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 start heading into QWC once a week to work on GenreCon this week, in addition to doing my last full week of shifts at the Queensland Health gig and catching up with friends through most of Monday, so I’m actually doing very little creative work in the next seven days. A little short story tinkering will probably take place, but mostly I’m focused on rethinking most of my planning systems to account for the fact that I’ll be working from home a awful after January 31. This brings with it an incredibly high potential for procrastination, and I’d really like to lock down any habits that contribute to that and nip them in the bud.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I picked up a copy of Elmore Leonard’s Fire in the Hole and Other Stories, which is best-known these days for including the titular novelette that eventually became the TV show, Justified. I’m a fan of Leonard’s novels – he’s an great stylists who has a real knack for character and dialogue – but they kinda pale in comparison to what he does at shorter word counts.

What’s really interesting is watching…well, not a formula, but a definite recurring motif in terms of the way he likes to end things…get rolled out alongside an ironic final statement in story after story, to the point where you can predict it happening. It should be incredibly irritating, but it’s become the thing that I really enjoyed looking for.

What part of my project an I avoiding?

I’m intentionally avoiding writing projects for the next week, but I’ve been unintentionally avoiding a bunch of writing-adjacent work like signing contracts and processing email. I really should set aside a few hours to clear the decks before Friday.

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?

Finished a story draft last week, so the bulk of this week is devoted to revision and trying to get it into a readable form

What’s inspiring me this week?

The History of the Devil by William Woods, which is not quite the book I expected it to be when I picked it up on a discount table at my local second-hand bookstore a few year backs. Much of it isn’t really looking at the Devil at all, but the shift from a hunter-gatherer society to agrarian society and how that’s reflected in the beliefs. Incredibly interesting book, and I keep making notes that will probably be short stories one day.

What part of my project an I avoiding?

Part of rewriting the story has involved layering in some new layers on the story, which in turn means that I need to start figuring out what the new ending. Still a couple of ways that it could go, but I need to pick one and build towards it.

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?

Well, first day of 2017 and its time for me to finish my two weeks of relative holiday and get back to writing. On the to-do list this week: three blog posts, one short story, one chapter on Float (which will also mean spending some quality time re-reading the project and figuring out where I’m up to after a long break).

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’ve leaned heavily on the cultural consumption over the last week, finishing off movies and TV shows I’d half-watched and then left for a later date. The most interesting of them was 20,000 Days on Earth, which is billed as a documentary about Nick Cave and his work, but is probably closer to the documentary equivalent of Creative Non-Fiction.

There is a lot of artifice in the presentation, giving it a really strong visual style and approach, and it doesn’t try to hide the fact that things have been staged in order to generate specific effects. The weird thing is that it kinda works, partially because it’s Nick Cave and his work has always been touched by a streak of pompous melodrama, partially because the documentary makes it very clear that it’s got its own take on the idea of documenting that’s willing to be metaphoric and isn’t necessarily based on realism.

Not a great film, but an interesting one for that reason and I’ve been pondering it on and off.

What part of my project an I avoiding?

I really need to sit down and do my quarterly, monthly, and weekly plans at the moment, in addition to setting up the white board with hour tracking. My rhythm for this is all off thanks to the holidays, and in particular the fact that all my regular breakfast places are shut down for the next two weeks and my habit of planning over coffee isn’t quite coming together.