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 deep in the draft for Project Stair, which started off as a Short Fiction Lab project but may just edge into longer territory by the time I’m done. It’s a YA-quest-fantasy set around an underground ocean, filtered through the kind of Lovecraftian logic of a Guillermo del Toro horror film.

I spent the bulk of last week getting the shape of the thing, and realising that I couldn’t achieve the effect I wanted without really fleshing the details out on the various sub-quest narratives. This week I’m hoping to finalise two of the three side-quests, one of which revolves around a haunted battlefield and the other of which involves a boiling patch of ocean and whatever thing I end up hiding there. 

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’ve been re-reading Damon Suede’s Verbalize and Jim Butcher’s 2006 post about writing sequel scenes this week, trying to wrap my head around developing my ideas for stories a lot more before I write them.

I turned to the former towards the start of the week, when I found myself stalling out on the Project Stair draft and could figure what happened after all the initial set-up. A half-day spent working out character’s inner voids, long-term strategies, and tactical voids suddenly opened up a whole suite of story options, and got me working at a fair clip.

But when I stalled again, towards the end of the week, I found myself going back to Butcher and really pondering how the way character’s process information changes the tone of a story. What felt like an out-of-place whiz-bang action scene started taking on very different overtones when I started lingering on the anticipation instead, and I’ve started to really notice the way other writers are using the same. 

What action do I need to take?

I kicked goals on most of my writing tasks this week, doing more than I’d actually scheduled in my drafting, thesis, admin, blogging, and newsletter columns on my whiteboard. 

That said, there are two columns on my board that were barely touched: the ones devoted to redrafting tasks for novels and developing new story ideas before I sit down to write.

I think this is because neither had specific actions to turn to, which made it really easy to disregard them or treat them as less important, so my challenge for the coming week is breaking them down into clearer, trackable daily actions.