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’m two weeks and 20,000 words into Project Rad at the moment, and narrative has just coalesced as a bunch of scenes turned into a structure where all the narrative beats line up. I know roughly what the story is doing and how it pulls together, which means the writing process gets a little easier from this point on. Also a little slower, as I’m no long just writing a scene and trusting it’ll have a home in the final work–things actually have an ongoing intent.
What’s inspiring me this week?
After mainlining five and a half seasons of True Blood over the last month, I decided to go back and read the original Sookie Stackhouse novels and picked up the first omnibus edition which includes the first three. It’s fascinating to see the transitions between book and show–the characters who get a more prominent role, those who get shuffled away into the background. Also, the richness that’s added when the focus moves away from a single viewpoint.
At the same time, the novels are really tight, easy reads that make full use of Sookie’s voice and perspective to keep things light and moving on at a tremendous pace. It’s the kind of thing that looks really simple on the surface, but is incredibly hard to pull off.
What action do I need to take?
I’ve been taking my time getting on top of things since my dad died back in March, keeping my focus on the baseline essentials of life (writing, thesis, partner) and gradually stacking new things on top once I feel like I’ve got a handle on things. Two of the things that has been left to lie fallow is email and other communications, and long-term planning so I’m on top of my schedule.
They’re both trouble-spots, because leaving them so long means addressing the shame of leaving them so long, and that becomes a recurring loop that makes it easy to keep ignoring things. I really need to start taking the easy steps and clearing the decks in a meaningful way.
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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Best of luck getting back to the long-term planning process! That’s seemed so helpful for you in the past, so it’ll be a good thing to reintroduce, I’m sure. 🙂
What I’m working on this week: Getting back up to speed on 1k/day hopefully, and avoiding falling behind despite two days decimated by sickness.
What’s inspiring me this week: Inspiration has been tough this week, as TV has been pretty much the only thing either Bug or me has been up to doing. That said, I must commend Wall-E as a fantastic film–it’s Bug’s favorite movie, and we’ve seen it three times in the past two weeks, and every time I end up watching, despite planning to read or do other things–it just sucks me in. If that’s not excellent story telling (even knowing the film almost line-for-line), I don’t know what is.
Also just started watching Empire, which is one of those shows I’ve always been curious about, but haven’t ever seen. Well, I’m completely hooked now. It’s like everything I wanted Luke Cage to be, minus the superhero elements (though if the Empire producers had done that show, HOT DAMN, it would have been perfect). And I love the additional mix of music and the creative process of creating music–it’s just such a cool, fascinating show that always keeps me on my toes and fixated on what happens next.
What action do I need to take?: I definitely need to get back into the regular exercise routine, but that’s somewhat dependent on how quickly I feel better. But as soon as I can, at least getting back into walking would be good to warm back up to where I was before.
That’s a lot of True Blood.
What am I working on this week?
Moving along with the new reader magnet. It’s coming along well. Part 3 remains much less planned than parts 1 & 2. We’ll see what happens when I get to it.
What’s inspiring me this week?
I enjoyed Hanna on Amazon Prime. Not exactly what I expected and maybe a bit more intense than I was up for at the time, given that I was recovering from surgery. But an interesting show.
Going back to the old X-Men movies has also been interesting. Bryan Singer does not appear to have ever wanted to incorporate anything from the Matt Damon Jason Bourne movies into his action scenes. They remain ponderously slow. I didn’t notice it back in the day, but I did notice it when I watched Days of Future Past the first time.
The X-Men franchise has also made me appreciate something the Avengers movie franchise managed: 22 movies over 11 years and they didn’t make any real continuity screw-ups, whereas the X-Men franchise is an utter cactus. It also contains a few quite poor and skippable movies, whereas you kind of want to watch the Avengers from start to finish.
I’ve watched comics and tie-in novel series succeed, fail and then have to fix, via fix-novels or continuity-changing cosmic events, this sort of thing for decades. It’s funny watching it happen in billion-dollar movie franchises.
What action do I need to take?
P1 is whatever I can do to get the release of Book 3 prepped. I’m in a weird holding pattern though. I’m waiting for one of the bigger email services to give me a slot and then intend to build my schedule around that.
P2 is the revamp of the website. I finally found a theme and theme builder I like. I’m doing it in small stages. Unfortunately, spending that much time on my website has illuminated the general shabbiness of my host. As I want people to sign up to my newsletter, I need this site to work reliably.
Whose your mailing list provider? I ended up going with a Mailchimp landing page as a medium-term interim after giving up the search for themes that had effective landing pages, and it has been doing the job okay.
Also Mailchimp. I was playing around with their landing page feature just last night. I’ll see how it goes with a little more testing, but if it looks good I’ll create a proper one and replace the links in my books. I don’t want to lose a single potential sub to “Error connecting to database”.
Although with this week’s Mailchimp news, I may be moving to MailerLite…
It starts feeling like a lot more True Blood than it should around season 6, when everything goes off the rails and the series premise feels like it got rewritten 🙂