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?

There’s about five half-finished chapter in the Median Survival Time draft at the moment, and the goal for this week will be finishing them off and doing a first-past polish and annotation for what will be tackled in the coming revisions. I’m a little behind where I wanted to be–I’m certainly going to blow the informal deadline I was working towards–but it’s not catastrophic. Talked to my supervisor about other options that will meet the PhD requirements, and I think the novella will be stronger for the extra time.

More importantly, I put together a work plan that will take me through to the end of the year, laying out exactly what I’m meant to be working on at any given day. It still needs a little refinement–I’ve set it up to be updated with more detail on my quarterly planning sessions–but it gives me a really strong idea about what’s achievable this year. In theory, it should see the return of some blogging in a few weeks–right now, I’m building up a buffer of content and figure out a schedule.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’ve been reading Anne of Green Gables and watching Anne with an E on Netflix more-or-less simultaneously, and it’s been a fascinating experience. The book is something I’ve avoided for years, under the assumption that it’s historically driven and I don’t often gel with historical setting (also, lets be honest, internalised and unconscious misogyny).

Truth is, it’s not historically driven at all (as in, the point of the book is not the historical aspects). The book is fantastic and I owe an apology to everyone I ignored when they urged me to read it. It’s got an incredibly efficient set-up, in terms of getting us invested in the characters, and while it’s highly episodic in structure, it’s got a style that keeps me reading. 

The series is also fantastic. Well-acted, well scripted, and utterly willing to throw out the source material in order to examine something that is cheerfully glossed over in the books given the time period. A lot of people hate it, especially if they grew up with the 80s Green Gables miniseries and dislike the attempts to add “gritty” to the setting, but I really dig the way they’ve used the novel as a basis for looking at issues around coping with trauma, the inherent discrimination of the setting, and gender. 

What action do I need to take?

WordPress has a new system for putting together posts (hello, Gutenburg), and I have a bunch of ready-to-go templates built around the HTML editor used in the old post editor. They don’t translate well–the attempt to copy-paste this week’s resulted in a chunk of time devoted to re-doing layout. At some point in the coming seven days, I really should sit down and get familiar with Gutenburg and how I’ll need to re-format.