The dread deadline doom

So today I submitted Peace With Honor just ahead of the deadline. This has me reflecting on the old saying that writers would never finish anything without a deadline.
I can safely say that one is bunk. Outside of submitting my Applied Science series on Big Pulp, this is the only time I’ve had someone ask me for fiction on a deadline. Nevertheless, I have finished multiple novels and lots of short stories without any deadline but my own.
That being said, deadlines do help. I certainly wouldn’t have finished Peace With Honor a little under three months without one (although that’s partly because I’d be working on multiple projects instead of focusing on one).
While self-imposed deadlines—my usual kind—help, they don’t have the compelling power of someone saying “Yes, I’ll buy this if you get it in” with the implied corollary of “If you don’t make deadline, I won’t take it.”
Precisely because I so rarely have them for fiction, they scare the hell out of me. It’s relatively simple with nonfiction: The facts create a framework to operate within: Stuff to learn, interviews to schedule. With fiction, even given basic guidelines and an agreed-on premise, as I had with this story, it all has to come out of my mind. And there’s always the risk it won’t be there.
Though to date, I’ve delivered 12 Applied Science stories (only ten of them up so far) and now this one. So I probably should stop worrying … but somehow I doubt I will.