Last month, I spoke with a journalist who told me that journalism was hard to leave. She was attracted to the fast pace, “the quick hits,” and the rewards of daily or weekly publication, “As if someone is handing you cookies.”

I understood what she meant. I enjoy the combination of relief and excitement when I hit a deadline. And I have always enjoyed cookies.

I worked in journalism, where stories were often held up by the race to find one last quote or check one last fact. I also worked in software, where projects were held up by the engineers, who spent most of the day chasing each other with shotguns and starships before finally writing the #@$!&* code.

Now I set my own deadlines. Last month at the Port Townsend Writing Conference, I set one in public. On Tuesday I accepted the challenge of one class with four prompts and on Thursday I read what I’d written at an open mic.

From this experience I deduced that I needed more deadlines in my life. Quick hits, not the long march through the hundreds of pages of my novel that I must revise. So I started revising a story I wrote a few months ago and that I’m unhappy with. Surely I could do this in a week! And surely it would read like that, too.

If I were playing fútbol, the referee would’ve held up a yellow card, pointed at me, and cautioned me for time-wasting and deliberately delaying a restart. Which brings me to Henry Miller’s advice from way back in 1964: “Work on one thing at a time until finished.” Don’t rush off in different directions.

Miller knew what he was talking about. Everything he wrote was banned in his own country until he was 70, but he never stopped writing.  

“Forget the books you want to write,” Miller said. “Think only of the book you are writing.”

And so I return to the book I am writing.

I still want cookies, though.