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?

Still working on my heavy-metal-orangutan-dinosaur-apocalypse novella this week. The rough draft of the first act is done, which means i now move onto the road-trip portion of the story and freak out about the fact I now get to write scenes with actual dinosaurs.

Also putting together the thesis rational for my PhD prospectus document so I’m prepared when uni goes back.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Stick with me on this one, but the four films in the Sharknado series. I sat down to watch all of them with a friend earlier this week, and I was really impressed with the first three. They’re terrible films, as everyone accuses them of being, but they are internally consistent terrible films that don’t treat their concept as an ongoing joke. Everyone in the movie treats the possibility of a sharknado (and, in film three, the oncoming sharkpocalypse) with utter seriousness, which I suspect is one of the reasons they became a cultural landmark back when the first film debuted in 2013..

They lose that in the fourth film. The tenuous verisimilitude and internal consistency of world-building gives way to the parody of Star Wars movies and entirely consequence-free carnage. Deaths – however stupid –  that would have been mourned and carried with a character in the first three films are forgotten in the fourth, and major characters have the kind of plot immunity that robs scenes of their tension.

Basically, the fourth film is the kind of godawful movie most people assume the first three are. It’s an incredible series to watch if you’re a fan of incredibly goofy narrative concepts (which, lets be honest, heavy-metal-orangutan-dinosaur-apocalypse falls into), just so you can figure out why they work and why they stop working.

What part of my project an I avoiding?

I have to pull apart the lit review from my thesis and rebuild it from scratch, as it appears I may have tried to do far too much for the wordcount available to me in my end-of-semester assessment.

I’m also hitting the end of the kicking-the-tyres stage of a project I’m not particularly sure about, which means I should really fire up some of the sub-projects that would let me test whether the main project will work.

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?

So the next month is going to be spent doing a draft thesis prospectus for university, which may end up being the 4,000 words most likely to drive me crazy out of all the things I’ve ever written (at least, until I have to write the thesis). I’m also about 1/4 of the way through a novella about dinosaurs, heavy metal, and bounty hunters, but I’m torn between trying to split my time between these two or just going full-tilt at the prospectus draft and clearing it out of the way.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Joe Lansadale’s Vanilla Ride and Devil Red, two more instalments in his Hap and Leonard series. They’re the books where he came back tot he characters after a long delay, so in addition to being fun books they’re also interesting to look at in terms of the thesis, since they mark a series where the characters exist in very different cultural contexts (they suddenly have cell phones and the internet is a thing).

What part of my project an I avoiding?

Making a call on how to balance thesis work and creative work over the next few weeks. Mostly, I suspect, because the call I want to make (‘I’ll just do both’) didn’t work in a way that’s actually useful to me. I always mean to do thesis work, but i’ll usually end up ignoring it after a day writing creatively or dive into it and work obsessively for two or three days where nothing else matters.

This may be a problem with having no way of putting hard edges around the thesis work, so I can measure when a day is ‘done,’ especially since word-count alone isn’t a good measure for these sorts of things.

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 uni stuff is still bubbling away in the background, but the primary task this week is writing enough scenes in a zombie apocalypse novella (working title Very Bad Men) that they’ll serve as a plot skeleton. The novella is a very silly project, but I’m basically lifting the approach to writing scenes straight out of Robert Ray’s first edition of The Weekend Novelist – writing opening scenes, climaxes, end-of-act transitions and the demount before the bulk of the story.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I could quite easily spend this section enthusiastically talking about episode 8 of Riverdale, which was quite an extraordinary slice of melodrama when you’re looking at it as a writer. In the space of thirty or forty minutes, they recontextualised a half-dozen characters, changed a litany of alliances, and reversed the narrative direction of several subplots running through the show.

Honorable mention goes to the new netflix YA series, Thirteen Reasons Why, which is…well, not pleasant viewing, but a YA story that looks at suicide, abuse, and the cruelty of high school with a kind of bluntness than isn’t usually there in a series aimed at teens. It’s a show that comes with all the trigger warnings, but its great.

What part of my project an I avoiding?

I keep looking at the process of writing a lit review for my thesis thus far and throwing up my hands, to say nothing of the thesis rational I need to have done by the end of April.

And given that I’m doing this on a Sunday morning, for the first time in forever, it would appear that I need to revisit my weekly planner to make sure my deadlines are a little better managed.