Deadlines and Number Crunching

Well, this is a banner day for me. God must have known that my day to blog would fall on today...the same day that my 6th book is due to my editor. Talk about stacking up on deadlines and "due" dates.

As many of you know, I have a brand new baby girl here at home, so writing has been in brief snatches. Whenever I can grab a few minutes, I've dumped from my brain. So, the book was assembled in bits and pieces. Thankfully, my husband was wonderful when he came home from work for the past two weeks. I provided the milk for Victoria's evening feeding in a bottle and he fed her to allow me a solid chunk of time each evening to write. Othewise, I know I never would have made it without suffering through a handful of sleepless nights to get the book written.

Used to be, I could pump out a 50K word book in just 2 weeks. This one took me about the same time when I put the time blocks together, but it was spread over about 7 weeks instead. I didn't quite make the 50,000 words, but that's the high end. Ironically, I ended up right about in the middle between 45K and 50K...47,423 to be exact. :)

And the best part? My critique partners had time to read through the entire thing before I finished. I was working on edits right up to the end, as you can see by the time stamp on this post. But praise God, the book is done, and my editor has it. It'll go straight to content edit immediately, as I was working on an extension from the original due date of May 1st.

Funny how my editor knew having a baby would require me to push the deadline back before I did. She anticipated it and built in the spare weeks. :) That's why she's so awesome.

Right now, though, it's time for bed. I fully intend to enjoy the rest of this week post-deadline. Going to get out of the house with my daughter, catch up on email and housework that's been a bit neglected, and perhaps even cook a decent meal for my husband to thank him. :)

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Tiffany Amber Stockton is an author and freelance web site designer who lives with her husband and fellow author in beautiful Colorado Springs. They celebrated the birth of their first child in April and have a vivacious puppy named Roxie, a Border Collie/Flat-Haired Retriever mix. She has sold six books so far to Barbour Publishing. Other credits include writing articles for various publications, five short stories with Romancing the Christian Heart, and contributions to the books: 101 Ways to Romance Your Marriage and Grit for the Oyster.

Read more about her at her web site: http://www.amberstockton.com/.