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
I’m just back from a weekend in the mountains to celebrate my partner’s birthday, so this week will be fairly short one.
What am I working on this week?
I’ve been kicking around a short story under the working title The Black Glove Widow of Helios Ridge, which is just starting to arrange itself in my head after several months of lying fallow. The current draft is about 6,000 words and maybe a quarter of what I’m thinking, so it could well end up stretching out to something longer.
What’s inspiring me this week?
American Hippo is the compiled edition of Sarah Gailey’s Tor.com novellas focused on an alternate history American where hippos are farmed as the primary food source. It’s a madcap idea – both in the initial set-up and some of the character arcs – but it gets away with an awful lot through careful pacing, endearing characterisation, and an utter fidelity to it’s world and the stakes set up within it. Strongly recommended, if only to see how Gailey puts together a heist storyline in the space of a novella length.
What action do I need to take?
Sleep. The weekend was long, the celebrations hard, and nature close enough that my allergies were invoked. I’m running on very little sleep at this stage and really need an early night 🙂
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
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Sleep is a lovely thing! American Hippo sounds fascinatingly fun. I may have to give that a peek!
What am I working on this week?
This week, I’m going to try to finish the started short story draft. If I can get it wrapped up by Wednesday or thereabouts, I’m hoping I’ll have time to start a bit of an edit on it–or at least get it off to my beta readers for a quick review prior to next week.
And if I can come up with a date to sit down and punch out Chapter 1 of Draft 2, that would be stellar, too.
What’s inspiring me this week?
I started listening to Writing Excuses again recently, and somehow through the magic rabbit holes of the internet, found these seriously cool sounding free MOOC (massive online open courses) classes available from University of Iowa’s Writing Program. They’ve got a bunch on fiction and on poetry, and since I know so very little about poetry (much less than I’d like anyway), I started listening through a class yesterday, and am pretty fascinated. I’m not sure how long or how regularly I’ll be able to work through them, but they seem like a cool place to self-educate for the time being.
Also, that article on saturation diving is A.MAZ.ING. (It’s here: The Weird, Dangerous, Isolated Life of the Saturation Diver). Thank you so much for recommending it, @writing, writing, words words words! It’s exactly the kind of thing I’ve been looking for!
I’m also getting sucked into Riverdale again, because it hits that drama button so well, and because the soundtrack is aPOPcolyptic, and I love it. Kind of rings with EmpathyTest or “Acid Rain,” by Lorn or even some of lowcityrain‘s stuff, which my husband introduced me to, and is totally unnervingly fitting to these times.
What action do I need to take?
I did better about reading this past week, so I’m hoping to continue the trend. The key so far seems to be getting to bed early enough to read before sleeping, and even a half-hour can be incredibly fruitful in moving forward on various reading objectives.
If you’re interested in going further poetry, try tracking down Kenneth Koch’s Making Your Own Days–while I went through a lot of books on poetry that talked about what the techniques of poetry are, Koch does a great job of talking thought why we use them and why poetry endures in addition to the technical aspects. He then finishes off the book with a short anthology of poets work, taking you through the history, and adding a handful of notes to point out what they’re doing.
It pretty much got me through my poetics thesis, way back when, and formed the basis of every poetry class I taught for the better part of a decade.
Oh, definitely! Thanks for the recommendation. I’ll check it out!