The 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?

My twin goals for this week are:

  • Writing something on my PhD exegisis every day–I’ve fallen off the wagon with the events of the last two weeks, but this week I get to reaffirm my commitment to the project and get it moving once more.
  • Work on the Exile (Keith Murphy 1) re-release and clear at least three chapters. 

It’s the first time in a while that I haven’t set myself any first draft goals, but it’s going to be a complex week for getting stuff done. There’s a funeral to go to, a packed weekend next weekend, and I’m in the phase where habits get to be reset and re-affirmed rather than being tools to rely upon. 

What’s inspiring me this week?

The biggest bang-for-my back inspiration this week has been Craig Mod’s latest Roden Explorer newsletter, in which he devotes approximately 4,000 words to the idea of publishing, appholes, and dopamine-driven entertainments. It’s the kind of topic that’s deep inside my wheelhouse to start with, but it came loaded with enough links to other resources that have got my brain sparking that it’s a highly inspiration-rich ground zero document.

What action do I need to take?

Less an action I need to take, and more an action I need to maintain: keeping my desk clear. I let a whole lot of clutter rise up in my workspace over the last few months, which culminated in the classic I’ve-spilled-coffee-on-my-laptop moment that tends to arrive when there’s nowhere to put the cup.

This was a prompt to get the desk cleared last week, but it will be ridiculously easy to fall back into the clutter mode, so I’m challenging myself to develop two habits: starting each day with a desk clear, and ending each work session by returning the tools (books referenced, notebooks worked in) back to their default state.

Ideally, I’d like to be hitting next Sunday with the desk in much the same state as it is now–a clean, ready-to-use surface where work can spread across as necessary, ready to adapt when I switch between computers and notebooks in order to get work 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?

Things got a little off-track last week, so this week is all about regrouping and re-establishing habits. The first half of the week will likely be finishing off the first act of Project Stairwell, after which I might set the draft aside for a few days so I can work on a short story project for a stretch.

Mostly, though, it’ll be getting back into the habit of kicking off my days with thesis writing (one chapter down now, only four to go) and trying to hit my word-counts. Progress will matter slightly less than process for the next seven days.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’m spending the weekend volunteering at Go Play, Brisbane’s Tabletop RPG and Board Game Mini-Con held at the State Library. It’s my first time at an RPG convention in over a decade, but that decade followed a period where I regularly attended a bunch of local and interstate cons, and…well, it’s been great to reconnect with a part of me that got excited about being around other gamers as a community, but also to see how different Go Play is (in very good ways) compared to what I’m used to.

What action do I need to take?

I’ve got a small run of projects that are hitting the “edits and marketing copy” stage, which is proving to be the point where things are most likely to stall when life gets busy. I need to put some thought into that–both why it’s happening and what I can do to mitigate it–but in the short term I’d like to get everything in place for at least one of those releases.

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 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.