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?
It’s been nearly six weeks since I’ve had serious time to devote to fiction rather than thesis drafting, but I’m finally at the point where all the urgent things have been submitted and the next wave is yet to hit. That means my schedule opens up to start prepping You Don’t Want To Be Published for release and familiarise myself with Hell Track once again. I’m going to spend a week working on one particular character’s scenes in the latter, trying to get the spine of their narrative down.
What’s inspiring me this week?
I’ve been re-watching Season 4 of Doctor Who over the last week, largely because my partner hasn’t seen this part of the series. At the same time, I’ve been re-reading Russel Davies The Writers Tale, where he talks about the process of writing/showrunning season 4 with a journalist. It’s an interesting experience: you see the season arc developing from its early stages, gradually getting fleshed out and altering in response to real-world concerns about actor availability. You also get more insight into how ideas develop into stories – and what Davies looks for, in particular – than you’d get out of a dozen ‘how to write’ books.
What action do I need to take?
I’ve let my newsletter slide over the last few weeks through a combination of too little time and too much I want to do with it in the short-term. I really need to sit down and start clarifying the project a little better, including a list of all the current things that are currently getting in the way of me actually writing regularly.
I’ve ended up taking a short, unscheduled break from writing newsletters over the last fourteen days. Regular GenrePunk Ninja transmissions will resume
Like many of you, I have good weeks and bad weeks on the writing front. This week has been rocky, and if
Welcome to GenrePunk Ninja supplemental, where I occasionally post foundational essays written before I launched the GenrePunk Ninja newsletter, especially if they’re
6 Responses
Okay. Just because I did in fact just do something on it:
What Am I Working On? I am crafting a pair of antlers for myself. These are intended to be used at a Samhain event at a few months time, but they will be useful beyond that. Of course, I’m also learning how to make this kind of thing and am tempted to begin another set with fewer mistakes. They just got a re-plaster. Next step is painting them.
What Is Inspiring Me This Week? My pagan group is beginning our year this Friday and I’ve discovered a resource that teaches the absolute basics of mental magic.
What Action Do I Need To Take? I almost always enjoy physical crafting yet I don’t do it anywhere near enough. The main reason is that I always have to get over the “setup hump” of getting all the required materials together.
Have you tried setting a regular, trackable goal around the setup rather than the crafting? Something that will set up the basic discipline of getting of the tools in place, even if you don’t actually craft with them?
Wow – was that only a week ago? That’s an interesting idea about tracking the setup rather than the crafting. I’ll give that some thought.
Nothing I am doing this week will be as interesting as crafting a pair of antlers.
What am I working on this week?
Wrapping up some formatting fixes on a novella, then converting it to a mobi file so it can go to a beta reader. Then I head into the last round of editing on Book 2. I set myself a deadline of 1st of April for publishing this one. Doable, but I’d better get to it.
What’s inspiring me this week?
David Gaughran’s Let’s Get Visible and Amazon Decoded. They have, in a timely fashion, both just come out. On the fiction front, I’ve just finished NK Jemisin’s The Fifth Season, which is damned good. Haven’t decided what I’m reading next. I think I’ll make it some urban fantasy.
What action do I need to take?
Keep Author Time to a minimum. I’ll be easing into marketing as the year progresses, but right now I think the best thing I can do is put the required work into getting Books 2 and 3 out.
What am I working on this week?
– Editing the uni novella
– Getting the… vast cloud of thought down into something recognisably approximating an exegesis.
– Starting edits on the-manuscript-formerly-known-as-the-Large-Amorphous-Manuscript. Just sentence-level edits for now, but I’ve been very anxious to get started on this round, so it’s a treat in between everything else.
– Assorted art commissions & manuscript reading.
What’s inspiring me this week?
– Picnic at Hanging Rock by Joan Lindsay, again. It’s a remarkably beautiful, understated, well-shaped little novel, and never a trial to revisit.
– Wellington: The Years of the Sword, by Elizabeth Longford. Reading this very slowly, but still enjoying it – it’s an effective portrait of the emergence of a particular character (The Iron Duke) from a particular personality (indolent, bookish, musical). But they’ve only just got started in Portugal.
– The Shape of Water. I’m coming to appreciate Guillermo del Toro in the same way I do Terry Gilliam (and occasionally M. Night Shyamalan). They’re the illustrator’s directors: narrative is paramount, but it’s a visual-aesthetic narrative. (Wes Anderson, by contrast, is a graphic designer’s director).
What action do I need to take?
– Just keep swimming. I’m hitting a respectable number of hours-actually-spent-working, and enforcing deliberate days off, and… I’m not sure there’s anything more I can do, really. It’s just a matter of choosing where to spend those hours, and given my list of things to do, there’s no right answer to that – but no wrong one, either.