So … yesterday was the first deadline in our writing buddy system. Both my buddy Katrina and I had spectacularly disorganised weeks last week with the odd drama and hiccup thrown in for good measure, and failed to meet our deadline yesterday. Instead, we ate cheesecake together. (Baked cheesecake, the best kind).

However, we are not giving up, and decided that our deadlines are there to help us make progress and the deadlines are structured to give us a little room for movement – so we gave ourselves a small extension. Technically, it is still Sunday in many parts of the world, notably across North and South America, and we’re going to be using that time zone instead for our deadline! Yes, we’re totally cheating, but it’s better than giving up entirely.

My goal for yesterday was to write the second chapter of my Bratislava novel. I have an outline for it and a couple of pages written, and I am fairly confident I know how the rest of it is going to sound. After I do a little paid writing this morning and take a good walk with a friend, I’ll be raring to go and polish it off this afternoon. I promise. I’ll report back here with a little edit to prove that I really do get it done.

So far, it’s really been one of those weeks. My paid writing gets done only because a deadline is looming; my poor fiction writing has only got a couple of looks in and only in the form of me opening up a Word file and leaving it open most of the day, hoping that seeing it down there on the bottom of the screen will inspire me to write.

But sometimes, you have those weeks where motivation for nearly everything is lacking. The Olympic Games are on – they’re a great distraction. The weather is warming up a little, so it’s substantially warmer outside than in my freezing house and it’s much more tempting to take a book outside than to sit doing any work. My desk is messy, full of piles of stuff I know needs doing, but I’m not sure where to start. I whittled some piles down this morning by discovering that several of them were full of bills that needed to be paid – I paid them, but you won’t be surprised to hear that this activity didn’t leave me feeling that full of inspiration. And then there’s all kinds of other stuff going on, personally, that doesn’t leave me with that much brain space for writing.

Surprisingly, I don’t really feel too guilty for neglecting my blogs, but I did feel the urge to mention some of this stuff here. The Word Wyrd blog linked to me recently on a list of “Ten great blogs for writers” (very flattering) and described this blog as being about “An aspiring writer shares what she’s learning as she goes along”. And this week, what I’m learning is not very much about writing, but about how many ways there are to not write.

If this was somebody else’s problem, I’d have a long list of tips to give them, and have pretty much given myself a lot of advice too. But sometimes it just seems like waiting for the next, fresh week to start might be a better option. I owe my motivation buddy a first chapter by Sunday, but that’s still five days away, so there’s time for the motivation to kick in again before then. Fingers crossed.