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’ve got a couple of projects moving forward this week, but the one that needs the most thought is the draft for a novella called Warhol Sleeping. It’s the oldest thing on my big list of unfinished projects, and about half done, so I’m giving myself a week of tinkering to see a) whether it can be salvaged as a project (it was originally a cyberpunk-ish thing, drafted in the era before smartphones) and b) whether I can transform the suite of vignettes into a narrative arc within a reasonable amount of time.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’ve been reading Mary Robinette Kowal’s Word Puppets short story collection, which covers a lot of career ground (early stories to later works) and shows her progression as a writer. I’m a fan of Kowal’s work in general, but an even bigger fan of the way she unpacks progress online and in workshops/the Writing Excuses podcast, and you can see the kind of thinking she talks about at work in the craftsmanship of her stories.

What action do I need to take?

I’ve got my next short story collection formatted and the meta-data and sales spiel is all written up. That just leaves final proofing, some minor tinkering with the original stories, and the authors notes on all the stories on the to-do list. The scheduled release date is the end of May, so I need to pick up the pace on these this week.

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 down to the final scene on the story I started last week, so I’m looking to get that written around some thesis work in the coming days. Hell Track has been a little slower to resume work on, but I’m going to break out a notebook and start tackling all the hiccups which have emerged over the last week.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’ve been reading Rick Remender’s run on Uncanny Avengers over the last week, which does an incredible job of blending the history of two Marvel franchises and coming up with some really high-level, cosmic plots that still feel grounded in the people. I generally like the Avengers least when they’re tackling big, cosmic-level plots involving time travel, and I’ve liked the X-Men comics least when they’re dealing with time-travelling, unknowable villains like Apocalypse. Remender takes both and fuses them into something incredible, while keeping the action grounded in the foibles of the team.

What action do I need to take?

Chaos has taken over my desk over the last month as it became the dumping ground for things that did not have a home in the flat, and the available work space has shrunk to the size of the keyboard. I really need to start sorting things and either finding homes or tossing things away, because it’s becoming harder and harder to work there.

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?

Everything in my life ground to a halt while I focused on clearing marking of decks this week, so this week will be spent reconnecting with the three major projects on my plate: Hell Track, the current short story draft, and my thesis chapter. I’m keeping my new word goals relatively low – I’ll be happy if I get 500 to 1000 a day – but I’m aiming to spend about two hours a day on each re-reading what’s already been done, making notes, and generally getting back up to speed after a few weeks of heavy distraction.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’ve just marked a whole bunch of student essays where they analysed aspects of craft in the novels we’re reading this semester, and there’s some of them that have sent me back to The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Gone Girl, and Venetia with fresh eyes to take a really close look at the minutia of the craft. More and more, I find myself fascinated with Gaiman’s craftsmanship, in particular – there’s a real care with the way he builds his novel and the images used within.

What action do I need to take?

The aforementioned feeling of things grinding to a halt has taken it’s toll. It’s largely the result of the mid-semester break at uni disrupting routines and the aforementioned marking eating up time (both in the actual hours spent marking, and in the energy spent managing the stress around it). I’ve been setting the goal of “get back into a routine” for weeks now, without being specific for what that means. In hindsight, I should be specific: I really need to do a thorough weekly plan, instead of just reviewing specifics on a Sunday, then be mindful of where I want to spend my time. From there, I really need to do a half-hour daily check-in to kick off my weekday mornings and make sure everything is running in sync.