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 ten thousand words into a crime novella at the moment, and in another two thousand or so I’ll hit a natural stopping point in the structure and set it aside to do spend some quality time on thesis novellas. Specifically, Project Bug, which I’d like to have done to submit to my supervisor before the end of january.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Kathleen Jennings sold me on Tessa Dare’s Romancing The Duke via the suggestion that it’s a regency romance about Star Wars fandom. I couldn’t picture such a thing, but dove into the novel regardless…and was immediately rewarded by a phenomenal regency that was, 100%, about Star Wars Fandom (among other things).

What impressed me most is that even with the warning, I didn’t pick up on straight away. The Star Wars riffs are so bald-faced that I overlooked them, and it’s not until the regency equivalent of a Comicon shows up it actually clicked. 

What action do I need to take?

It’s looking like Brain Jar will expanding its stable of authors beyond me next year, which means one of my pressing tasks is pulling together a contract outlining terms. Harder than it sounds, given the existence of ebooks and print on demand, as the return of rights gets a bit stickier due to the lfact that books are never truly “out of print.”

Current Gamer Kit

PETERMBALL Gaming

I’ve spent the last five or six years running Marvel Heroic at our weekly game sessions, which usually meant carting around a buttload of dice and ten years worth of game notes every time we had a session.

When that campaign ended last month, we transitioned to John Harper’s Blades in the Dark–a game about gangs of scoundrels in a pressure-cooker fantasy city where every bit of turf needs to be fought for with a scrap.

The group built themselves around the conceit of being a a cult devoted to an ancient cat goddess, the three core members consisting of an immigrant lawyer dealing in ghost rights, an immigrant academic who is basically Indiana Jones with feline features, and an immigrant locksmith whose turned into the crime-savvy burglar of the crew.

In the space of three sessions they’ve got involved in a gang war, pissed off a local consulate, found themselves embroiled in the affairs of several vengeful ghosts, and attacked people with ghosts, ghost-bombs, spectral honey badgers, and impressionable college students.

I’ll give the system this: it excels at generating hooks from play, and what seems like relatively straightforward system is surprisingly complex when you start playing. I’m really digging the tone–we’re a little more anime action than the default system seems built for, but the slow sense of the characters miring themselves in the muck as they try to do good is definitely seeping in.

The the thing that really pleases me is how lightweight the whole system is. I’ve got a game folder that is on the verge of being sidelined, as I basically need the core rulebook, a handful of dice between sessions, and two notebooks (one for brainstorming, one for tracking things session by session).

I’m very late to the party for this one, but if you’re a gamer with an interest in stories and spec fic, I heartily recommend this one.

Hanging at the Book of Face for a Stretch

PETERMBALL Writing Advice - Business & the Writing Life

For the past few years, I’ve largely left my Facebook Author Page as a secondary concern. It was a place to re-post links to blog posts after Facebook ceased allowing these to go to a personal feed, and occasionally served as the site for announcements of new covers or books.

This was partially a function of time—I invest a lot of energy in not being online, most days—and partially a function of a mindset where I wanted to keep processes controllable and focus as much energy at possible on writing new things.

As I’m getting some bandwidth back, this week, I’ve started trying to change that a little. Facebook is getting its own little stream of content rather than repeating things that appeared here or over on twitter. Basically, there’s now a version of me that’s increasingly Facebook Specific. A professional version of me, that gets a moderate amount of attention, as opposed to my increasingly diminishing personal presence on the book of face.

One of the intriguing exercises, leading up to this, has involved sitting down and figuring out a plan for the kinds of content I want the page to focus on. My first version ran something like this:

  • Great science fiction and fantasy books/stories.
  • Insight into my writing and publishing process.
  • Book recommendations and interesting links for fans of SF and Fantasy, plus content about other genres that might be relevant to Speculative Fiction fans (My heart belongs to Spec Fic, but I’m a non-denominational genre fan and author).
  • Personal updates about writing-related interests such as gaming, movies, television shows, and pro-wrestling. Also, the occasional photograph of my cat when she’d being adorable.
  • Links and writing/publishing advice.

Much as my heart may belong to blogging, in the grand scheme of things, there’s no escaping that Facebook is where a lot of people congregate. Ergo, it gets a short trial period while I see how it fits into my daily schedule, and whether it’s something I can maintain over the long term.

If you’re interested in checking out what I’m doing, you can find the page hither and yon.