It should come as no surprise to anyone who knows me, that I am spread a little thin.  What might surprise some of you is that I stress about things like that a lot.  A lot of stress is coming from my day job.  There is nothing I can do to control that but I am working on managing my stress level.  But enough about how stressed I am

Let’s talk about the rest of what is going on.

Last week I got it in my head that I really needed to start writing on a regular basis again.  My writing blog World Builders Unlimited, which I was posting to at least two or three times a week had gone silent about a month ago.  On top of that my goal of getting several new stories published was not happening.  So I have set a new goal for myself.  It is a weekly goal, so the deadlines will be tight, but that has worked pretty well for me in the past.  I won’t go into all the details about here, but if you want to know more about it, check out my post from Monday, and the original announcement that includes the goal.

This last weekend my wife and I talked to a group of soon to be husbands and wives as part of a Pre-Cana program, about Natural Family Planning.  Now that I have gotten over the awkwardness that is talking about people’s sex lives with a group of strangers I really like giving talks like this.  As much as I enjoy teaching the NFP classes I think I like talking about it in rather free form  manner better.  I get a chance to tell people why it is so very important to me, while still giving them some real information about it.  The whole process can be very rewarding.

On a similar note, our local chapter of NFP teachers and promoters has been looking into ways to extend our reach, and gain some more interest in the program.  As I said, this is something that is really important to us and we really feel like it is important to let people, especially young people, know that there are alternatives out there.  So in order to do that, we have been trying to do an outreach to priests.  Yesterday during lunch I drafted a letter addressed to all the priests and deacons in the Rochester and Buffalo Diocese and sent it out to get some feedback.  The feed back has been very positive, with some very helpful suggestions that my wife and I working on  integrating into the letter.

I have also been working on writing some fiction.  I have a story started with a working title of “Isabella,” that is based on the prompt from Monday.  I have about 3000 words written so far.  It is very much in a first draft state and I don’t have an ending yet, but I should at least have something to post on Friday. So wish me luck on that one.   I working am another story that is tied to the same universe as Cargo with a working title of “The Lump that Ate Long Island.”  I think I have finally overcome a logistical problem that I have been struggling for the last few weeks so I have given myself the green light to move forward with the idea.  I hope that it will start to answer some of the questions that I have gotten from readers about Cargo.  That is a universe that I have a lot of material in, but that needs a good deal of editing to get into it a publishable state.

And yes I have yet another project in the works.    This one is a story that I am writing for and about my kids.  Working title, “Family Ties.” The idea with this story is to finish it up, get a very limited print run created have something to give to the kids for Christmas.  It is a much larger project than I typically work on, and so far I have about 10,000 words written.  I suspect that it will be about 45K when it is done but I really have no clue.  I have been toying with the idea making some small changes (like changing the kids names) and then also releasing the story into the wild. It is a fantasy story that I think would work well for teens and young adults.  I read the first chapter to the kids the other night, and they really seemed to like it. Then again since it featured all of them they might be a little bias.  I have been working on this project since before Christmas last year, but I think I can get it done by summers end.

So one final rather sad note.  This week, I announced to the rest of the team at Flying Island Press that I was going to going to officially put Pirate’s Cove on a more official hiatus for the foreseeable future.  I dearly love the working we were doing there, but as I said at the beginning of this post, I am spread very thin.   There is just not enough of me to give that project the attention that it rightly deserves.  There will be a post on the Pirate’s Cove site and the Flying Island Press home page some time this week about the change.  There is hope that once Flying Island Press becomes more successful that there will be time to return to “The Cove” and continue the work there.  Thank you to everyone who has participated in the work there.