Perhaps I'm in the wrong line of work

Last night was the culmination of weeks of work on my entry to Blizzard's Creative Writing Contest. I'll quickly point out that it's essentially a fanfiction contest with the prize being a potential job interview with one of the largest and most influential video game companies in the world and leave it at that. I had almost a month to work on my entry - from the start of the contest entry period. I didn't actually start work on it until the last week of March and, despite creating goal posts and milestones to get my fat ass into gear, work on the project didn't kick in until about April 5th or so, and at no time was there a rough draft or proofreader copy.

The final (only) draft of my story didn't begin until April 9th, 4 days before the deadline. The contest entry requirements state the work of fiction should be between 3,000 and 10,000 words. On April 12th at 10:00 AM, I had roughly 1,200 words on paper. That day also happened to be Easter, so I was forced to spend some time with the family - not that I'm complaining, we had a nice dinner and I really enjoyed my time with my parents, but the fact remains that was time I could have spent on my story. I was at about 2,000 when I went home around 2:30. When I returned to my apartment, my roommates were pretty interested in getting caught up watching stuff on TV - Dollhouse was the main offender, but was followed by the first episode of the Fullmetal Alchemist series and episode 2 of Basquatch (thing Gurren Lagann with basketball). Since the living/TV room doubles as my main writing area, you can see the conflict.

Serious effort on my story resumed around 9:30 PM EDT. I had until 2:59 AM (11:59 PM PDT) to finish. In that time frame, my story ballooned to a modest 6,897 words. That's a little under 4,000 words in five and a half hours. Roughly 727 words an hour, 12 words a minute.

I finished the story at 2:52 AM.

Of course by 'finished' I mean it was forged into a form that could be passed for readable. It was somewhat coherent, there was a plot, and it had a beginning, middle, and end. The final product contains about 80% of what I intended to go in there. In fact, I'm not entirely sure what all went in there. From 1 AM to 2:52 it's all a blur.

I still had to submit the thing. At 2:53, I filled out the Blizzard submission form... only to have it reset. So I did it again... and it reset again. I refreshed the page, filled out the form, hit submit to upload my Word file... and it kicked back an error.

The time was 2:56 AM.

I hope I didn't wake up my roommates as I cursed at my laptop, uploaded my file to the network, raced up the stairs to my desktop, then pounded away at the keys in a mad dash to fill out the form again. I hit submit... and it uploaded successfully, even giving me an email confirmation.

The time was 2:58 AM. I had submitted my story at - literally - the last minute.

My thanks go out to my friends who encouraged me to keep going. I popped in to twitter several times to receive gentle proddings to keep myself on task, so thanks there, too - especially Dan, who was like the coach in Punch Out for all intents and purposes, except he didn't steal my bike. Also my apologies for not completing the story sooner as I asked you to proofread but I never delivered on my end. When I get home I'll be gloating by sending out to my friends whatever the hell it is I submitted to Blizzard so you all can point derisively at the shitpiece I cranked out in the span of about eight noncontiguous hours.

A rant on the general writing process is soon to come.