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?

My deadline to get a rough exegesis draft to my supervisor is this Friday, which largely sets my to-do list for the week. There’s about four thousand coherent words left to write, and about ten thousand incoherent ideas half-written in another file. Much of my week will be spent winnowing out the bad ideas and finding the stuff that will fit.

Once the draft is turned in, I’m taking a few days to chill and then getting back to fiction…but that’s likely to be next week’s project.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Rian Johnson’s Knives Out, which is one of the best films I’ve seen in years. The first Rian Johnson film I encountered was the low-budget indie Brick, which took the tropes of film noir and ported them into a high school setting. The result was such a startlingly fresh, tight, and innovative mystery that I found myself rewatching the film over and over for the space of a week, puzzling out all the tricks.

Johnson’s Star Wars film, The Last Jedi, took his knack for visual framing and turned it up to eleven. Whether you come down on the side of loving that film or hating it, it’s hard to deny the visual impact of what’s put up on the screen. Johnson, when given a budget, prooved to be both stylistically flashy and incredibly coherent in terms of visual style.

Knives Out is a blend of those two approaches. It’s got the really nuanced understanding of its genre that made Brick great, although it’s taking on the cosy mystery rather than film noir. It uses that nuance to recretate the genre from the ground up and deliver something fresh, accompanying a cracking script with really great performers.

And then it’s got the budget for Johnson to turn his knack for visual style loose, and the results are spectacular. 

What action do I need to take?

Setting myself an easy one this week: hit up the various social media sites and edit my interest profiles. I do this fairly regularly on Facebook, which maens it stops assuming I’ve got a prevailing interest in things I checked once or twice (or assuming I’ve got an interet in certain interests showing up on facebook, whe that’s not really how I use the site). I’ve never done it on twitter, though, which my explain why the site is becoming increasingly difficult to navigate and engage with. 

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