

As the days wore on, I felt more and more stressed. And more. And more. I had banned D.J. from calling, but I would call him in tears. I’d switch from a breakthrough to a breakdown in an hour’s time. I started talking to myself, pacing. I ceased wearing proper undergarments, except for super fuzzy hot pink socks that I wore everywhere, even to the lobby. I ate lots of cake (cupcakes weren’t enough) and drank 64-ounce Diet Cokes that I could buy for $.89 from a convenience store a block away. And time kept passing, and it felt like the book just wasn’t going anywhere.

And then, all of a sudden, I saw the end. Before I left, I had organized the book into 10 chapters. As I wrote, I kept breaking out sections of chapters into smaller groups and rearranging things. It took me days to get through one of the monster chapters, and when so many untouched chapters loomed, it seemed like the task was impossible. But I discovered that when I opened up the new chapters, they either had finished pieces and parts, or they were much shorter than I imagined.

I ended up pushing and pushing and pushing through, and I ended up staying an extra 30 hours to finish the job.

And finish I did. And I put it in the mail a week before the deadline. And two weeks later, my publisher wrote with his official acceptance. He also added something like, “I have to admit I thought your timeline was a little ambitious, and I was very pleasantly surprised to discover how polished it is.” Now the book is pretty much in his hands, and we’re going to move to the copyeditor and the designers and the other people who do things with books.

I did it. I wrote a book. In two months. Boy does that feel good.