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:
I’ve ended up taking a short, unscheduled break from writing newsletters over the last fourteen days. Regular GenrePunk Ninja transmissions will resume
Like many of you, I have good weeks and bad weeks on the writing front. This week has been rocky, and if
Welcome to GenrePunk Ninja supplemental, where I occasionally post foundational essays written before I launched the GenrePunk Ninja newsletter, especially if they’re
10 Responses
Regarding the morning alarm, I feel you. The early rise has fallen out of the schedule for me at the moment too, making it more of an exception than a rule. Two quick questions around this:
– what are you using if anything to signal “time to wind down”? (I’ve found scheduled night mode on devices or an alarm can help here as at least a notion that I should be heading to bed, whether I do or not…
– is there something you can reward yourself with on early start mornings to encourage the behaviour?
I don’t really have a time to wind down, but I’m mindful of the fact that 11:45 is my up limit for getting to bed and still maintaining a decent sleep window. Couple that with the decision to use an analogue alarm clock and store my phone out in the lounge room, and the system starts correcting itself a bit.
Rewards tend to be a bit secondary once I get the trigger for the system right, ’cause there’s plenty of break points in the routine to keep me enthused about the work. The fail points tend to be the mornings where I don’t ever get started due to a departure from normal patterns, and they’re a problem regardless 🙂
I hear you on the interruptions to starting the day – they’re a bugbear when they happen for me, too. Is there possibly a starting cue you can use to get back into the routine of the day, or is the issue the difficulty in just that: trying to do anything planned once the wheels are off the rails?
I’d challenge you a little on the ‘no particular time’ to wind down (and bear in mind this is in part talking to a projection of the issue I have with this in my own schedule) – if you’ve got an ideal time to start each day, then working back you’ve got an ideal time to hit the hay. If that’s what you’ve already number-crunched with the 11:45, then ignore my comment. 🙂
What am I working on this week?
Starting a large long-form narration project, moving a narrative project forward, and realising that the monthly review I did on the weekend needs to super-size into the quarterly review I’m actually due for. I’m a little worried that it’s yak-shaving instead of new work, but we’re now feeling settled in the new place, there are some things I don’t feel l’ve got my finger on project-wise, and the things that are exciting me at the moment feel like they’ve shifted from where my head was pre-move. The work done on the monthly checkpoint hopefully won’t be wasted, just folded in.
What’s inspiring me this week?
Starting regular streaming is really buzzing me at the moment. I’ve realised how integral the theme of something I’m playing is to my head space, and the idea of potentially sharing that with others in a way that’s lower-cost on time investment is really exciting. I’m continuing to be interested in the themes of tyranny and resistance, and the real experience of war, but I’m also looking to dive into Atomic Age culture in the US and beyond. Starting off with reading Cat’s Cradle by Vonnegut, but looking for more good resources if you have any recommendations! (1950s futurism, fascination with nuclear energy, the surge in domestic capitalism post-war to keep the economy afloat – all these things!)
What action do I really need to take?
The critical thing for me this week is getting day job work sorted to remove that source of stress. That, and moving a narrative project forward to the point where I’m not the blocker for it currently.
What’s the plan for getting the narrative project up and running again?
The only thing I need to do with it is finish some edits to a document and send out an email – it’s just prioritising it that’s the issue. I suspect tonight will go to quarterly planning given where my brain’s at, but tomorrow morning is open.
I love-hate the check-in because it hangs like an axe over my head. I am so off track on the both the check-in and writing.
What am I working on this week?
Nothing. I’ve been working overtime, and my back feels like someone is pressing a stiletto heel on a vertebra. Writing has taken a back-seat so I can make more money. The trade-off eats me up, and is not worth it, but when the work comes in, I don’t know how to say no.
What is inspiring me this week?
Longread’s personal essays.
What action do I really need to take?
I need to finish *one* personal essay, instead of continuing to write down the nearly perfect first sentences that give me the info/reminder of where each essay wants to go. I need to glue my ass to the chair, hold my noise, and leap. I’m terrified. I need to learn to lighten up.
PS Wow – way to mix a metaphor. I’d love to blame Google for the spelling errors, but I can’t. At least this site is a safe place to fall on my face. Thanks Peter and Kevin.
Nothing wrong with a mixed metaphor in the circle 🙂
And if you’re open to advice from someone who has a black-belt in beating-themselves-up-for-not-writing, there’s a couple of things that really help me during the weeks when time is scarce due to work/health obstructions.
The first is shifting my daily focus away from the long-term goal (finishing something) and working on the immediate issues (what can I do to advance this today given the constraints of work and pain?).When we focused on finishing, we’re actually focusing on multiple logistical problems at the same time – when do I find time to write? What am I going to write about? How am I going to structure it? How do I make it good? How do I deal with the fear that I’m wasting my time with all of this? Breaking ithe process down to its individual component parts always helps me a little, keeping my focus on the most immediately pressing task and solving it before moving on to the next one.
And context is always going to affect what can get done in a given week, but its always tempting to ignore it or misjudge the amount of time/bandwidth available for the tasks. If you can only solve one problem on the list, that’s the thing to tackle and the rest will come in time.
The second, if you’re really feeling trapped in the first sentence pattern, is to make it part of the process: sit down and write 50 first sentences, then pick 25 of them and flesh them out into first paragraphs, then turn twelve of those into fully-fledged openings. It lets you focus on the thing your brain is really interested in at the moment, but also adds a finite limit to how long you’ll spend doing this before moving on to the next thing.
The third, if you’re really stuck, is to stop focusing on writing and steal this exercise from Kelly Link on fine-tuning your subconscious by making a list of all the things you enjoy in other essays/stories (actually, double-checking that interview, I’ve also stolen the previous exercise from Kelly, who suggested it at a workshop I was at years ago. I fall back on it a lot and had forgotten the source until now).
Heya – welcome back! There’s no need to think of hanging out here every Sunday as another obligation. This is a zero-judgement place. 🙂
I was recommended this approach by a friend recently, and it might be worth looking at as a way of both cultivating kindness toward yourself, and working incrementally towards where you want to be headed: https://www.reddit.com/r/getdisciplined/comments/1q96b5/i_just_dont_care_about_myself/cdah4af/
I’m finding personally the idea of small incremental action REALLY helpful at the moment. Chuck Wendig posted on Twitter a little while back talking about a goal of 350 words per day giving you a novel in some shape in a much shorter time than you expect. I’ve been using it personally to just write *something* each day towards the goal of building narrative skills.