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 hit a point where the original draft for Wail wasn’t working–the pacing was all off and I felt consistently stuck–so I went and rewrote the first act to move certain things earlier into the story and replay some of the rhythms established in Horn and Bleed.  It feels better now–tomorrow I get up and writ the transition into Act Two, and with luck I can drive towards the midpoint of the story and get it clear before the next check-in. 

Of course, the changes have made the scenes in the second-act harder to write now that a lot of the key info is delivered in act one….

What’s inspiring me this week?

So I picked up Nick Pizolatto’s Between Here and the Yellow See a year ago, read two stories, then set it aside to finish when I had a little more time to process it. That turned out to be this week and, my, do I regret waiting.

Pizolatto’s more well-known these days for being the guy behind True Detective, but I’ve only ever read his fiction rather than his TV work. That said, you can see his interests in noir all over these stories–even when they’re not concerned with criminals and investigators, they retain that interest in charting precise details that’s important in good detective fiction.

Pizolatto goes out of his way to chart nuances in emotions, locking them down with precise language and unexpectedly glorious metaphors. I spent my reading time with a notecard by my book, noting page numbers whenever he employed a particularly elegant phrase or scene that was worth going back and studying. 

What action do I need to take?

It’s an exceptionally basic action, but I need to buy a new mouse and mousepad to take to my workstation at uni.

I’ve been getting horrible back-pain while working out there over the last couple of weeks, largely because I’m hunching over the desk like crazy and the chairs are intensely ergonomic in the way they want you to sit. Last week I took out a laptop riser and a spare kepboard, so I wasn’t leaning forward and looking down all day, but utterly failed to take a mouse to finish that particular set-up because I just don’t equate “mouse” and “laptop.”

Without a mouse, the set-up is better for the back but infinitely more distracting. Therefore, it’s time to trek down to the newly-opened Officeworks and go shopping for something cheap and usable…

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 10k into Wail and the momentum has sprawled a little this week, largely because I’m working scenes on both sides of the first act turning point without being happy about how I’m managing the reveal. The goal is to get the story drafted to the midpoint, along with notes about how the scenes will be revised based upon changing needs.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Surprisingly, the most inspirational thing this week has been sitting down with the draft version of the Cortex RPG Rules sent out to Kickstarter backers and figuring out how to apply them to our Superhero campaign.

The Marvel version of the rules is really focused on the fight scenes, but the mechanics stumble when they’re used for anything else. Looking at the structures used in other genres (Heist stories for Leverage, soap opera drama with Smallville) really involves putting the focus on how stories work and how they can be replicated.

In game, that means locking in on how a scene should be dramatized, what’s really important in terms of the result,  and which rules will best showcase the conflict that actually matters.

What action do I need to take?

As my inspiration for this week shows, I’ve been heavily on the gamer geek side of my reading for a while now. I really need to make time for other forms of inspiration, particularly some theory works that I can use with the coming thesis chapter drafts.

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 locking down the first act of Wail this week–there’s a bunch of scenes already down, but I’m coming up on the moment when the story transitions and escalates into the second act through the discovery of bodies and the reveal of the “monster-of-the-week” at the heart of this novella.

Wail is slower to write than I’d been hoping–I tend to average 1,200 words a day instead of 2,000–but a lot of that comes down to managing continuity and making decisions in that regard. Occasionally it slows down due to research, such as the discovery that the timeline I’d set up means that one of the recurring characters is now six years past the mandatory retirement age, and thus needs to be handled differently now. 

What’s inspiring me this week?

I fired up Mark Waid’s 2012 run on The Indestructible Hulk this week, and it’s both spectacular and useful-for-the-thesis. The great thing about comic books is their long-term storytelling–characters have been around for decades at this point, fulfilling certain archetypes. Every now and then a writer comes along and looks at a character in a new way, shifting the position of the lamp so you see a whole new set of shadows and surfaces that were hidden in the previous portrayals. Waid does that by asking a simple question: what happens if Bruce Banner stops looking for a cure for the Hulk, and does everything he can with his genius to help humanity while he’s human?

In four words–Hulk Smash, Banner Build–Waid defines an entirely new direction for the character without making any fundamental changes to the backstory or the personality that break the suspension of disbelief. It’s a neat trick, and one that’s nearly impossible to pull off outside of comics where the long-term storytelling has built these kinds of iconic protagonists. 

What action do I need to take?

I acquired a new phone this week, converting from android to iPhone for the first time. This seems like a minor thing but has resulted in all sorts of hiccups as I try to adapt to a new lay-out and look up app passwords I haven’t had to remember for nearly three years. Similarly, the layouts are just different enough that I can’t mimic the old set-up on the new phone, leaving all my instinctive process around things like posting to social media or making notes wrong. 

I really need to sit down and set the new phone up properly–set up all the apps correctly, position them in places where they’re going to be useful–and take a look at any new tools that I can upload given the change in platform.