If you think a piece is 100 percent done, it’s actually 45 percent done. To get it to 100 percent done, you can’t.
If you think you need “just a few more hours,” you really need a few more months.
“I’ll send it by EOD”—no, the odds are 6-1 you won’t. 7-1. 17-1.
“EOD” equals 5 p.m., 6 p.m., and 11:59 p.m., as well as 2 a.m., 8 a.m., 10 a.m., and 11 a.m. the next day.
Each breakthrough equals ninety days of clinical depression. (But you can’t pay upfront; if you commit to ninety days of clinical depression, then you may or may not get one breakthrough.)
Tragedy plus time equals a best-selling funny personal essay collection.
“Best-selling” equals selling better than however much you thought it would sell (0).
If something is due Friday, it might as well be due Monday, which might as well be due Tuesday, which might as well be due Wednesday, which might as well be due Thursday, which might as well be due Friday. This is why God (She/Her) gave us seven days.
There is such a thing as a negative number of words. This can happen if it’s December, a Tuesday, or there’s weather.
The odds of writing one book are zero, but writing two books is so easy anyone should be able to do it.
Today the writing is “100 percent genius”; tomorrow, it’s “95 percent so fucking stupid, what the fucking fuck was I doing; I quit; I fucking quit this shit.” The day after tomorrow, if you’re still working on the same thing, it’s 100 percent because of pills.
If you wrote 1,000 to 5,000 words today, you can write zero words tomorrow without hating yourself. If you wrote more than 5,000 words today—no, you didn’t, or else all those words are bad.
If you have twenty things to do, then you will do twenty things you don’t have to do; this is the common denominator among writers and non-writers.
For every quarter of an hour closer to the deadline, your bathroom will be 1/10th cleaner. By the infinite tortoise theorem, though, it will never get 100 percent clean. Like your shitty writing.
Two seconds after the sun sets, the average editor stops thinking about you.
Zero money, some money, and a lot of money are all the same number after taxes.
One publication isn’t enough, and neither is 1,000.
The first derivative is slope, the second derivative is curvature, and anything more derivative than that is a Colleen Hoover novel.
Morning ≈ afternoon; nighttime ≈ morning; afternoon ≈ nighttime; there is no such time as 9 a.m.
There’s a nonzero probability that if you don’t check your email, then you didn’t get any email, and no one is disappointed in you. (Oops, this may be quantum mechanics and a literary tangent.)
Order of operations: (mentally rehearse Academy Award acceptance speech for Best Adapted Screenplay) write book.
Formulas: If you think the writing is good, it’s bad. If you think the writing is bad, it’s good. If you think the writing is great, you must be invited to parties often. If you think the writing is shit, then you’re everyone else. If you go to a lot of parties, then you don’t write.
For praise, the limit does not exist.
Criticism is mean, irrational, and should be finite.
If you miss a deadline 1x, fine. If you miss it 2x, still fine. If you miss it 3x, then you must fake your own death.