You may have noticed that the novel progress bar hasn’t moved much. There are several reasons for it, but it’s mostly a matter of choices.

I would like to be making better progress on Shadow, but I have other competing responsibilities and commitments. You know I make games for a living. I generally spend eight hours a day working for money to pay for the house, and the food and all the other necessities of life. I don’t have much choice about that, yet.

But next, I have to make a choice about what to work on. Writing or StoryBox. The past two weeks, it’s fallen decidedly on the StoryBox side. StoryBox has customers, and I’ve made a commitment to update it on a regular basis, at least until I realize the complete set of features that I want it to have. The vendor of the component suite that I use released an update I’d been waiting on for quite a while. I had to get StoryBox updated before I could embark on some of the newer features I want to add, and the update consumed all of my extra work time.

I could have chosen to write, and spent less time on StoryBox, but then I would not have hit my once a week update schedule that I try to keep. (Don’t hold me to that schedule – it’s not a promise, only a goal). I’ve been feeling guilty about that, too.

I realized, today, that I shouldn’t feel guilty about it. I like working on StoryBox. It has customers. It’s a living product that I have goals for. And ultimately, I’m not spending my time on the couch watching reality television, or taking time to clean the house, or surfing the web for hours on end trying to find the answer to why I’m not getting my writing done.

I didn’t get my writing done because I was working on another product that I like to work on, and that is perfectly acceptable. Sure, it wasn’t writing, but I wasn’t procrastinating, and it was important work. I’ll now be able to go back to a schedule of updating StoryBox mostly with weekend work, and I’ll be able to get back to the writing and finish Shadow.

If only someone would invent a twenty-eight hour day.