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?

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: 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?

There’s about five half-finished chapter in the Median Survival Time draft at the moment, and the goal for this week will be finishing them off and doing a first-past polish and annotation for what will be tackled in the coming revisions. I’m a little behind where I wanted to be–I’m certainly going to blow the informal deadline I was working towards–but it’s not catastrophic. Talked to my supervisor about other options that will meet the PhD requirements, and I think the novella will be stronger for the extra time.

More importantly, I put together a work plan that will take me through to the end of the year, laying out exactly what I’m meant to be working on at any given day. It still needs a little refinement–I’ve set it up to be updated with more detail on my quarterly planning sessions–but it gives me a really strong idea about what’s achievable this year. In theory, it should see the return of some blogging in a few weeks–right now, I’m building up a buffer of content and figure out a schedule.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’ve been reading Anne of Green Gables and watching Anne with an E on Netflix more-or-less simultaneously, and it’s been a fascinating experience. The book is something I’ve avoided for years, under the assumption that it’s historically driven and I don’t often gel with historical setting (also, lets be honest, internalised and unconscious misogyny).

Truth is, it’s not historically driven at all (as in, the point of the book is not the historical aspects). The book is fantastic and I owe an apology to everyone I ignored when they urged me to read it. It’s got an incredibly efficient set-up, in terms of getting us invested in the characters, and while it’s highly episodic in structure, it’s got a style that keeps me reading. 

The series is also fantastic. Well-acted, well scripted, and utterly willing to throw out the source material in order to examine something that is cheerfully glossed over in the books given the time period. A lot of people hate it, especially if they grew up with the 80s Green Gables miniseries and dislike the attempts to add “gritty” to the setting, but I really dig the way they’ve used the novel as a basis for looking at issues around coping with trauma, the inherent discrimination of the setting, and gender. 

What action do I need to take?

WordPress has a new system for putting together posts (hello, Gutenburg), and I have a bunch of ready-to-go templates built around the HTML editor used in the old post editor. They don’t translate well–the attempt to copy-paste this week’s resulted in a chunk of time devoted to re-doing layout. At some point in the coming seven days, I really should sit down and get familiar with Gutenburg and how I’ll need to re-format.

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 currently about 1/3 of the way through the type-in draft of Median Survival Time, which largely involves typing up and adapting the hand-written draft while making changes as I go. A lot of stuff gets stuck at this point, and a lot more gets added in. The goal for the coming week is to get the remaining two-thirds typed up–it’s going to be pushing things pretty hard and leaves little time to dwell on major issues that will get fixed up in the final two sweeps.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I finished Angela Carter’s The Magic Toyshop earlier today, and like most of Angela Carter’s work there’s a precision and control to what she’s writing that very few other writers can match. Its probably less accessible than a lot of Carter’s other works–The Bloody Chamber is very up-front about its reference points, while novels like Wise Children and Nights at the Circus balance their literary models against a more accessible arc. The Magic Toyshop plays around with the Dickensian mode a bit, and the conclusion left me a bit cold. That said, it’s a bit like going on a long scenic drive to get someplace a bit drab–the final destination may not be to your taste, but the journey to get there was breathtaking.

It’s also convinced me that it’s time to read everything else Carter has written pretty damn quickly.

What action do I need to take?

The simple action I need to take is checking to see whether I can get after-hours access to my desk at university. I’ve headed to campus to do some work a few times over the weekend, but it usually involves tracking down a berth at one of the twenty-four-seven workspaces available in a library. They’re workable, but don’t have power options when the laptop is running out of charge, and that means I’ve got a hard limit on how long I can be there.

The more complex action I need to take is a series of hard choices about what’s getting priorities in the rest of the year. I’ve got a fairly clear idea of the mountains I’m working towards after doing the quarterly plan last week, but I’ve still gotta put together a path for getting there.