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’m deep in the draft for Project Stair, which started off as a Short Fiction Lab project but may just edge into longer territory by the time I’m done. It’s a YA-quest-fantasy set around an underground ocean, filtered through the kind of Lovecraftian logic of a Guillermo del Toro horror film.

I spent the bulk of last week getting the shape of the thing, and realising that I couldn’t achieve the effect I wanted without really fleshing the details out on the various sub-quest narratives. This week I’m hoping to finalise two of the three side-quests, one of which revolves around a haunted battlefield and the other of which involves a boiling patch of ocean and whatever thing I end up hiding there. 

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’ve been re-reading Damon Suede’s Verbalize and Jim Butcher’s 2006 post about writing sequel scenes this week, trying to wrap my head around developing my ideas for stories a lot more before I write them.

I turned to the former towards the start of the week, when I found myself stalling out on the Project Stair draft and could figure what happened after all the initial set-up. A half-day spent working out character’s inner voids, long-term strategies, and tactical voids suddenly opened up a whole suite of story options, and got me working at a fair clip.

But when I stalled again, towards the end of the week, I found myself going back to Butcher and really pondering how the way character’s process information changes the tone of a story. What felt like an out-of-place whiz-bang action scene started taking on very different overtones when I started lingering on the anticipation instead, and I’ve started to really notice the way other writers are using the same. 

What action do I need to take?

I kicked goals on most of my writing tasks this week, doing more than I’d actually scheduled in my drafting, thesis, admin, blogging, and newsletter columns on my whiteboard. 

That said, there are two columns on my board that were barely touched: the ones devoted to redrafting tasks for novels and developing new story ideas before I sit down to write.

I think this is because neither had specific actions to turn to, which made it really easy to disregard them or treat them as less important, so my challenge for the coming week is breaking them down into clearer, trackable daily actions. 

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 re-setting of work habits continues here in Casa Del Brain Jar, where I am quietly chugging along on my thesis after a few weeks off and I’ve kicked off a novella draft that’s going by the name Project Heavy for the next stretch.

Project Heavy‘s a bit of an interesting one, as it’s very much a story where part of the fun is looking towards stock scenes and then figuring out the twist on them based on the setting. My scene notes for this week’s writing: “Save from mobsters!” and “Meet the family.”

I’m also working my way through the meta-data, sales copy, and cover design for the next Short Fiction Lab release, which I’m hoping to get up for pre-order before the week is out.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I went to an “In Conversation with Kate Forsyth” event at the Brisbane Library, talking about her new novel The Blue Rose, and as is traditional for Forsyth events I walked away with a head full of ideas and an itch to get writing.

To put it bluntly, Kate Forsyth is one of those writers who excels at transforming the research and writing journey of a book into a narrative of its own. When she dos an event, she’s doesn’t necessarily talk about the book–she talks about the journey of writing the book, and her own journey as a writer, and makes those just as reach, meaningful, and interesting as the book itself. 

I spend a lot of time thinking about how to talk about stories at the moment. It’s such a big part of the job when you write–whether it’s speaking in front of people at events or writing blog posts about what you do–and yet its really rare to see somebody who does it incredibly well. Which really makes this inspiring on two levels–the first via the list of notes I’d taken down about books to read, techniques to try, and other details from the In Conversation, and then via the example Kate represents for how to do the business side of authoring. 

What action do I need to take?

A review of the content we’ll be covering in tutorials this week. I’m back in the teaching groove at the moment, but in that strange space where I’m teaching a course that is both entirely new to me and just far enough outside my comfort zone that I don’t walk in entirely confident that I’ve talked about the issue at hand dozens of times before. 

It’s been a while since I’ve been in that situation, and it means I’ve got to spend a little more time planning before each tutorial compared to my usual approach.