I am now forty pages in the hole.  It's been four weeks and I've written a grand total of a paragraph.  There were three separate occasions that I sat down to write this week and just stared at the screen for a few minutes before getting distracted by something else.

Now, several days this week (and at least one more next week) were spent replacing a section of the drain field in our back yard, and I again spent a good portion of the week playing D&D with various groups of people.  While my summer has not been as productive as I would like in the writing department, it has been an enjoyable summer.

This next week is going to be busy as well, but I think that I've decided that if I don't get writing this week, I am going to stop the weekly updates on my lack of progress.  I don't like quitting.  We will see if that is incentive enough.

I'm now thirty pages behind (as in I haven't really written anything new this summer).  That isn't all that unexpected, but I also didn't finish the Rosary section this past week, which puts me a bit further behind schedule than I expected.

It was a bit of a busy week.  With a couple of meetings, various chores around the house, and several gaming sessions, I have been easily filling my social calendar this week, not to mention this summer.  While I have a few things on the agenda for this coming week, I do plan on putting a dent in my page deficit.

In prewriting news, I came up with a couple of solutions to my current writing block, so I at least know where to go with Vali and Orean once I pick up with their story again.  I think I have a track for them through even meeting up with their next friend.  Next week, those of you following this story will have something to read.

This is not the post that I wanted to write this week, but I got no writing done on Vali's Tale.  That puts me twenty pages in the hole.  Truthfully, I expected to be near this situation at this point, but I had hoped to be further ahead with my other projects.  

This time, I didn't spend time on Skyrim (although I do plan on spending time there this weekend).  I spent Monday getting the Sorrowful Mysteries section done for my Rosary page and then spent the evening gaming.  I spent almost all day Tuesday getting my Dragon Quest VII-like adventure (including a class-system) ready for Wednesday game (which is how I spent Wednesday).  On Thursday we worked on various errands and cleaning out the garage from our last garage sale (which was in May).  Friday was all-day gaming.  I haven't played this many campaigns ever before.  I'm loving it, but it definitely fills time.

While I don't see getting much writing done next week, I do hope to start gaining back a little ground in the weeks that follow.  My apologies to anyone who was looking forward to an update this week.

A week ago I posted that my plan was to write ten pages a week on my story, Vali's Tale.  As of this moment I have written ... one paragraph.  Yep, not a productive week for me.  Now I could say that part of the reason was that I spent time this week getting my Rosary section running (I'm still working on two sets of Mysteries), or that it was because we were out of power for the entire day on Tuesday, or because of the several events we attended because this was the week of Independence Day, but the truth is that my lack of writing is because I downloaded the Legendary version of Skyrim to my computer and I have almost no self-control.

Instead of creating my own fantasy story, I have spent most of my week in Skyrim dealing with their Dawnguard expansion story (and no, I won't play as the vampire lord).  Again, I would like to blame external forces.  It has been difficult writing in the mornings now that my sons have rediscovered the gaming systems attached to the TV in our "office."  Listening to Mario or Zelda music is not that conducive to writing (yet I manage to play Skyrim through it).

Even when I forced myself to sit down with the document open for over an hour, I just stared at my writer's block.  The problem?  Vali doesn't have shoes (or undergarments for that matter) and he wouldn't want to steal in (them) front of Orean.  It's a ridiculous problem that can be easily solved, but all I could think of was Skyrim.

As my wife reminded me, I need to set Skyrim playing as a reward for having completed writing (and better writing than what the paragraph I wrote turned out to be).  We'll see how things go next week.

Normally, I have been reserving Saturday posts for short descriptions of various story ideas that I have been chewing on.  While I have not yet come close to exhausting the current store of ideas that I have, I am a little concerned about eventually running out or putting up just whatever came off the top of my head (although that might actually be pretty entertaining).  The idea came to me that, as long as I was going to start writing a larger creative story, that I could use Saturday's as a weekly update for how I've been progressing.  Then, my mind decided to up the ante even a little more.

What if I gave people access to my document as I was writing it?  Now, I am a little concerned that this might not work out, and I've nearly ran screaming from the idea, but I thought that it might be worth a try.  The background for the story, and the link to the Google Doc where I will be writing the main story can be found here.

While you can read the details there, I wanted to just let you know a little bit about my schedule.  I will try to avoid writing this story on Sundays.  I will have very little time to write the story on Saturdays and will have almost no time on Fridays.  I plan on writing during the morning hours on Monday and Wednesday, but other plans might get in the way.  I currently plan to write more in the afternoons on Tuesdays and Thursdays.  I set Wednesdays as the main deadline for the summer because they are currently the most open of my days, and I might end up writing up until midnight to complete my self-imposed deadline.

I am setting this up as a motivation to keep writing a larger project.  However, I have several other irons in the fire that I also want to accomplish, so we will see how this goes.  I pray that it will be a positive experience for both me and anyone who wants to follow it.