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?

Much of this week be translating handwritten Hell Track scenes into the main document and going in for a rewrite of some earlier scenes I’d like to get a bit more focused and clear. I’m working into the second act at this stage – heading for the second race – and it presents an interesting conundrum: if I have overplayed my hand with earlier action scenes (a strong possibility), how do I escalate matters in the later parts of the book? How do I make the scenes feel different and unique? Going back and locking down the earlier scene feels like the less stressful option at this stage, possibly even reviewing the two scenes in parallel.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Some weeks I’m working with drips of inspiration; some weeks I work with rivers. This week has been one of the latter.

I’m doing a series of deep re-reads at the moment, going through books that I’ve already processed to do some serious annotating and thinking about what they’re saying and how they can be applied. This week I revisited Cal Newports Deep Work, about building attention span and shifting focus to the kind of skilled, time consuming work that has the biggest pay-offs in many knowledge-work careers.

I find Newport problematic much of the time, especially when he’s talking about the lack-of-value inherent in the internet. While the things he references to advance his argument often begin with research rooted in psychology or neurobiology, his attempts to engage with the arguments about why social media and the internet are beneficial usually take their starting point in here are some things people have argued in the comments section of my website when they disagreed with what I’m saying. His certainty that he is right, coupled with the lack of experience given his refusal to engage with the medium, ultimately leaves me wishing that he’d tackled the topic with more rigour.

That said, I started this re-read feeling really dissatisfied with the amount of work I got done through February and the book has given me language to start thinking about the problem. On top of that, my notes are full of asides and ideas to explore when I start looking at follow-ups to You Don’t Want To Be Published, which will probably be the series of posts about business planning for writers that people have been nudging me towards for the last few years.

On top of that, we’ve been studying The Ocean At the End Of the Lane in the classes I’m tutoring this week and it was educational to re-read the book with an eye to talking craft and structure. It’s incredibly easy to overlook the craft that goes into Gaiman work, simply because of the space he occupies in the publishing field, but the deliberate build of conflicts and imagery in that book is outstanding. He makes us trust the narrator with the accuracy of real things – childhood feelings and moments – before slowly supplanting the familiar and wanted (the narrators kitten) with the unfamiliar, strange, and still mundane (the alley-cat named Monster), before introducing actual uncanny and supernatural entities later in the book. By the time you’re getting to the it was strange and I could not describe it elements of the book, you’re so grounded and prepared for uncanny that you barely notice the lack of details.

What action do I need to take?

So a few weeks back I started the project diary for Hell Track and basically stopped because switching to my Confirmation presentation triggered a massive, ugly anxiety day where my brain locked into ruminating thoughts and refused to let go. It’s been four weeks since then and much of that tie has been spent arguing with the less healthy part of my brain, trying to counter the slow spiral of obsessive concerns that the attack invited in and fighting the urge to spend nine hours a day flaked out on the couch and embracing failure.

The problem with that kind of attack is that it’s not much fun to admit to, so the Hell Track diary basically disappeared along with any motivation to work on or talk about the project. On the other hand, it’s now a half-finished project that’s taxing my energy (the diary, not the book), so I need to invest some time into a) figuring out how much I want to explain about what happened, and b) looking at where the diary component of the project goes from here. The book will get written regardless, but the doing-it-in-public side needs some consideration.