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?
Trying to shore up the first two sequences of the no-longer-a-werewolf-detective novella. It’s a good four or five scenes altogether, which should make up the first two chapters of the novella.
What’s inspiring me this week?
I’ve been re-reading a whole bunch of Roland Barthes’ this week, including a very lazy Saturday spent revisiting A Lover’s Discourse and Mythologies. The former is one of two books filled with dense semiotic theory that I will also sit down and read for the poetry of what’s being said; Barthes does, on occasion, break out some lovely passages.
What part of my project an I avoiding?
I have hit a tricky part on a short-story rewrite, where I’m doing a scene which is weird mostly-psychic-hallucinations. At some point this week I need to sit down and figure out how to make that scene work.
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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
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MY CHECK-IN
Post Contact this household has been in recovery from, well, everything, not to mention getting in the 1st of a uni subject’s assessment.
What am I working on this week?
Alas, my creative stuff has to take a back seat for a couple of more weeks. Uni deadline (due on the 20th) is the priority and that means brain and word allocation usage for essay and case study wrangling. So, working on the theories of archival appraisal (essay) and then a case study using said theories of appraisal. Scintillating stuff huh?
What’s inspiring me this week?
Resumption of Write (& Cheese) Club after a week off. Also inspiring me on a whole other part of life is the imminent non-writing retreat I am going on (Friday). Which as an end result is going to see a whole lot of stuff come together and bring out the writer side of myself in a huge way (well, this is the possible plan lol).
What part of my project an I avoiding?
Pretty much everything on the creative fronts. The mermaid, the changeling and the chimaera (all different wips) are being quiet while the uni stuff is sitting on them quite heavily (or that could just be my brain exploding from ongoing headache/migraine/stoopid weather battles).
Heads up I’ll be AWOL next week on account of being in media/radio silence from the 15th to the 20th.
Best of luck at your upcoming retreat, Nicky! And as someone who often has to reevaluate when and how creative projects are going to get done, sometimes a little step-back to focus on non-WIP things can be a major energy-boost to the creative side. Just be kind to your creative self and don’t stress too much! (Some of my favorite passages have come out of “cheating” sessions, in which I should have been doing other work, and instead, snuck off to pound out a few scenes I couldn’t bear to hold in!) 😀 Enjoy the retreat! Super jealous! ^_^
Thanks! I am taking that view of stepping back will do the WIPs good lol. And yes, I’m “sneaking” my notebooks onto the retreat if I can find some time tucked away to get some words down – has happened in the past.
That case study does sound fascinating!
Hope the retreat goes well, too. Are you able to indulge in music or films or something inspiring during the stretch you’re working on the assignment? Thinking it might help with background processing on the works in progress, maybe…
On a media blackout of sorts in the sense, music is allowed, so have cds in machine going “old school” (old school to me would be a record player but none of that exists here anymore lol). And yes, it’s one of those things where my brain needs that background processing while I focus on uni.
Thanks!
Writing club is great. I feel that it’s so good to have other writer’s to connect to. I hope your uni work goes well and that your retreat helps recharge you.
Thank you. Write club is still new but awesome (even more so when we get our word counts going more steadily lol). I’ve had crit groups and writer groups sprawled across the country, but never had someone to actually sit and talk/*do* words with on a regular basis. Ta re uni and retreat is definitely going to do that (if the one I went to last time is any indicator).
Oh, enjoy the retreat! And I hope the uni theories can be of use for future stories, which is always a nice bonus. Data management and office procedures make fascinating plots.
Thanks re retreat. I’ve been keeping the story ideas in mind as I’ve been reading, coming across case studies etc. Some of it is actually quite interesting (eg the purposeful destruction of “memory” in war situations even late 20th century examples). Office procedures seems to have been hijacked by The Office 😉
Have you ever read The Windup Bird Chronicles by Haruki Murakami? There’s a big chunk of the climax in that book that feels very hallucinatory. (Same, actually, for A Wild Sheep Chase, for that matter, and After Dark has some great psychic-crisis moments, too.)
Oooh, I have read that. I found it a bit of work to get through some parts. I think one needs to be in the right head space for some of his works. Will need to look up those others.
What am I working on?: Revising a short story with the critiques from the class I took in January. The instructor pointed out an amazing place where the story should have started, and it trims out almost 2k, which I’m thrilled about!
What is inspiring me?: I picked up a copy of The Accidental Creative at my local library this past week, and as a result, I’ve started drawing again as part of the Unnecessary Creating aspect. It’s like falling in love all over again. I don’t think I realized how much drawing meant to me, and even how important it may be to my writing process. I’m no fantastic artist, but getting back into sketching characters has opened up a whole new well of creative energy I really didn’t know I still had in me. It’s a fresh breeze I really, really needed.
I do have a question though: for those of you who have read/implemented some or all of The Accidental Creative plan, how do you approach the Idea Time and the Big 3? I keep defaulting to making the Big Three a task list (though I know it should be a project that requires conceptualizing). Writers and non-writers alike, what kinds of challenges do you set for yourself and use for the Big 3? I’m probably overthinking it (I can tell I’m going to need to re-read it sometime, because it feels like there’s a lot of info there that I haven’t fully absorbed), but I was curious how you utilize the Idea Time and how to approach picking/setting Big Three challenges. Thanks in advance!
What am I avoiding this week?: I’ve had to do some pruning of my current pile of projects (I was hitting that burnt-out/unexcited stage hard last week), so I’ve bumped the novel rewrite prose-draft back to July, and have set aside the short-story a week challenge. I’m both excited and hesitant to dig my hands into the mucky-muck of this short story rewrite, but it’s really just overcoming the initial inertia-wall.
That, and fixing my printer…ugh…
And apparently I’m too tired to use HTML tags tonight. XD Sorry about that…
Your question about Idea Time has actually prompted me to think about this, so thank you! You’ve solved a problem for me, and maybe this approach might work for you.
I’ve got a WHOLE lot of individual projects/items that require 30 minutes or an hour of research (my default time I set in Omnifocus is 30 minutes for a research task) that are sitting piled up. The thing I’ve struggled with from week to week is scheduling Idea Time, and then doing something useful with it, but I realise now all I need to do is find a spot in the calendar that’s a good candidate, and pick one of those tasks from the list.
So maybe start with that? Set an arbitrary time (and change it only if necessary from week to week, and elsewhere build up a series of questions that need answers?
The big three is a tricky one. I don’t do great on that week to week, but I find it easier looking at it for a month, or a quarter. Because identifying the three projects that need to overcome some obstacle is good (identifying the particular obstacle is better) but then it requires follow through on putting time against it (rather than the usual high priority but not as important stuff) which is where I’ve typically found it challenging. And you’re absolutely right that that book (and I guess any detailed set of workflow practices) requires at least an annual re-read as you’re putting it into practice. Accidental Creative and Getting Things Done are now mandatory Christmas break re-reads for me.
I hope some of that helps!
That’s great, Kevin! Thank you! It helps me frame how I might be able to apply it better to my own projects, too. I think often I don’t have articulated questions in mind that need considering, which is probably part of the problem. I’ll definitely give this a try!
Drawing and writing are very interconnected for me too. I have recently started going to the zoo and sketching animals. Even though it’s not connected to my writing at all I feel like it helps stoke the creative furnaces. I haven’t read The Accidental Creative but many people have mentioned it so I probably should.
My recommendation: if you’re struggling with the big three, focus on getting 4-to-6 challenges that define the key problems for all the projects in your list (it’s tempting, when you’re starting out, to just do that for the big three). Nothing goes on your major projects list without those challenges defined.
To give you an example, this is the weekly challenges list for my rewrite of the Mummy Story I’ve been working on:
1) What unique aspects of the setting need to be highlighted for the reader?
2) What would these characters most like to change about themselves, but are least likely to admit out loud?
3) How do I clearly define the through-line of the central conflict?
4) What are the themes in the current draft that are worth developing?
A few weeks back, when I was first starting the story, the challenges looked very different:
1) When do I find the time to work on this, amid a busy March schedule?
2) What are the obvious mummy ideas that I’ll want to avoid in this draft?
3) What is the most interesting hook for each of the major characters?
4) What do I need to know about space travel in order to write this story?
When you’ve done that for everything on your to-do list – which, in my case, averages about fifty projects accross work, writing, and general life, it becomes easy to pick big three (IE – the ones where you’ve got big conceptual blocks, and/or haven’t updated the challenges in a couple of weeks) as well as the things to focus on in idea time.
Awesome! Thank you, Peter! This really helps clarify it on the writing side. I’ll give it a shot! ^_^
I really like those questions, for general use..
Need to remember to look at this when I come back (& most likely needing to apply to many things). Thank you for the example.
I tend to pick the big three as being things I am (a) avoiding or (b) need to do thinking work on – the most important of these (not purely mechanical tasks). Then when I’m planning my day I refer back to the big three. But PARTICULARLY when I am doing the ‘notation’ part, in the ‘pattern’ question, I deliberately force connections between whatever I’m reading/watching and the big three.
Oh, that’s a good way to determine what projects to pick. I’ll definitely keep that in mind as I start getting into the swing of this! 🙂
That is so cool re the story trim feedback being productive. Huzzah. Sounds like I should search out The Accidental Creative. Cool re taking up drawing again. Sounds like a wonderful thing to allow yourself to “just create”. Sometimes the to-do list can be overwhelming and sounds like you’ve found a way to balance and re-jig it to a less overwhelmed state and more do-able one. Enjoy playing in the short story rewrite.
Thanks, Nicky! And oh boy, I hear you on the overwhelming to-do list. That’s been my life since the Little Guy showed up! The Accidental Creative is really interesting, I definitely recommend checking it out! It has a lot of very interesting ideas about preserving that creative energy, which has been helpful even when I’ve only applied a few so far. 😀
I haven’t read any Roland Barthes before but his stuff sounds pretty interesting. Is there any book in particular you’d recommend as a starting point?
Also my Sunday Circle check-in is here
A Lovers Discourse. Its the least comprehensible, without a grounding in Barthes, but the most beautiful in terms of its language.
What am I working on this week?
Just finished the GTD sweep and quarterly review a’la Accidental Creative, and processing backlog of email. The week to come holds digging into Othello, some editing and recording for a video game project, and the usual run of auditions.
What’s inspiring me?
On Mr Ball’s recommendation, I’ve started watching Master of None: Aziz Ansari’s sitcom on Netflix. It’s so great to watch a show that you can’t predict the twists and turns of. I’ve given up trying to guess where plotlines head. We’ve also been watching season one of True Detective, which is amazing.
A little self-indulgently, I’m also inspired this week by going back and comparing notes for my quarterly review at the start of the year with now – I didn’t do everything I set out to do, but I got a number of things ticked off the list in a number of categories. This whole structure thing pays off!
What am I avoiding?
Once again I’ve moved hardware issues with AVID interface to lower priorities through sleight of mind. ARGH.
Also, I’m noticing now that full GTD reviews of everything I’ve got in Omnifocus (682 projects, 2731 actions) there’s a point where my brain just goes numb to the detail. I think I need to break down regular reviews into key areas – dip into each one during the day, rather than trying to tackle everything in one sitting, because all of the ‘I gotta get on this!’ items just snowball.
AUGH! I forgot a whole inspiration thing about digging into Art of Learning and applying its principles to a suitably geeky hobby (a card game called Netrunner) and enjoying putting structure around learning in a deeply strategic space, too. Particularly given the payoffs around psychological approach to conflict and tension.
I’ve thought about watching Master of None a couple of times now when I saw it pop up on Netflix. I should give it a go. It looks like you have a lot of projects on the go! Well done with ticking off so many things this year so far. =)
Thanks Kath! And I’d definitely recommend Master of None. The first episode is O-K, but it starts showing its strengths from the second episode, and just gets progressively better. (without overselling it)
Regarding projects, I’m actually pretty conservative – I’ve got three big projects on the go at the moment, but the stuff tucked in Omnifocus is EVERYTHING THAT I CAN EVER THINK OF. And projects in there can be as small as “Spend half an hour researching this thing”.
That numbness to detail is what eventually drove me away from GTD, and why I leaned heavily into the checkpoint system.
Yeah, something’s gonna budge somewhere to deal with that. I like having a full inventory of things that occur to me, but it’s exhaustive, and exhausting to review. Definitely find the monthly and quarterly reviews more useful than the GTD sweep at the moment, but I think part of that is also the sheer volume of stuff that is pretty strategic, just not the tippety top priority.
Congrats on the seeing progress in the quarterly review. Still yet to get to True Detective, so another vote for “don’t forget about it”. So many shows, so little hours in the day.
Congrats on the quarterly progress! That’s got to feel pretty damn good, and it’s a great thing to appreciate one’s progress! (Another benefit of those quarterly reviews–successes can be marked and enjoyed again a bit in retrospect.) Master of None is great. It’s one of the few shows I’ve gotten my constantly exhausted hubby to watch in the evenings after long days at the hospital–they’re short, but they’re so satisfying!
Sorry, I just listened to some of your samples on your website, and I gotta geek out a little. Fractured Skyline looks (and sounds!) *fabulous*. SO COOL. Voice acting is such a seriously awesome field to be working in! I learned to appreciate the massive impact good voice actors have on storytelling when I was fifteen and became obsessed with the Thief franchise games in the early 2000s (Stephen Russell did the voice of Garrett and–apparently–many of the villains, too, which I didn’t realize at the time!) My friend and I were crazy about his Garrett voice to the point where for her birthday one year, I went through the entire Thief 2 game and recored (on a cassette tape, no less!) every single line of his dialogue and gave it to her. So that’s my random voice-acting appreciation story. But seriously: Mad props, man–you do amazing work. /geek-out session finished. ^_^
Sounds like your plan to break up the reviews is a good one to help fight the brain numbing! I can imagine how having that many projects all listed out could be pretty overwhelming. Hang in there!
To Mr Ball:
Mythologies sounds fascinating. Is it accessible to laypersons, or do you need an academic context to parse it?
On a possibly related note (but at the other end of the spectrum) have you ever bumped into Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable before?
I’ve never read it without the academic framework, but it’s among the more readable of his works (albeit dated, occasionally). It shouldn’t be a huge leap, and if you’ve got questions, I live for talking about this stuff 🙂
Keeno! I’ll put it in the reading list behind Game Changers.
What am I working on this week?
I’m trying to polish up and put together a collection of poetry. A monthly writer’s group I attend have demanded I collect it all together instead of having it in forgotten notebooks, scraps of paper, emails and random word files. =P It’s good to have the motivation because I have to show them at least something next time we meet. Though every time I look at a poem my reaction is ‘That’s not good enough’ and then I try to rewrite it before putting it in. So it’s slow. This week I think to do more to just get them in there and then fix them up later.
I also have a novel idea that I’ve been messing around with for a while that I really need to sit down and look at what I’m doing with it this week. A structure, a plan, or something more than a collection of ideas.
What’s inspiring me this week?
I listened to an hour long audio poem by Ania Walwicz which I’ve heard before at La Mama a couple of years ago. Ania was my teacher for a Poetry and Performance subject and I always found her classes very inspiring. I’m trying to think of how to recreate individually that energy because the environment she created helped me produce work I liked. There was discussion on other writers and she used sound or video clips and other stimulus to provoke thought and writing around a topic, theme or style. All the work was then read out if people were comfortable to read, and poetry spoken is very different to poetry on the page.
What part of my project an I avoiding?
Apart from avoiding everything because I’m a terrible procrastinator I’m definitely avoiding looking at my honours thesis to split it up and rework it into useful articles. I’m also avoiding entering writing competitions and submitting to journals etc because it’s a bit terrifying and my reactions after doing it in the past has always been ‘Argh, oh gods, why did I do that, it’s not good enough’ and then a sort of mixture of disappointment and relief when nothing happens.
You’ve explained the procrastination around submissions, but do you know what’s making you avoid splitting up the honours thesis at all?
I generally just procrastinate about everything because I am terribly lazy. =P But in particular the thesis was a hard slog and I’m always reticent to go backwards rather than on to something new, but I also dislike not having really used it for anything, but then I also worry that it’s been a year so it will need a lot of updating and extra work to make it useful. So yeah… equivocation procrastination.
It’s SF focused, but this is generally the mindset I had way back when I submitted poetry: http://www.sfwriter.com/ow05.htm
The feeling of “oh Gods” goes away as you build up submissions over time. It starts bad, because you only have a handful of stuff out, but once you’re up to ten or fifteen submissions at once, the rejections are just rejections.
Thank you. Those are good things to remember. I must be less of a scaredy cat.
The poetry collection sounds fun! Sometimes it helps to have people pushing to get things gathered up in one place. ^_^ Sounds like you’re on the right track there!
As for organizing the novel ideas, I’ve recently been trying Chuck Wendig’s method for vetting novel ideas into more concrete building blocks (if you haven’t seen it already, it’s found here: http://terribleminds.com/ramble/2012/11/27/how-chuck-wendig-writes-a-novel/). So far, I love it, because it gets to the meat of the ideas I’m playing with but makes me think through the big questions I ordinarily skip over when I approach a novel draft. It feels like it builds a pretty solid foundation for moving forward on a project! 🙂
(And I agree with Peter: the more you submit, the easier it gets!)
Having people prodding me is very good. I’m much more likely to do things not to get in trouble with other people. =P
Thank you for the article. It’s good to see the processes writers go through. I’m going to have a look at my novel ideas with thise things in mind.
Roland Barthes is very interesting. Do you find him influencing your work in style or ideas? I’m always interested in how the things we read or see come out in the things we create.
Yep. You can probably trace a through-line between me reading A Lover’s Discourse and eventually writing this: http://dailysciencefiction.com/hither-and-yon/slipstream/peter-m-ball/say-zucchini-and-mean-it
Fantastic! =) Thanks for sharing that. It also makes me think of the movie Pontypool.
Pontypool is THE BESTEST.
Incidentally, I bumped into this post on how to read a book a week recently, and was interested in people’s thoughts. It feels a little blasphemous, but on the other hand I’m curious about anything that can turbo-charge my non-fiction reading, because that’s like jacking information straight into your brain. I might try this after Art of Learning.
https://hbr.org/2016/02/how-to-read-a-book-a-week
I think it’s useful for quick research, if you want a broad understanding, but probably not much use for deeper understanding, and definitely not for when you want to enjoy a book or the flow of the writing.
That is…not for me.
My non-fiction reading tends to be speed reading on a first pass, but I still aim to make it as complete as possible. The last few years have taught me the value of really sitting with a text and delving into it, especially given how much I miss during that first past.
I do reserve detailed reading, with annotation, for a second read-through.
Interesting and not surprisingly what I do for uni stuff, which for me isn’t a life long passion (it’s interesting but not all consuming – hope that makes sense). Plus, I realised probably due to years of brain fog issues (still around) I tend to not do word-word for any reading. I try to, but it overwhelms said foggy brain. If I know it’s something I *need* to know in depth I do second passes, usually with a pen and paper by my side (muscle memory and all that).
What I’m working on: The novella. The novella. The novella. Also some illustrations but mostly the novella.
What’s inspiring me: I’ve been very much enjoying editing, in large part due to Karina’s thoughtful, deep and entertaining help! Getting excited about stories generally is very inspiring – recommendations and people who get your allusions and the tremendous delight of Heyer fans discovering each other. The peculiarly non-art-dependent affection of borrowed dogs.
What I’m avoiding: The novella.
Awww. And I thought the pleasure was all mine!
So……..you’re working on the novella? 😛 Yay for having someone make the process of editing enjoyable AND inspiring. Great loop to have going there.
What am I working on this week?
Back at the computer after a weekend over the in-laws with iPhone only, but really only to check-in, alas. This week I’m mostly working on Kathleen’s editorial comments to my original opus. They are all very salient. I would be rather more enthusiastic about this had I not read Kathleen’s work… more on that next question.
What’s inspiring me?
So this week I read a proper old-fashioned historically-accurate Regency which felt rather like a reader’s journey from Austen to Heyer to Bronte on a carriage built by Pratchett, Gaiman and Jones. It read the way Kathleen Tweets: sly and informed and precise. About halfway through, I swore I’d never write again. Then I got over that and decided that, actually, if Kathleen was making such great Art, someone needed to do the lesser and really I was quite ok with knowing someone who could do it well than with needing to produce literature of that calibre myself. Still, it has made me aim higher and that is always a worthy ambition.
What I’m avoiding?
Chapter Four of the Fun Flimsy. It is too disjointed and displaced. Today’s long car journey inspired a better scene but I’m not sure when I’ll get to write it this week and how best to connect it to what I already have. Fortunately, I’ve 2 long car journeys tomorrow to overcome that.
Also, I will need to do the Hard Edit on the second opus soonish. On the recommendation of this group, I’ve located a 1994 edition of The Weekend Novelist which should arrive in a couple of days to help prepare me.
Kathleen does that. She uses her powers for good (mostly). Yay to have her words to inspire you. Yay for car journeys to allow writing problem solving.
FYI I’m printing out these comments.
Break down the list of stuff you’re avoiding into smaller parts and cross them off as you do them is one way I break through the procrastination/not-good-enough angle as I find it’s the same coin. Including the breaking up of the honours thesis – which I’m guessing has parts that don’t have quite as much rework to do as others.
Avoiding due to sheer overwhelm of workload, I give myself a “harden the f&^$ up” and get on with it and then I usually find it wasn’t as big/hard/as much as I had envisioned in my head (& try to remember that for the next time).
Katherine FitzHywel this way my reply to you – no idea how I broke out of the thread *headdesk*.
Obviously cannot be constrained by the bounds of the thread. 😉
Good point. The parts will be less intimidating than the whole. I should look for the smallest part I can break off to get the momentum going.