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?

The main focus this week is notebook draft of Median Survival Time, which is rolling towards its midpoint and a major shift in direction. I’ve now got to take a character that has been proactively running and fighting for much of the last three chapters and get them to sit still for a very long time. Lot s more talking than they’re used too, lots more betrayal on the horizon. 

What’s inspiring me this week?

To my considerable surprise, the Shadowrun Returns computer game. It’s not the most advanced of games in terms of its dynamics, but the plotting and atmosphere have routinely made me smile as advanced through the story. It takes a whole bunch of weird-ass worldbuilding in the form of fantasy cyberpunk and builds upon that, taking us on a tour of classic noir tropes and cyberpunk conceits. This has the potential to go hugely wrong at so many ways, but the little details are great–character’s feel like they’ve got a presence beyond their appearance in the game, and there’s always a neat detail or two to pick up when you interact with them.

What action do I need to take?

I’ve been meaning to pitch a conference paper before a July 23 deadline, but I haven’t put any more thought into things than “yeah, I should probably do that.” Partially this is the result of putting all my focus on drafting this week, but I suspect it’s also got a lot to do with ambiguous timelines in terms of the work that follows – when do I write the paper? How do I allocate the time I need to get through the “oh crap, is this going to be good enough,” nerves that will inevitably kick in when I start doing something I’ve not done before. I need to devote a little time to thinking this sort of thing through, then get the abstract together.

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?

Back on Median Survival Time this week, as I’m working towards an end-of-July point where I need to swap back to the theoretical side of the thesis. I pulled the entire thing apart over the last week and started looking for ways to tighten the action, cutting some of the filler that is currently padding the story out and leaving the scenes that are lean muscle.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Sy Montogmery’s The Soul of an Octopus, which is a kind of book-length personal essay about octopuses that weaves between scientific fact and personal experience. Much heavier on the latter by the end of the book – and there are points when things slow because of it – but I spent large chunks of the book making notes for aspects of marine biology I’m going to steal for other things in writing. As Montgomery argues, Octopuses are the closest things to aliens on planet earth; this makes them great fodder for SF writers.

What action do I need to take?

The last scene of Pixie Dust, with Whisky Chaser, continues to elude me, which means the ending I’ve got in mind probably continues to be wrong.I should go through the earlier scenes and look at what I’m building towards, then brainstorm a couple of

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?

As predicted/feared in last week’s check-in, the post-marking slump posed some interesting mental health challenges due the sheer amount of stuff I let slide in the name of getting everything done. Still not quite out of the slump, so I’m keeping my goals very simple for the coming week – one hour of research notes every day, one hour working on the Median Survival Time draft. Try and keep to my preferred schedule as much as I can, even if my attention drifts away from those two things after the initial work is done.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Robin Laws Beating the Story is proving to be every bit as good as I hoped it would be. The useful thing about the book isn’t that it breaks down narrative – books on story structure are widespread – but that it gives very specific names to the beats within a story so you can look at them in analytic terms based upon their goal. In some respects, it’s a little like the idea that the sky wasn’t blue until we invented the dye colour – once you have a word for something that was always there, you can suddenly notice it a little more easily.

What action do I need to take?

Tending to the routines that are in place to manage mental health and focus. I’ve broken it down to three things that I want to focus on in the coming week:

• Setting a morning alarm. I’ve been letting my sleep habits get out of whack a lot since Tuesday, for example, which means I’m frequently staying up until 3:00 AM and getting up around 8:00 AM.
• Focusing on a daily routine. I’m not putting fences around my work, which means there’s no clear time when I’m meant to start/stop, and I end up focusing on the wrong project with furious intensity.
• Do my Checkpoints. I haven’t done clear monthly/weekly plans for a while, and my quarterly checkpoint is a month overdue, so I’m a bit lost as to where my attention should be and getting irritated at how little I’m doing.