Sunday Circle

The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them).

After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all.

Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here).

MY CHECK-IN

What am I working on this week?

I’m keeping a very narrow focus in the coming week: I’m working on the first half of Warhol Sleeping‘s final act; aiming to get about a third of my conference paper written; and aiming to get a short story re-release out on the major platforms. 

What’s inspiring me this week?

The Silver Well by Kim Wilkins and Kate Forstythe, one of those seemingly rare short story collections that are built around a central concept rather than simply bringing together a series of previously published fiction. It uses pair of signature motifs–the titular well a woman in search of a place to belong–to do a deep dive into the history of the location and a particular family who lives there.

What action do I need to take?

I updated the onboarding for my newsletter this week (aka the series of emails new subscribers get), and got caught off-guard when mailchimp started sending out automated emails to current subscribers despite the fact that I’d taken them off the list. I need to keep an eye on things to ensure that everything is working as it should.

My tracking is also showing that my screen tie on the phone is creeping up to about 5 hours a day on average, with an average of 65 pickups per day. I need to look for ways to wind that back a little, especially since the bulk of it is checking data that doesn’t really need to be monitored that closely.

The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them).

After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all.

Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here).

MY CHECK-IN

What am I working on this week?

I started re-building the final act of Warhol Sleeping on Friday–one of the inevitable side-effects of fleshing out the first two acts is figuring out the stuff that’s wrong in the last, or as it appears in my rewrite notes: if you put a cyberpunk ziggurat on the mantle in the first act….

This is also a function of reworking the books role a little–I’m going back to this particular setting in a few books time, which means the world building needs a little more detail.

I’m also preparing a bunch of short fiction projects for release–I’ve spent the last week studying newsletter processes and how to do certain things more effectively, and the disconnect between primarily selling fiction and offering non-fiction as the bonus for newsletter subscribers has sunk in.

What’s inspiring me this week?

This week I finished reading Joe Abercrombie’s Sharp Ends, collecting together a bunch of his short fiction. I’d been dipping in and out of this book for months, because it distinguishes itself from most short fiction collections by featuring a whole suite of stories set in the same universe without specifically being focused on similar characters.

It’s a really interesting reading experience because of that–there are some connections that you pick up in the stories themselves, but others that are enhanced by familiarity with Abercrombie’s novel-length work and the connects that are forged there. Since my reading of the longer works is haphazard, there were a bunch of stories where I felt like I was missing the zing that the recognition usually brought.

Intriguing on thesis level, but also in terms of how writing series starts to tie together.

What action do I need to take?

There’s a bunch of cover-design and blurbing on the horizon, much of which deserves more than one draft before I finalise things. I need to do a full list of everything on the docket, then work out a process to ensure that roughs and finals happen in an ordered way.

Similarly, my Brain Jar Press files are in a state of chaos at the moment–my early organisation hasn’t held over as I picked up the pace of doing stuff, which means that I need to do a considered sorting-and-arranging so things are in logical and consistent places.

It’s the three-year anniversary of the Sunday Circle this week, which I almost missed amid the chaos of the last seven days. Big thanks to all past and present circle posters–I appreciate you dropping in and sharing your weekly goals with us.

The Sunday Circle is the weekly check-in where I ask the creative-types who follow this blog to weigh in about their goals, inspirations, and challenges for the coming week. The logic behind it can be found here. Want to be involved? It’s easy – just answer three questions in the comments or on your own blog (with a link in the comments here, so that everyone can find them).

After that, throw some thoughts around about other people’s projects, ask questions if you’re so inclined. Be supportive above all.

Then show up again next Sunday when the circle updates next, letting us know how you did on your weekly project and what you’ve got coming down the pipe in the coming week (if you’d like to part of the circle, without subscribing to the rest of the blog, you can sign-up for reminders via email here).

MY CHECK-IN

What am I working on this week?

In approximate order:

There are six scenes left to redraft and flesh out in Warhol Sleeping at present, although I expect this will be two weeks work rather than one due to the sparse writing I was using as I rushed to the end. The bulk of this week will be focusing on revamping the two chapters that take place at a weird-ass cyberpunk art commune, working hard to really nail down the futuristic punk overload feel.

My paperwork came back for conference funding all approved, which means I need to start ramping up on the writing of the paper this week. I’ve got a rough structure in place, but I tend not to be 100% confident of such things until I start trying to flesh it out (this week’s goal–really laying into the lit review).

With the first two Short Fiction Labs all loaded (and about twenty-four hours left to pick up your copy of Winged, With Sharp Teeth for free), this week’s short story time will be spent tinkering with a pair of old ghost stories that I wrote over a decade ago (before I realised that one of them was a ghost story). There will be some research this week, nailing down what makes a good ghost story work, then some redrafting.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Research reading has been particularly inspiring this week, courtesy of Seriality and Texts for Young People: The Compulsion to Repeat, which made the really interesting point in its introduction about how repetition is valued in various forms of writing–while the repetition of patterns and tropes is often used to devalue serialised fiction, the repetition of language and rhythms in poetry is part of what we value about the form.

It’s a useful comparison given my background, and became a really useful thing to hinge an entire thesis chapter around in the next few months.

What action do I need to take?

I let day-to-day planning slide a whole lot over the last ten days, and it was already pretty sketchy for two weeks before that. I really need to sit down and do a proper review and refocus of all the projects in my Omnifocus listing, updating it with the new stuff that’s cropped up over the last month, and do some hard assessments on how and when certain things get done.