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 on the downward slope of the next Short Fiction Lab story. It’s a ghost story build around a road trip, and the two characters have finally hit the ghost where everything picks up and we barrel towards the inevitable conclusion. Aiming to get the draft finished this.

Also on the docket: more work on Warhol Sleeping, which has slowed down a lot due to the necessity of focusing more time on my thesis for a stretch; more work on the thesis novella, with some heavy thinking about how I can do something interesting with the conventions of the Space Marine/Bug Hunt genre. 

What’s inspiring me this week?

If you’re not an aficionado of the writers-being-interviewed genre, it’s going to be really hard to explain why Meredith Maran’s Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and Why They Do What They Do is such a breath of fresh air. It’s a combination of the way the interviews are framed and contextualised, and what’s being asked of the writers themselves, and it delivers interviews that simultaneously feel shorter than normal and more densely packed with useful information.

It is, however, a book that I’d strongly recommend to anyone still trying to figure out what it is they want from writing–you start to see the goals emerging in various ways as people find their answers to the book’s core question. 

What action do I need to take?

I need to book in to see a physio, and figure out where the money for that is coming from in my budget. I’ve been putting this off for months as something-I’ll-deal-with-later-the-problem-is-not-that-big-yet, but it’s largely to deal with back pain that’s kicking in hard after long periods of writing and getting bad enough to wake me up in the mornings. 

Given that I will typically use that early wake up to sneak in some extra work before my partner rises, I fear that I’m creating a vicious cycle that’s only to get worse.