The Sunday Circle: What Are You Working On This Week?

It’s the three-year anniversary of the Sunday Circle this week, which I almost missed amid the chaos of the last seven days. Big thanks to all past and present circle posters–I appreciate you dropping in and sharing your weekly goals with us.

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?

In approximate order:

There are six scenes left to redraft and flesh out in Warhol Sleeping at present, although I expect this will be two weeks work rather than one due to the sparse writing I was using as I rushed to the end. The bulk of this week will be focusing on revamping the two chapters that take place at a weird-ass cyberpunk art commune, working hard to really nail down the futuristic punk overload feel.

My paperwork came back for conference funding all approved, which means I need to start ramping up on the writing of the paper this week. I’ve got a rough structure in place, but I tend not to be 100% confident of such things until I start trying to flesh it out (this week’s goal–really laying into the lit review).

With the first two Short Fiction Labs all loaded (and about twenty-four hours left to pick up your copy of Winged, With Sharp Teeth for free), this week’s short story time will be spent tinkering with a pair of old ghost stories that I wrote over a decade ago (before I realised that one of them was a ghost story). There will be some research this week, nailing down what makes a good ghost story work, then some redrafting.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Research reading has been particularly inspiring this week, courtesy of Seriality and Texts for Young People: The Compulsion to Repeat, which made the really interesting point in its introduction about how repetition is valued in various forms of writing–while the repetition of patterns and tropes is often used to devalue serialised fiction, the repetition of language and rhythms in poetry is part of what we value about the form.

It’s a useful comparison given my background, and became a really useful thing to hinge an entire thesis chapter around in the next few months.

What action do I need to take?

I let day-to-day planning slide a whole lot over the last ten days, and it was already pretty sketchy for two weeks before that. I really need to sit down and do a proper review and refocus of all the projects in my Omnifocus listing, updating it with the new stuff that’s cropped up over the last month, and do some hard assessments on how and when certain things get done.