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?

As predicted/feared in last week’s check-in, the post-marking slump posed some interesting mental health challenges due the sheer amount of stuff I let slide in the name of getting everything done. Still not quite out of the slump, so I’m keeping my goals very simple for the coming week – one hour of research notes every day, one hour working on the Median Survival Time draft. Try and keep to my preferred schedule as much as I can, even if my attention drifts away from those two things after the initial work is done.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Robin Laws Beating the Story is proving to be every bit as good as I hoped it would be. The useful thing about the book isn’t that it breaks down narrative – books on story structure are widespread – but that it gives very specific names to the beats within a story so you can look at them in analytic terms based upon their goal. In some respects, it’s a little like the idea that the sky wasn’t blue until we invented the dye colour – once you have a word for something that was always there, you can suddenly notice it a little more easily.

What action do I need to take?

Tending to the routines that are in place to manage mental health and focus. I’ve broken it down to three things that I want to focus on in the coming week:

• Setting a morning alarm. I’ve been letting my sleep habits get out of whack a lot since Tuesday, for example, which means I’m frequently staying up until 3:00 AM and getting up around 8:00 AM.
• Focusing on a daily routine. I’m not putting fences around my work, which means there’s no clear time when I’m meant to start/stop, and I end up focusing on the wrong project with furious intensity.
• Do my Checkpoints. I haven’t done clear monthly/weekly plans for a while, and my quarterly checkpoint is a month overdue, so I’m a bit lost as to where my attention should be and getting irritated at how little I’m doing.