The Sunday Circle

And lo, we have made it to the end of 2018, navigating the wasteland between Christmas and New Years where time seems to lose all meaning due to the disruption in our routines. We aren’t sure which days are public holidays. We aren’t even sure what day it is today.

Rest assured, today is a Sunday, which means it’s time for….

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 going to be be nearly 100% thesis time, locking down the conference paper I’m going to be delivering on the 22nd of January. It’s a major source of stress in my life at the moment, so I’m throwing approximately 20 hours of work at it in the name of having a draft down with plenty of time for refinement.

There’s some light writing work going on around the edges–mostly blogging work–but I’m setting aside fiction projects until the paper is done.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Part of me is very tempted to say Aquaman here, since most of my reading this week has been non-fiction oriented, but in truth it wasn’t the film that really blew my mind. I loved it in all it’s glorious, over-the-top idiocy, certainly, but what really got me excited this week was discovering the concept of Maximalism while looking up a soundtrack song from another film entirely.

It turns out that Maximalism is a pretty good description of Aquaman’s appeal–something I’d previously been referring to “this film gives no fucks about subtlety”–and for the appeal of James Wan’s work in general. And, having given it a name, it becomes something that can be explored within the context of a particular aesthetic philosophy and applied to fiction.

What action do I need to take?

I blogged about my new time-tracking habit yesterday and the process continues to be going really well, but part of it involves sitting down and transferring the data into an ongoing archive where I can really take a close look at where my time is going.

I’ve been really good at the tracking of half-hours, but I’m yet to actually devote a few minutes to the task of transferring all the details into a spreadsheet (and fear that may be a point of resistance for me, based upon my current reluctance to actually do it).

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.