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?

This week I start the drafting process on Wail. I kinda hesitate to mention this one–I’ve got all sorts of superstitions about working on a third Miriam Aster novella given the difficulties I’ve had in the past, but the upside of doing the PhD has been the opportunity to sit down and think about why I had so much trouble using Horn as the basis for a series. 

What’s inspiring me this week?

John Truby’s The Anatomy of Story. A lot of books on story tend to fall back on the three-act structure and its variations, and Truby touches upon that here, but he’s less interested in the nuts and bots of who does what and more interested in tracking story as means of exploring a problem of morality. He takes a close look at what it means to build towards the moral choices that are made a the climax of a story, and how to build a narrative that will support it. 

What action do I need to take?

I really need to sit down and re-read the second Aster book, Bleed, which I wrote approximately a decade ago and remember far less than I do Horn. Currently I’ve been flicking through the pick up certain points–character names, double-checking locations–but there’s all sorts of minutia in there I need to check for the Wail draft with very little idea of where, exactly, it might be. 

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?

I more-or-less finished a very rough draft of Median Survival Time last week, but there’s still five scenes that aren’t quite right. The main task for this week will be going through and redrafting them, getting them into a format that better suits the novella and the ending.

If those are done in time, I move on to the detail-pass–going in and adding all the little details and flourishes, looking for ways to tighten up the setting and the character perspectives.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’m about two-thirds of the way through Peter May’s The Black House, a police procedural that takes place on a remote Island in the Hebrides. The story is solid, but what elevates this is the precision of language during the descriptions of the physical and social landscape.

What action do I need to take?

I’ve been refining a paper idea after bouncing the topic of my supervisor, but I’ve been putting off the redrafting to the abstract for nearly a week. I’ll need to get a new version of that together by Friday, so I can get feedback on it before the deadline at the end of the month.

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 about five half-finished chapter in the Median Survival Time draft at the moment, and the goal for this week will be finishing them off and doing a first-past polish and annotation for what will be tackled in the coming revisions. I’m a little behind where I wanted to be–I’m certainly going to blow the informal deadline I was working towards–but it’s not catastrophic. Talked to my supervisor about other options that will meet the PhD requirements, and I think the novella will be stronger for the extra time.

More importantly, I put together a work plan that will take me through to the end of the year, laying out exactly what I’m meant to be working on at any given day. It still needs a little refinement–I’ve set it up to be updated with more detail on my quarterly planning sessions–but it gives me a really strong idea about what’s achievable this year. In theory, it should see the return of some blogging in a few weeks–right now, I’m building up a buffer of content and figure out a schedule.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’ve been reading Anne of Green Gables and watching Anne with an E on Netflix more-or-less simultaneously, and it’s been a fascinating experience. The book is something I’ve avoided for years, under the assumption that it’s historically driven and I don’t often gel with historical setting (also, lets be honest, internalised and unconscious misogyny).

Truth is, it’s not historically driven at all (as in, the point of the book is not the historical aspects). The book is fantastic and I owe an apology to everyone I ignored when they urged me to read it. It’s got an incredibly efficient set-up, in terms of getting us invested in the characters, and while it’s highly episodic in structure, it’s got a style that keeps me reading. 

The series is also fantastic. Well-acted, well scripted, and utterly willing to throw out the source material in order to examine something that is cheerfully glossed over in the books given the time period. A lot of people hate it, especially if they grew up with the 80s Green Gables miniseries and dislike the attempts to add “gritty” to the setting, but I really dig the way they’ve used the novel as a basis for looking at issues around coping with trauma, the inherent discrimination of the setting, and gender. 

What action do I need to take?

WordPress has a new system for putting together posts (hello, Gutenburg), and I have a bunch of ready-to-go templates built around the HTML editor used in the old post editor. They don’t translate well–the attempt to copy-paste this week’s resulted in a chunk of time devoted to re-doing layout. At some point in the coming seven days, I really should sit down and get familiar with Gutenburg and how I’ll need to re-format.