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, thesis work and writing take a back seat to clearing a bunch of marking of the decks and preparing for the next few weeks of classes. The first half of this semester’s teaching was dominated by books I knew really well, but the back half involves two books I’ve never read (Gone Girl, Eleanor and Park), and one book that I’ve not read in a lot of detail (A Game of Thrones), so I’ve got a bunch of reading and annotating ahead of me before the semester returns from break.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’ve been watching bits of Jane the Virgin lately, well into the second season, and I’m incredibly impressed with the way they make use of the omnipresent narrator to generate effects within the narrative. It’s an incredibly smart show that’s hyper-aware of the genre and how to both deliver upon- and innovate the generic expectations. Their ability to quietly set stuff up in the A-Plot and then use it to deliver a surprising pay-off in the B-plot is fantastic, and I keep wanting to pull episodes apart to better understand their structure.

What action do I need to take?

Having consolidated all the unfinished drafts in on my various hard drives, it’s time to start taking a closer look at all the unfinished drafts I’ve got floating around in notebooks. There’s a small stack of projects that never actually made it onto a computer, including one finished novel draft and a handful of novellas. Since a lot of the big, thinky work this week will be spent on marking, it seems like typing these up and logging them could be a useful task for the more-braindead parts of my working day.

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 didn’t get much writing done over the last week, but I have been rehabing workspaces and writing tools to re-evaluate how to make them work a little better. One of the things on my to-do list was consolidating all the unfinished projects from three seperate computers into a single drive, sharing the same file architecture and save structures, so I don’t find myself getting lost every time I try to figure out what to do next. I’m currently sitting at 237 unfinished projects of various lengths, which includes:

– 144 short stories in various states of completion plus a list of raw ideas two pages long;
– 29 Unfinished blog posts plus a list of raw ideas a page and a half long;
– 38 novel projects with partial drafts or planning notes
– 31 novella projects with partial drafts or planning notes (technically 34, as I’m yet to create folders for the next few PhD novellas)
– 1 essay series, partially written and largely swamped in planning.
– 1 short story collection which is…well, right on track.

The next step will be processing the dozen or so projects that don’t need much work to reach completion, then start rehabbing some of the older ideas and seeing what needs to be done in order to get them out of the “in progress” folder. I’ll be splitting my time between drafting Hell Track and working on a drag racing short story that I’ve been redrafting, on and off, for about six years.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Two books this week. As my last post suggested, Aspects of the Novel has been a really good read over the last week, provoking some new ways of thinking about fiction despite certain aspects of aspects of the novel being familiar after years of writing workshops.

Jane Friedman’s The Business of Being a Writer isn’t particularly inspirational in the here’s a story idea sense, but as the list above suggests, I probably don’t need a bunch of new ideas. What it’s great for is providing a context around the business decisions you make as a writer, along with the decisions being made by the various publishing companies and magazines you end up working with. The stuff on opening up leads and author platform is among the best I’ve seen out there. I keep arguing that writers need to start putting together a better plan for how they’ll make a living from their work, and Friedman’s provided the toolkit for figuring out how to do that. Strongly recommended.

What action do I need to take?

Part of the reason I’ve got so many unfinished projects is my habit of jotting down 300-500 words of a short story as a placeholder – usually enough to lock down an idea, or a voice that I want to write. These often stall because they don’t have clear plots yet, which means nothing is working towards a specific point, so I really want to work my way through the unfinished project file and start looking for an actual plot to work with as I reach the point where I have time to work on it.

The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

PETERMBALL Stuff, 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 got hit with a nasty cold on Monday of last week and didn’t bounce back until Friday, so this week is largely a copy of last week’s goals: writing the first “race trails” sequence for Hell Track and doing some light revision on the opening to start bringing it in line with the story in my head.

On the thesis front, I’ll be hashing out a partial chapter plan based on the little aside in Raymond Chandler’s The Goldfish, where he says: 

The last time I had been in the Gray Lake district I had helped a D.A.’s man named Bernie Ohls shoot a gunman named Poke Andrews. But that was higher up the hill, farther away from the lake.

This kind of intertextual reference to another story is rare in Chandler’s work, so I’m taking a closer look at it and running through some of the narrative functions it’s serving compared to series recaps in other works.

lWhat’s inspiring me this week?

I read Helen Sword’s Stylish Academic Writing with the goal of fleshing out the skills I need fo my thesis, but there were a half-dozen times where I found myself putting the book down and making notes that are more applicable to the craft (and ideas) at work in some creative stuff I’ve got going on. It’s the kind of book that gets me excited about writing because it’s pulling apart the mechanical side of things in a really specific and focused way, rather than hitting the general advice that gets replayed over and over.

Also, my god, the reading list that this book generated as it cruised through examples of people who write academically and well. So much interesting stuff that I’m eager to go read now…

What action do I need to take?

I’ve been running without a clear weekly plan for a few weeks now, so this question is starting to get a little dicey – I’m not sufficiently sure of what should be on my radar that isn’t to really be confident of my answer. Fortunately, this means I probably need to revisit my planning documents and actually do a detailed weekly checkpoint for this week and a proper Monthly check-in before April kicks off.