Hooray Hooray for Deadline Day

Greetings loyal readers,

I know I didn't tease this in last week's post, but I thought it might be fun to give you all a glimpse of what it's like on deadline day here at Promo Marketing, mostly because it's deadline day today, and that's pretty much all that's on my mind. Not that deadlines really bother me, it's more that if you can see the finish line, you mind really isn't on kittens or the great sandwich you had for lunch. We're going to do this piece time-stamp style, and promise each other that we won't think about kittens until it's over.

8 a.m. : I had planned on diving right into my writing as soon as I came in, but the mystery of off-hours e-mails has struck again, and somehow my inbox is full of tiny problems that are going to take about an hour to fix. My morning mental acuity not its best, I alternate between uneasy gratitude for the distraction and staring blankly at my cube wall.

9:15 a.m. : I take stock of the final revisions I need to complete before we close on the issue. It's a decent-sized workload, but shouldn't be a problem as long as I stay focused and approach the problems smartly.

9:17 a.m. : I get up to ask Kyle (our managing editor) a simple question about formatting, which somehow turns into a 15-minute conversation about how many zombies Dracula could feasibly kill in a night. Mysteriously, the debate ends with us both agreeing that no one really knows how to use an apostrophe, and that the American education system needs an overhaul.

9:32 a.m. : Still thinking about Dracula little bit, I finally start my revisions. (I think he could probably destroy about 1,300 zombies in a night, if he found a shopping mall full of them or something. Otherwise, it would probably be closer to 5 or 600, because who knows how hard zombies are to find in the wild? This model assumes a zombie apocalypse, where there are basically zombies everywhere, by the way.)