Sunday Circle

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

PETERMBALL Sunday Circle

Sunday Circle Banner

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?

My dad ended up in the hospital on Friday, which threw off a whole bunch of timelines as the week adjusted to the situation. I’m still working on the Warhol Sleeping redraft and I’m toying with the idea of doing a whole bunch of stand alone stories as a practice-run while I get used to some new tools (when you upgrade from CS2 to the new adobe creative suite in the space of 24 hours, the learning curve is steep)

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’m really intrigued by what’s going on in the third season of Riverdale at the moment–the show had a fairly middling second season, but has stormed back to being one of the most interesting narratives out there now that’s its splitting its narrative focus between three different archetypes (prison drama, D&D panic as horror, criminal investigation) and started blending them into a whole. It’s brought back the feeling that the story is going to bounce off in a random direction, yet somehow integrate it all as the season wears on, and it’s impressive how well they handle things. 

What action do I need to take?

Part of the logic behind upgrading my Adobe tools was finally sitting down and updating a bunch of old RPG products so they can go on sale again. It’s good busy-work for when my brain isn’t up for in-depth projects, since it’s mostly a matter of playing with layouts and updating files, but almost everything is in a back-up drive and thoroughly unsorted. I’ll need to transfer them onto the active PCs before I can do anything meaningful. 

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

PETERMBALL Stuff, Sunday Circle ,

Sunday Circle Banner

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?

The Warhol Sleeping redraft continues this week, and the books is really coming together now that I’m looking at the deeper structures. It’s going to be a bigger redraft than I originally thought, but it’s gradually transforming from a book I was slightly nervous about to a book I’m really confident about (also, now a book that will get at least one or two sequels, given that I started writing another short novel in the setting).

Also on the docket this week: working on a Loop & Hayley urban fantasy novel; working on my Vampires presentation; redrafting the first 1/3 of Cerberus Station Rumble to get the voice right; doing a few new scenes on the Warhol Sleeping follow-up. 

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’ve been hip-deep in cyberpunk narratives this week, catching up with Altered Carbon in TV and novel form, revisiting old William Gibson novels, and checking out Charlie Stross’ Halting State which is kinda like Cyberpunk getting filtered through the tech of the late 2000s instead of the eighties, dealing with the economies of online gaming, augmented reality, and exciting new forms of crime that cops don’t understand yet.

What action do I need to take?

I’d loosely earmarked Warhol Sleeping for a November 30 release, because it marks one year of Brain Jar Press, but the more detailed rewrite-and-fleshing-out process I’m doing makes that a date that’s tricky to hit. Still a feasible timeframe if I want it to be, but the book would need to take up much of my deep focus time every workday, leaving other projects to sit fallow until it’s done. On the other hand, part of the joy with Brain Jar is being in charge of my own projects, and being free to hold off until a project is done right instead of done-good-enough-to-release

I keep flipping back-and-forth over whether I’d rather double-down and hit my original target date, or embrace the slower approach and get other things done around the edges. 

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

PETERMBALL Sunday Circle

Sunday Circle Banner

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?

There’s five major projects on the boil this week, and it’s possible I’m sneaking in work on a sixth around the edges. The Warhol Sleeping structural sweep is underway–every scene is getting broken down in a spreadsheet so I can trace what’s happening and make sure the emotional payoffs are right. The next book in the series is about 6K in, spinning off one of the characters I cut from the early drafts and giving him his own story (in third person, past tense).

The other two projects are early drafts, but the real meat of my week is thesis driven: I’m starting to devote an hour a day to writing papers and chapter segments, building the work up with the same process that’s been guiding my fiction for the last two weeks. It has the advantage of breaking a big, scary task down into incremental bites.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I recently joined a whole bunch of different writing and indie publishing groups on Facebook, and started engaging with a bunch that I’d joined and largely ignored. It’s put me into contact with the kind of “how do I…” conversations that used to be part and parcel of working for the Writers Centre, and started pushing me to really think about how  and why I do certain things (or believe certain things are a bad idea).

What action do I need to take?

I’m at that dangerous part of a getting my shit together where it feels like I can start taking on more things. Already, putting this post together, I’ve been looking at things I’d like to do and feeling like I could just tack an extra two-hour pomodoro into my day in order to stack another task onto the table.

It’s really hard to ignore that temptation, and I need to start revisiting priority lists and paying careful attention to the hours I can devote to stuff. It’s time to start looking at how much time I really have to get things done every day, and stay focused on what’s really important.