Recent editions of Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn includes an essay, “Things I Want to Say About My Mother,” by one of Smith’s two daughters, Nancy Pfeiffer. Pfeiffer, recalling Smith’s struggle to keep her family afloat as a single mom with no other source of income, wrote:

She was a professional down to her fingertips. She learned early on to think on the typewriter. Writing was her profession and she handled it that way. She generated projects and met deadlines. It was all she did.

I thought of this quote at the end of April when I read about the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction. The award is sponsored by the University of Georgia. Every year since 1983, the Flannery O’Connor judges and administrators have selected a collection of stories, 40,000 to 75,000 words long, to be published by the University of Georgia Press. The Flannery O’Connor winners occupy their own Wikipedia page.

When I was trying to hold a job and write, my problem was time. Here in retirement, where I have no job and can write whenever I want, my problem is motivation. Well, here was my project and my deadline. I knew which stories I wanted to include, including two that had been waiting for months for me to rewrite them. And as you can tell from this and my last blog entry, I have one thing in common with Duke Ellington, who said, “I don’t need time, I need a deadline.”

My deadline was the end of May. Reader, I made it.

The prize money is practically sitting here in my pocket

There are no downsides to hitching my wagon to the Flannery O’Connor Award. If I win, the Press will publish my stories and shower me with cash. An agent will read the book, because the Press has an agreement with her or she’s too polite to say no. I’ll hold the published book in my hands everywhere I go, including weddings, bar mitzvahs, coffee dates, raves, dog walks, and birding.

And if I don’t win? Did you think I had a chance? My friend Jack Palmer, in a letter to me about doing the rounds of Christmas bazaars, put it best:

Ofelia and I had a triffic day. Got lots of “unique treasures” soon to be passed on the hapless as Christmas presents. Also entered several quilt raffles, which we will of course not win.

When I don’t win, I can still say I finished rewriting two stories. I can say I put together a 60,000-word manuscript that I submitted for a major literary award. I can say that I generated this project and I met this deadline.

Does anyone care? Does that matter?

Be bold, thrust forward, and have the courage to fail. After all, it’s only writing. Nobody is going to die for our mistakes or even lose their teeth. (Garrison Keillor)

Results in August. Meanwhile, I have a novel to write, plus stories still to submit to the hapless.