The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

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.