The 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’m down to the final scene on the story I started last week, so I’m looking to get that written around some thesis work in the coming days. Hell Track has been a little slower to resume work on, but I’m going to break out a notebook and start tackling all the hiccups which have emerged over the last week.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’ve been reading Rick Remender’s run on Uncanny Avengers over the last week, which does an incredible job of blending the history of two Marvel franchises and coming up with some really high-level, cosmic plots that still feel grounded in the people. I generally like the Avengers least when they’re tackling big, cosmic-level plots involving time travel, and I’ve liked the X-Men comics least when they’re dealing with time-travelling, unknowable villains like Apocalypse. Remender takes both and fuses them into something incredible, while keeping the action grounded in the foibles of the team.

What action do I need to take?

Chaos has taken over my desk over the last month as it became the dumping ground for things that did not have a home in the flat, and the available work space has shrunk to the size of the keyboard. I really need to start sorting things and either finding homes or tossing things away, because it’s becoming harder and harder to work there.

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?

Everything in my life ground to a halt while I focused on clearing marking of decks this week, so this week will be spent reconnecting with the three major projects on my plate: Hell Track, the current short story draft, and my thesis chapter. I’m keeping my new word goals relatively low – I’ll be happy if I get 500 to 1000 a day – but I’m aiming to spend about two hours a day on each re-reading what’s already been done, making notes, and generally getting back up to speed after a few weeks of heavy distraction.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’ve just marked a whole bunch of student essays where they analysed aspects of craft in the novels we’re reading this semester, and there’s some of them that have sent me back to The Ocean at the End of the Lane, Gone Girl, and Venetia with fresh eyes to take a really close look at the minutia of the craft. More and more, I find myself fascinated with Gaiman’s craftsmanship, in particular – there’s a real care with the way he builds his novel and the images used within.

What action do I need to take?

The aforementioned feeling of things grinding to a halt has taken it’s toll. It’s largely the result of the mid-semester break at uni disrupting routines and the aforementioned marking eating up time (both in the actual hours spent marking, and in the energy spent managing the stress around it). I’ve been setting the goal of “get back into a routine” for weeks now, without being specific for what that means. In hindsight, I should be specific: I really need to do a thorough weekly plan, instead of just reviewing specifics on a Sunday, then be mindful of where I want to spend my time. From there, I really need to do a half-hour daily check-in to kick off my weekday mornings and make sure everything is running in sync.

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 didn’t get much writing done over the last week, but I have been rehabing workspaces and writing tools to re-evaluate how to make them work a little better. One of the things on my to-do list was consolidating all the unfinished projects from three seperate computers into a single drive, sharing the same file architecture and save structures, so I don’t find myself getting lost every time I try to figure out what to do next. I’m currently sitting at 237 unfinished projects of various lengths, which includes:

– 144 short stories in various states of completion plus a list of raw ideas two pages long;
– 29 Unfinished blog posts plus a list of raw ideas a page and a half long;
– 38 novel projects with partial drafts or planning notes
– 31 novella projects with partial drafts or planning notes (technically 34, as I’m yet to create folders for the next few PhD novellas)
– 1 essay series, partially written and largely swamped in planning.
– 1 short story collection which is…well, right on track.

The next step will be processing the dozen or so projects that don’t need much work to reach completion, then start rehabbing some of the older ideas and seeing what needs to be done in order to get them out of the “in progress” folder. I’ll be splitting my time between drafting Hell Track and working on a drag racing short story that I’ve been redrafting, on and off, for about six years.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Two books this week. As my last post suggested, Aspects of the Novel has been a really good read over the last week, provoking some new ways of thinking about fiction despite certain aspects of aspects of the novel being familiar after years of writing workshops.

Jane Friedman’s The Business of Being a Writer isn’t particularly inspirational in the here’s a story idea sense, but as the list above suggests, I probably don’t need a bunch of new ideas. What it’s great for is providing a context around the business decisions you make as a writer, along with the decisions being made by the various publishing companies and magazines you end up working with. The stuff on opening up leads and author platform is among the best I’ve seen out there. I keep arguing that writers need to start putting together a better plan for how they’ll make a living from their work, and Friedman’s provided the toolkit for figuring out how to do that. Strongly recommended.

What action do I need to take?

Part of the reason I’ve got so many unfinished projects is my habit of jotting down 300-500 words of a short story as a placeholder – usually enough to lock down an idea, or a voice that I want to write. These often stall because they don’t have clear plots yet, which means nothing is working towards a specific point, so I really want to work my way through the unfinished project file and start looking for an actual plot to work with as I reach the point where I have time to work on it.