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?

I finished the draft of Warhol Sleeping last week, but it’s still a rough bit of work. This week I’m doing a redraft sweep and fleshing stuff out: adding more personality and detail to character’s in earlier scenes, before I really had a handle on them; looking for the scenes where I’m writing plot alone and adding the emotional/sensory details that will make them work. 

Basically, sanding away the rough edges and transforming it into a book I’d like to read.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Netflix released The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, the reboot of Sabrina the Teenage Witch from the people behind Riverdale, and I’m kinda in awe of it. For one thing…how did they make this without 50% of America just spontaneously combusting in some kind of Satanic panic scenario? Even more so than Lucifer, which features the devil as a main character, this show feels like it’s pushing the buttons of every conservative belief you can find.

Of course, that’s what makes it great. While Lucifer is a buddy-cop story where one character happens to be a fallen angel, Sabrina is a glorious melodrama about a power struggle within a church of demon worshippers. They aren’t shy about it either: a gloriously campy Miranda Otto intones “Praise Satan” around her cigarette at a regular clip, a goat-headed Satan shows up as a recurring foil for various characters, and the first episode involves a characters doing missionary outreach for the church (and, it should be said, a lot more effectively than most missionary conversations tend to do it)

Then, of course, there’s the performances: if you found yourself disappointed that Wonder Woman didn’t give Lucy Davis’s Etta Candy more to do, Sabrina uses her as the emotional anchor for the show and partners her with the aforementioned Miranda Otto in scene after scene. Every time they’re on the scene together, it’s campy, show-stealing magic. 

This show knows what it wants to be, knows how badly it will offend some people, and then says fuck it. It’s 100% the kind of show you can only get when you don’t need to capture a mass audience every week, just a large and passionate fanbase that is willing to monetise your work in ways that aren’t based on ratings-based advertising. 

What action do I need to take?

The other big thing on this week: fight scenes in one of the secondary projects, where I’m doing a novella that riffs on Robert E. Howard’s Sailor Steve Costigan stories. There’s three, maybe four, points in this book that are reliant on my ability to make a fight narratively interesting, but my blocking skills aren’t great for that kind of thing and I’m rarely happy with the results. 

This week, I need to seperate them out and work on the craft of fight scenes specially–in particular, making sure they all feel different enough to justify having them in the story. I’ve got a bunch of books, blog posts, and resources set aside while I ponder things, but I’ve been dragging my feet on reviewing them in favour of just writing messy drafts that aren’t working.