Sunday Circle

I just realised that the Sunday Circle turns four years old this weekend, which is a lot of weekly check-ins about projects, inspiration, and identifying sticking points.

It’s probably a sign that I need to revise the intro to these posts. A project to think about for the new year.

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?

Finishing off a few chapters in the exegesis that have blown out past word count, and doing a lot of the busywork in terms of making the draft readable (ie checking references, proofing, etc).

What’s inspiring me this week?

Monica Valentinelli’s Make Art, Not War Challenge, a book of essays, writing prompts, and rules for making art in times of enormous social turmoil. This one started out on Valintenelli’s blog a few years back, an online movement that gradually ran out of steam as Valentinelli moved on to other things.

Which is a shame, because the book the Make Art, Not War rules are a great toolkit if you’re feeling harried and beleaguered in your creative life.

When times are tough, the feeling that artists are not necessary tends to permeate. Art is viewed as frivolous or a luxury since we don’t produce food, clothing, or housing. The exact opposite is true, however, because in charged political climates artists document and represent our humanity and all our struggles be they violent or peaceful for present day and future generations. Often, propaganda posters, victory songs, and other forms of art are specifically commissioned as well. Art is omnipresent, it is always political, and the choices we make affect our audiences and everyone around us.

Valentinelli, Monica. Make Art Not War Challenge: Rules, Essays, and 31 Creative Prompts

In a month where Australia burned and the global political climate seemed to veer closer and closer to bleak and corrupt, it’s one of those books that’s full of timely advice and reminders.

What action do I need to take?

I want to compile a new revision and release checklist for Brian Jar Press, especially since I’ve now adjusted my proofing and editorial process by moving things online. This works well with short stories, less so for longer works where it’s easy to find myself losing track of what stage I’m up to and what still needs to be done.

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 deadline to get a rough exegesis draft to my supervisor is this Friday, which largely sets my to-do list for the week. There’s about four thousand coherent words left to write, and about ten thousand incoherent ideas half-written in another file. Much of my week will be spent winnowing out the bad ideas and finding the stuff that will fit.

Once the draft is turned in, I’m taking a few days to chill and then getting back to fiction…but that’s likely to be next week’s project.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, which is one of the best films I’ve seen in years. The first Rian Johnson film I encountered was the low-budget indie Brick, which took the tropes of film noir and ported them into a high school setting. The result was such a startlingly fresh, tight, and innovative mystery that I found myself rewatching the film over and over for the space of a week, puzzling out all the tricks.

Johnson’s Star Wars film, The Last Jedi, took his knack for visual framing and turned it up to eleven. Whether you come down on the side of loving that film or hating it, it’s hard to deny the visual impact of what’s put up on the screen. Johnson, when given a budget, prooved to be both stylistically flashy and incredibly coherent in terms of visual style.

Knives Out is a blend of those two approaches. It’s got the really nuanced understanding of its genre that made Brick great, although it’s taking on the cosy mystery rather than film noir. It uses that nuance to recretate the genre from the ground up and deliver something fresh, accompanying a cracking script with really great performers.

And then it’s got the budget for Johnson to turn his knack for visual style loose, and the results are spectacular. 

What action do I need to take?

Setting myself an easy one this week: hit up the various social media sites and edit my interest profiles. I do this fairly regularly on Facebook, which maens it stops assuming I’ve got a prevailing interest in things I checked once or twice (or assuming I’ve got an interet in certain interests showing up on facebook, whe that’s not really how I use the site). I’ve never done it on twitter, though, which my explain why the site is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate and engage with. 

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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’ve just spent two weeks marking, and like all end-of-year grading exercises, it obliterated any other work. Which means this week is all about gaining ground on the two projects earmarked for end-of-November deadlines–getting my exegesis draft finished, and getting a new short story collection together. Everything will be drafting and line-edits for the next seven days, possibly the next fourteen.

What’s inspiring me this week?

My partner and I finally caught up with Season 4 of She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, which is a phenomenal series in and of itself but also a really interesting one to look at in terms of series.

Serial fiction is often predicated on keeping characters iconic and close to archetype, particularly in animated narratives. She-Ra pushes its characters to evolve and change, a constant disruption of the status quo. The characters still cleave close to archetypes, but the series is finding new iterations on those archetypes and shedding new light upon them. Things that happen resonate through the series.

And the season finale…well, it’s a big status quo change. The kind that actually has me wondering whether everything we’ve seen thus far is the first act of a longer story, or if we just hit the end of a second act, or possibly the whole thing is unreadable in those terms.

It’s a fascinating thing to puzzle over, given where my head is at in thesis terms. I just wish I had the time to go down that particular rabbit hole.

What action do I need to take?

So many things. The key word for this week is regroup, since marking blew all plans out of the water and I don’t have any real sense of where I’m at with any projects. I new weekly checkpoint and project review is due, and it’s worth revisiting all my project plans for the quarter and seeing how challenges, goals, and timelines may have shited.