One rule of freelance writing is that you never miss a deadline. Never. I’ll confess that there have been a couple of instances where I’ve asked an editor for the weekend to put the finishing touches on a feature they’d expected on the Friday. If they were to have said no, I would have delivered on time. But they said yes, so they got a more polished product sitting in their inbox on Monday morning.
In my contract with Profile Books, I am supposed to have delivered the complete manuscript of The Way of the Panda by the end of January. This date was set because I wrote in my proposal, which went out to publishers last summer, that I’d need six months to finish the book. But, of course, it took a while for the signatures to appear on the contract so that I didn’t really get writing until September. Profile clearly appreciated this as they agreed to a 90-day grace period being added to the notional end-of-January deadline, so if I deliver by 1 May I will have met my contractural obligations. I am still fairly confident I can do it, though as the deadline approaches it’s becoming increasingly clear how tight things are going to be.
I haven’t posted for the last couple of weeks because I’ve been busy putting the finishing touches to three chapters, the central ones in the book that cover all panda-related shenanignas from 1950 to 1980. I have had these in an almost-finished state for a while, but the final step of making the writing slick is pretty time consuming. This is because they juggle lots of ideas
In one, I tell the story of efforts to get Chi-Chi and An-An to mate, an early effort to breed pandas in captivity that resulted in an absolutely extraordinary level of media attention. This, I argue, had a profound effect on the way the world sees pandas and on panda conservation. In addition, I have woven in asides about global nuclear test ban treaty negotiations, early examples of captive breeding, the birth of the first panda in captivity (Ming-Ming in Beijing in 1963), Anglo-Soviet relations during in the 1960s, espionage, clinical trials of human fertility drugs, the summer of love, the Prague Spring, Konrad Lorenz and second-wave feminism. It is not difficult to write a few hundred words on each of these. The challenge is to find a way to work them seamlessly into the chapter, choosing the moment to break from the central Chi-Chi/An-An plot, deliver the aside and then return to the story. I haven’t found a way to speed up this process of integration. I have to have to be up to speed with all the ideas and have them knocking around in my mind for a week or more before they gradually begin to settle into place.
Anyway, I now have three more chapters to send to my editor at Profile. When they reach him, I will have delivered 7/12 chapters. I still have a lot of work to do, two chapters that cover 1900 to 1949 and two chapters that cover 1995 to the present. Then a prologue and an epilogue. I think I can still do all this by the end of April but know already that it’s going to be tight.
You'll probably hit your deadline, and then Profile will sit on the book for 18 months.