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’ve got to write two or three novellas for my PhD between March and May, and the coming week will be spent locking down a lot of the early brainstorming–I’m averaging about three pages a day of notes and snippets of conversation, getting a feel for the characters and the situations I want to put them into, and I’ll be carrying that through to the ned of the month when the writing begins.

The big challenge for these is figuring out how to do something surprising or new with the genre–I’ve got the nominal details locked down for the first novella on the list (Working Title: Bug Hunt), but I’m still figuring out how to make it work in the prose itself.

The other big projects for the week is the rewrite of my ghost story, which which needs a few hours of dedicated focus, and going through the mid-canditature review for my thesis on Friday.

What’s inspiring me this week?

After a month in which I read very little, February has been all about devouring books as fast as possible and I’m incredibly spoiled for choice here: do I talk about the sublime lines, near-perfect sentences and paragraphs that Angela Carter rolls out in Heroes and Villains, even though I disliked the bulk of the novel? The big boosts to both practice and general well-being after reading Cal Newport’s Digital Minimalism? Have my cake and eat it too through the expedient of sneaking these questions into this section?

Truthfully, the book that consumed me this week was The Goblin Emperor by Katherine Addison–not just because it’s an incredible novel, but because I’m interested in how the craft ties into the effects it generates. The book is huge–around 500 pages–with a single point of view protagonist guiding every moment, a cast of thousands that all share different names, and a world that involves highly codified social strata and strictures that are rendered in titles distinctly tied to the setting. 

The experience of reading the book is a constant search for context, which makes it rather slow to begin and I’ll admit that I sat with this book partially read for a long, long time due to wading through all the set-up. But that slow set-up also serves a purpose and fits with the protagonists experience, and once the ball starts rolling it was nearly impossible to put the book down.

What action do I need to take?

One of the big innovations of the last week has been taking email apps off my phone and only checking it when I’m seated in front of a PC with enough time to respond to anything i’ve been sent.

That’s a good first step, but I’d like to take it further by setting up a dedicated window of time in which I check email, and setting up a checklist that makes sure I’ve checked all the messaging sources I should be (uni email, various messenger programs), given that I’ve also pulled social media off my phone as well. This means tracking time a for a stretch to figure out how long these reviews normally take, and what messaging services are not time efficient for me.