Ha, yeah. It’s almost like they purposely time them to coincide with the beginning of school in August or final tests in December and April. I wonder if it has something to do with the organizers’ schedules?
I’ve had an idea for a completely EPIC game for over half a year now. 
Don’t worry, LD timings are never good for me either. Since it’s always on the weekends I always have something going on like traveling, parties, visiting relatives or friends (or they’re visiting us), or just something more important to do. I only got to participate once and since it was my first game jam I got over ambiguous and couldn’t finish in time. Guess it sucks to be a programmer with a social life. 
start to code on it? =D half a year is alot off time xD
I have coded a few tests to check that it was actually possible to get good enough performance and all. =P
Looking at it from the other end of a career, please let me just say that 6 months is nothing!! I worked in business programming for … well quite a long time … till retiring recently and I have uncoded game designs going back - checks repository - over 20 years!! And some of those are beauties let me tell you!!
(Get to the point old man!) OK, my point is if you’re stuck on one project, do some work on another one. Have a few on the go at different stages of completion and then you can always pick one up and get a change of pace. Do some animation art on one, engine work on another one, or even just user instructions/help text. (BTW user instructions are a good place to start on any software, games or not: if it doesn’t make sense in words, maybe it doesn’t actually make sense as a concept, or with a game if you can’t make it sound fun, maybe it won’t be fun!)
Also FWIW that kind of multi-tasking with juggling various projects is the way you’ll probably work if you get any kind of programming job, so it’s good career practice!
And if the games you’re making are good and original then there’s no hurry right? They’ll still be good and original when all the clones of the latest big thing are dead and gone…
rich
=D