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?

I’m part-way through marking at the moment, which means the bulk of this week will be spent grading and critiquing about 72,000 words of student fiction before a Thursday deadline. I’m averaging about 12,000 words of marking a day at the moment, so I’m more-or-less on target.

I’m usually grabbing an hour or so for other work over coffee, which are being spent working on Project Rad and the Exile rewrite. Mostly, at this stage, working by hand, brain dumping everything I know about both projects and what the stories are actually about, figuring out when scenes I’ve written need to be resequenced or shifted, and generally having fun with things.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I picked up Amistead Maupin’s Tales of the City after watching a few episodes of the Netflix miniseries. I’m fascinated by the structure of the novel, which features self-contained vignettes that gradually weave together but still have the potential to stand alone. The structure is a legacy of the books origins as a newspaper serial, getting printed as a regular column on the back page of the San Francisco Chronicle. 

I wish I’d read this a little earlier in my life. I remember being curious what fiction-using-webcomic models might look like ten or fifteen years ago, and even did a short-lived project where I explored the idea, but couldn’t quite wrap my head around it. Now, I’m pretty sure it would look something Maupin’s work, which is basically a prose comic strip that builds up narratives through daily repetition of themes/characters. 

What action do I need to take?

I’ve stopped doing my daily plan and heartbeat log on Instagram because the one-two punch of guinea pigs in surgery and long days of marking made for a heavily disrupted week. Really need to get back to both on Monday–I’m feeling the lack focus starting to get to me and things like checking email or doing exercises to combat back pain are slipping through the cracks.

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’m setting aside the next weeks weeks to do rewrites on the Flotsam/Keith Murphy series, with the coming week focused on adding some scenes to  Exile in order to balance out the narrative–fleshing out a subplot that got truncated by the word-count limits back when I first wrote the series; adding in a little more scaffolding for the series based upon my PhD research.

At the same time, I’m trying to lock down the branding of the series on the cover and blurb front.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I spent the weekend reading both ReWork and It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work by owners of 37 Signals and the Signal-to-Noise blog, Jason Fried and Darren Hansson. They’re both short books, but they pack a wealth of information into a slim page-count, and there’s a definite philosophy at work that’s interesting to read.

They may be oriented towards business processes–and they’ve definitely been inspiring in terms of helping me clarify some stuff around my long-term ideas for Brain Jar–but there’s also something about the way they’re written that’s got me thinking about writing books and essays again. 

What action do I need to take?

My end-of-semester marking lands tomorrow at 4:00 PM, which means I need to start finding time in my daily schedule to read and assess a small pile of student work. The really important thing here will be starting early and getting small increments done every day, rather than trying to process everything in a two or three-day rush.

Unfortunately, embracing that daily process is hard, so I really need to monitor my habits and make sure it’s getting done.

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’m in the process of re-branding the Flotsam series this week, fleshing out the first novella and re-thinking all the sales copy. I keep getting stuck on Project Rad and letting the momentum stall, and I suspect the reason for it is that I’m subconsciously worrying about doing something that doesn’t fit with the rest of the series. 

What’s inspiring me this week?

I started listening to David Tennant’s podcast a few weeks back, and this week went back to re-listen to the episodes where he interviews his Good Omens co-star Michael Sheen and Jessica Jones co-star Kristen Ritter. The effect is rather like dropping in on two co-workers who respect one another having after-work drinks–there’s a lot of really great discussion about craft, background, and process, but also a lot of filling in the gaps around background and how they ended up doing what they do.

Part of what I’m really enjoying is listening in to the way people value their work, and what they start looking for from their projects as their position in the industry changes.

What action do I need to take?

I’m clearing a lot of old tax paperwork at the moment, submitting some long overdue returns from the period where my depression and sleep apnea were really bad. Last week I went through the arduous process of logging digital receipts–something that involved going through five thousand plus emails in order to make sure I had everything. This week, my focus shifts to making sure I’ve logged on my writing income correctly….and it’s prompted me to make sure my systems are in place to make the 2019 and 2020 tax seasons a little easier.