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?

This week is book prep week, setting up everything that needs to be finalised before Not Quite The End Of the World Just Yet drops at the end of the month. This means final proofs, double-checking everything is set up okay, making sure I get everything in before the pre-order cut-off, and setting up the various blog posts and social stuff. With all the chaos of the last few weeks – and the chaos to come in the next few – it’s increasingly tempting to let all this slide while I focus on other things, so I’m doing my best to keep it front and centre.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I caught up with Lauren Dane’s latest in the Whiskey Sharp series, Jagged, and a novella that floats around the periphery of the series, Cake.  Both were enormously fun reads – the Whiskey Sharp books have a real hipster vibe to them and their linking motif is a series of second-generation Russians living in Seattle. The books share a lot of the things that I generally respond to in Dane’s work: a focus on found family and recovering from trauma; character’s chasing their career passions (usually creative or artisanal ins some way) and being supported by those around them; incredibly hot sex scenes.

Cake suffers a little from being a novella about artists and perpetrating some of my least liked myths about creativity, but it does take the time to unpack that a little with one of the secondary characters. Jagged revolved around an Ex-FBI agent turned tattoo artist and a artisanal baker, which is perhaps my favourite combination of characters that Dane has done.

What action do I need to take?

I’m feeling the need to blog semi-regularly again, largely because I’m spending more and more time inside my own head, focused on my own process and the things I’m not doing. Blogging isn’t necessarily an escape from that, but it forces me to consider ideas and writing problems in a way that is accessible, comprehensible, and (hopefully) useful for other people. This is usually a good thing for my mental state, but frequently eats into the time spent writing other things (which is, invariably, why I start cutting back).

I’m hoping I can find a balance between the two, but I’m not entirely sure how. Logically, the sensible thing would be to start creating a backlog of work that I can keep in reserve, but that risks pushing me back towards the in-my-own-head-ess I’m trying to combat.