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’ve got virtually no creative or research work on the agenda this week – the bulk of my time will be spent marking the remaining 40 assignments on my slate in an effort to clear them off the schedule. If I can get it done, I’ll be free of the marking by next Sunday (which is, for me, record efficiency) and back to the writing/redrafting of Black Glove Widow and Median Survival Time.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I picked up the Tor.com edition of Caitlin Kiernan’s Black Helicopters to read around assignments. I’ve listed this in a Sunday Circle before, back when it first came out, but the original novella has been expanded with extra chapters and now serves as the second of a novella triptych with Agents of Dreamland. It’s the perfect anecdote to marking–full of time shifts and different POVs, deploying all its world building through insinuation rather than exposition. Kiernan is, as always, a writer working at the top of her game, creating something uncanny and beautiful and challenging with zero shits about its accessibility for a mass audience.

What action do I need to take?

This one stumped me this week–there’s a lot that I need to do that probably should rise up here, but it’s all feeling too minor or incapable of being done. Probably the biggest is emailing the lecturer of the subject I’m grading to make sure the date I’m intending to get everything done on the marking is actually going to be reasonable, and giving myself a little time every day to start thinking through thesis things even if I’m not actively writing or researching.