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 finished the draft of Warhol Sleeping last week, but it’s still a rough bit of work. This week I’m doing a redraft sweep and fleshing stuff out: adding more personality and detail to character’s in earlier scenes, before I really had a handle on them; looking for the scenes where I’m writing plot alone and adding the emotional/sensory details that will make them work. 

Basically, sanding away the rough edges and transforming it into a book I’d like to read.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Netflix released The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the reboot of Sabrina the Teenage Witch from the people behind Riverdale, and I’m kinda in awe of it. For one thing…how did they make this without 50% of America just spontaneously combusting in some kind of Satanic panic scenario? Even more so than Lucifer, which features the devil as a main character, this show feels like it’s pushing the buttons of every conservative belief you can find.

Of course, that’s what makes it great. While Lucifer is a buddy-cop story where one character happens to be a fallen angel, Sabrina is a glorious melodrama about a power struggle within a church of demon worshippers. They aren’t shy about it either: a gloriously campy Miranda Otto intones “Praise Satan” around her cigarette at a regular clip, a goat-headed Satan shows up as a recurring foil for various characters, and the first episode involves a characters doing missionary outreach for the church (and, it should be said, a lot more effectively than most missionary conversations tend to do it)

Then, of course, there’s the performances: if you found yourself disappointed that Wonder Woman didn’t give Lucy Davis’s Etta Candy more to do, Sabrina uses her as the emotional anchor for the show and partners her with the aforementioned Miranda Otto in scene after scene. Every time they’re on the scene together, it’s campy, show-stealing magic. 

This show knows what it wants to be, knows how badly it will offend some people, and then says fuck it. It’s 100% the kind of show you can only get when you don’t need to capture a mass audience every week, just a large and passionate fanbase that is willing to monetise your work in ways that aren’t based on ratings-based advertising. 

What action do I need to take?

The other big thing on this week: fight scenes in one of the secondary projects, where I’m doing a novella that riffs on Robert E. Howard’s Sailor Steve Costigan stories. There’s three, maybe four, points in this book that are reliant on my ability to make a fight narratively interesting, but my blocking skills aren’t great for that kind of thing and I’m rarely happy with the results. 

This week, I need to seperate them out and work on the craft of fight scenes specially–in particular, making sure they all feel different enough to justify having them in the story. I’ve got a bunch of books, blog posts, and resources set aside while I ponder things, but I’ve been dragging my feet on reviewing them in favour of just writing messy drafts that aren’t working. 

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 hit a thorny bit of the Wail draft last week–a plot choice I thought was right turned out to be wrong, and the story ended up being a bit stuck as a result. Rather than grind my gears against a narrative that wasn’t moving and getting frustrated, I switched my focus over to a short story project about flying cities, the town-based proletariate who live below them, and the relationship between former partners who now find themselves on either side of the social divide as they search for some stolen goods. 

The interesting thing about this project is that it’s part of the 138 unfinished story drafts that have been haunting my to-do list for ages. I started it back in 2010 or so, and largely got moving by applying some of the insights from John Truby’s Anatomy of Story to pull apart the original concept and rebuild it around a narrative core instead of a voice and an idea. 

What’s inspiring me this week?

Seanan McGuire’s Deadland’s novel, Boneyard, which I devoured in the space of three days in the early parts of the week and really should do a post about here on its own terms.

It’s an intriguing beast: probably one of the best narrative works I’ve seen come out of the RPG source material, but it achieves this by largely discarding the conventions of the RPG session and character archetypes and simply building a compelling story out of the core DNA of the world.

The result is a novel that is recognisably set in the Deadlands world, but rarely feels like something you would replicate in a game session. 

What action do I need to take?

I’m slated to deliver the first conference paper of my thesis in January, which is one of those experiences that makes me twitchy because I don’t yet have a good understanding of how to put one together in an efficient way.

My supervisor has recommended a rough outline structure I need to populate, but every time I look at it I feel an enormous sense of resistance predicated on the gaps in my research that would need to be filled…

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?

This week is book prep week, setting up everything that needs to be finalised before Not Quite The End Of the World Just Yet drops at the end of the month. This means final proofs, double-checking everything is set up okay, making sure I get everything in before the pre-order cut-off, and setting up the various blog posts and social stuff. With all the chaos of the last few weeks – and the chaos to come in the next few – it’s increasingly tempting to let all this slide while I focus on other things, so I’m doing my best to keep it front and centre.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I caught up with Lauren Dane’s latest in the Whiskey Sharp series, Jagged, and a novella that floats around the periphery of the series, Cake.  Both were enormously fun reads – the Whiskey Sharp books have a real hipster vibe to them and their linking motif is a series of second-generation Russians living in Seattle. The books share a lot of the things that I generally respond to in Dane’s work: a focus on found family and recovering from trauma; character’s chasing their career passions (usually creative or artisanal ins some way) and being supported by those around them; incredibly hot sex scenes.

Cake suffers a little from being a novella about artists and perpetrating some of my least liked myths about creativity, but it does take the time to unpack that a little with one of the secondary characters. Jagged revolved around an Ex-FBI agent turned tattoo artist and a artisanal baker, which is perhaps my favourite combination of characters that Dane has done.

What action do I need to take?

I’m feeling the need to blog semi-regularly again, largely because I’m spending more and more time inside my own head, focused on my own process and the things I’m not doing. Blogging isn’t necessarily an escape from that, but it forces me to consider ideas and writing problems in a way that is accessible, comprehensible, and (hopefully) useful for other people. This is usually a good thing for my mental state, but frequently eats into the time spent writing other things (which is, invariably, why I start cutting back).

I’m hoping I can find a balance between the two, but I’m not entirely sure how. Logically, the sensible thing would be to start creating a backlog of work that I can keep in reserve, but that risks pushing me back towards the in-my-own-head-ess I’m trying to combat.