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. You can find a more detailed post and how and why it’s a useful thing to do here. Want to get 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?

The project sitting top of mind as I sit down to do my weekly plan is a lecture I’m delivering Wednesday, but that’s a small amount of my weekly work in terms of raw writing time.

The larger focus is going to my PhD exegesis. At time of writing I’m about 4,000 words off minimum viable length for a submission—not the same thing as being done at all, but the point where the pressure is off a little because I know that worst-case scenario there is something I can pull together. With the deadline looming next year, I’m really pushing to hit that milestone as soon as I can and giving the theory the bulk of my writing time.

It’s a short-term hit to fiction productivity, but it will come with long-term gains. The less time spent with the exegesis making me nervous, the more of my focus I can give to fiction down the line. 

I do, however, have the line level of a short-story collection on my plate at the moment, which is giving me some interesting creative challenges on the fiction front. 

What’s inspiring me this week?

John Milton Edwards The Fiction Factory, which is essentially a “how to make a career as a professional writer” guide written by a pulp writer who went full-time in 1893 and covers a period into the 1920s.

It’s an utterly fascinating read given the conversations I’ve been having about productivity and the push to do more as writers—one of the recurring motifs Edwards builds around is yearly income reports about his career, what he wrote and how much it earned him. He doesn’t use the factory term lightly–a yearly listing will frequently group together 20 or 30 blocks of novella-length work put together for a nickel or dime novel series, then list everything else produced over the course of the year. At his height, he claims to maintain a pace of two “novelettes” a week, although most contemporary writers would regard these as closer to novellas.

I took a stack of notes for this one and spent a lot of time thinking about what I’d like to take away from it. While Edward’s style may be a little formal, it’s also beguiling in its arguments—to the point where I needed to think real hard about why I found myself tempted to take something onboard as a tactic. 

What action do I need to take?

Make sure I write a newsletter this week. I have sent nothing out since my grandmother died, which is ticking into three weeks of radio silence. Part of the hold-up is a mental block around announcements that have been delayed, but the other part is just a general stall of processes that set in.