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’m settling back into a work groove this week, right in time for a two week break from uni teaching where I can swing the bulk of my focus around to my own work. There is some marking and thesis writing on the docket, but the big project du jour is either a novella or short novel about boxing, space truckers, and too many hours reading Howard’s Sailor Steve Costigan stories while also watching The Expanse.

Admittedly, I had a similar draft to this underway at the start of the year, but it kept iterating outward to become something else. I’ve stripped this one back to its bare bones, and i think I’ve finally got a handle on the character which allows me to keep the focus on them.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’m in the middle of a lot of really inspiring books, but I’m going to repeat a book that I’ve recommended very recently: Damon Suede’s Verbalize. While I watched some great movies this week, and read some good fiction, I started a deep read of Suede’s work right as I started planning the novella I kicked off on Monday and started building a development process using the exercises he lays out.

And while his core advice–figure out what characters do, rather than who they are–seems like such a simple thing, the impact it’s made on my writing process is immense. Characters who have previously seemed flat and elusive suddenly have a through-line to their narrative that makes them comprehensible; scenes are built around conflicting tactics between two characters, and immediately become easier to write because the focus is on the consequences of those two approaches coming up against each other.

Even the major beats of the three-act structure become easier to lay down, because they’re often about showing how a particular strategic approach fails or succeeds.

Having put together a system, I’m now running every problematic, “I don’t know how to write this” draft I’ve got through it, seeing if it starts to spark something that makes me eager to write and finish it.

What action do I need to take?

I’ve got to finish uploading the Short Fiction Lab stories to a bunch of stores that aren’t Amazon this week, and I’d like to start the redraft of the current short story once I get all the marking off my plate later in the week.  Both are things that are likely to slip my mind by Thursday, when I’m expecting my schedule to open up, so I’m logging them here to help me remember.