Halfway through the year, and my latest story is not even halfway done...

It is now the end of June, the halfway point of the year. Six months ago, I had promised that I would be able to maintain my self-imposed schedule of completing and posting a new chapter once every two weeks, despite delaying the start of the tenth main story a month later than I had originally intended. As I'm sure you all have noticed, that promise has since gone flying out the window, and I feel absolutely miserable about it.

I had mentioned in a blog post at the end of last year that I had developed a new writing method that involves simply writing out all the various parts of a chapter that I've already thought about and then later fill in the blanks in between, rather than try to force myself through linear progression and risk forgetting some good ideas by the time I actually get to those later parts. My hope was that this new writing method would allow me to get more progress done more quickly, and while I will confirm that's it's made writing easier for me, the problem I seem to be having lately is simply taking the time to actually get the writing done in the first place.

Less then two months ago (only a week after I had posted what is still the most recent chapter), I decided to do something that I had hoped would make my writing progress even easier. I was able to buy myself a new iPad (thank you, government stimulus!), and since my Firefox web browser allows me to easily access sites across multiple devices, I decided to do all of my writing on that tablet (I had even purchased a special case with keyboard that would make writing feel like it was on my old laptop), while I would use the desktop only for final editing and posting the completed chapter. My hope had been that the tablet would allow me to immediately access the my writing progress in the online Word Document at any time and any place, so rather than try to set aside several hours to work on my desktop and hope I had remembered everything I had come up with earlier, I could just quickly turn on my tablet and add some new idea I just came up with right there and then, regardless of whether I'm riding in a car or lying in bed, for example.

While this new convenience has certainly helped out quite a bit, there's still no denying the fact that I've got nothing to show for my progress after two whole months. That really upsets me, considering that I was afraid this might happen if I ever stopped trying to complete progress within a fixed deadline, that I would end up putting off writing further and further without the pressure to have it done by a specific deadline. I will confess to have been spending a lot of time lately being distracted by various other things rather than taking the time to get some writing done as I frequently intend to. Put simply, it feels like I'm trying to complete a marathon, but can run only a few hundred feet within a day, and some days not even have a chance to go anywhere at all.

Another factor to my lack of progress (at least as far as you've seen) that I'm simply writing two chapters at the same time, both the latest chapter of the main story and the latest in the collection of side stories. As I had mentioned in the author's note of chapter 2, the next two side stories take place between chapters 1 and 2, so I figured that with the easy access provided by my new tablet, I could go ahead and get one of them completed before finishing the next chapter of the main story. Unfortunately, both the next chapter and the next side story have each turned out to be much longer than I had anticipated, and while I've definitely made a lot of progress in both thus far, it's obviously resulted in a rather long period of time in which you readers have not seen anything new (once these chapters are finally posted and you see the huge word counts, I'm sure you'll understand).

So, when do I hope to finally have something completed so I can have it posted for you to read it? The latest side story is almost finished, so assuming I can minimize my distractions, I'll hopefully have it ready within the next week or two. Once that's out of the way, I'll try to finally finish Chapter 3 of the main story, for which I have already made tons of progress, though I feel like it might currently be only halfway done at best (and after promising I would have it done before the end of May, I'll be excited if I can even get it done before the end of July, at this rate).

I'm terribly sorry that I haven't been able to get much progress done so far this year, especially since there's a lot more to the series that I'm really looking forward to eventually writing, so all I can really say at this point is that I will continue to try my best to keep going.