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?
Only one workshop that needs to be written this week, but I’m also trying to get together a major application ahead of a Friday deadline, so one again the writing time gets shuffled to the side in the name of more urgent tasks.
What’s inspiring me this week?
I saw the final two episodes of Supergirl this week, and I honestly cannot remember being this happy with a season of a TV show. Had its moments of cheese, but they were neatly balanced with a certain level of bad-assness and the set-up for next season totally has me hanging out for it to start.
What part of my project an I avoiding?
The application. I don’t often apply for grant-type things, which means I am distinctly uncomfortable with the process and never entirely sure what things are meant to look like.
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
19 Responses
I’m only halfway through Supergirl but have been really enjoying it!
Annnnd my Sunday Circle is here.
Unfortunately it looks like there’s a bit of a glitch in the embedded form HTML!
Also, would love to hear more about your podcast setup – I’m tentatively planning a podcast project for later this year, and collecting gear recommendations.
I hope you manage to sort the bridge between chapter 5 & 6!
I’m definitely going to have to check out Supergirl sometime. It sounds like so much fun!
What am I working on? Finally got to a place in the novel WiP’s extended outline that feels like a wrap for Act I, so I’m hoping to move on to Act II this week. I’m really hoping this next sequence of scenes doesn’t take as long as the first set did, but it’ll take what it takes, I suspect. I also want June to be the month I get “Ribbon & Key” out into the world, so I need to continue the out-loud read-through and smooth things out.
What’s inspiring me this week? Just rewatched Batteries Not Included with the kiddo yesterday for the first time in probably about ten years. There’s this distinctive Spielberg-esque quality about it, and while I’d never say it’s not a flawed movie in some respects, the humanity of it really blew me away. There’s something about this kind of movie (the mid/late 70s/80s SF kid-friendly flicks about ordinary people encountering extraordinary things that underline the ordinary-life problems and theme—particularly quantified by Cocoon, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, or Batteries Not Included) that really resonate with me for some reason. They’re not special people, or beautiful people, or even really “chosen” people to a certain extent. You get the impression that this story could really happen anywhere, to anyone in the right place at the right time, it just *happened* to occur to someone who really needed it to happen to them (maybe more than you needed it to happen to you). The speculative element is central, yet somehow the importance of it is adjacent to the real problem, which is always a human, ordinary problem. The spec fic element just makes it more fun. It’s a style and a tone that I realize I’ve been chasing in my modest attempts at sci-fi, to recreate that NORMAL bumps up against ODD, that’s almost more in the vein of the modern contemporary fantasy or weird fiction, just without the pseudoscience. But I really love it, and rewatching the movie and how much my son (who’s almost 2) enjoyed it, makes me long for more movies like it. I’m not sure there are many being made like this anymore, which makes me a little sad.
What am I avoiding this week? The re-read of the short story. It all feels like a horribly cobbled together Franken-beast loaded with thin imagery and flat sentences and weighted down by a whole lot of Meh. But I know I can liven it up at little, at least, if I just give it the time. Problem is, I just never seem to have much time anymore, and what time I do have, I don’t want to spend sitting around glowering at this particular text. It’s just a matter of giving myself a swift kick in the pants, which I’m pretty sure I can do, and I should have a bit more time in the evenings after Tuesday, so that’s something.
Haven’t watched any of those films for 15+ years, but know exactly what you mean–should rewatch some of them. Finding I’m hitting peak-superhero films, very much about the chosen. You (and Peter) might appreciate this: http://lithub.com/on-superheroes-and-the-myths-of-american-power/.
It’s in a vastly different tone, but District 9 has some of that same everyperson collides with something exception feel to it…. although it definitely changes in tone in the third act.
Going back to 80s films, would definitely add The Explorers and Flight of the Navigator to the same list, although admittedly it’s been a long time since I’ve watched those.
*Love* Flight of the Navigator. (That one’s currently “hidden” on our bookshelf because the little guy became so obsessed that we’ve watched it probably 8 times in the past three weeks (not even exaggerating there!)) And yeah! That one’s close, too–I haven’t seen The Explorers, so I’ll have to give that one a peek!
Also, with regards to the Short Story – this is me largely giving you advice I’m trying to give myself, but can you schedule a half hour or hour in the calendar? I find that things I try to ‘find time’ for never happen typically, but anything that’s scheduled has no other choice but to happen.
I do probably need to do that, for sure! I’m pretty confident I can schedule something like that most nights in the coming week. I’ll give it a try, because yeah–stumbling across available time is something of a crapshoot.
“They’re not special people, or beautiful people, or even really “chosen” people to a certain extent.”
Oh, I love that feeling! In some ways, it resonates with bits of Fargo, but it something I do so like. Diana Wynne Jones can pull it off, and E. Nesbit – it has echoes of the Edwardian fantastic.
What am I working on this week? Finished a draft of poetry manuscript #1 a week or so ago, and did very little this week (unless you count things like completely redesigning my computer folder system to make it more logical). The maybe pile is as big as the manuscript (and half the size of the reject pile), which was pleasantly surprising; got some work to do balancing theme and rhythm with things like including a few more of my published poems. Realised a page of haiku can function as a section break, so added a few more pages that I need to fill. Took a huge leap forward yesterday with poetry manuscript #2 (a single-line haiku sequence that does non-haiku things) by dumping a whole bunch of haiku files into a single spreadsheet–deleting and organising is proving to be much easier than I feared. Back to work on that this week.
What’s inspiring me this week? Back into Moby Dick! Also discovered a poet, John Anderson–one of his collections is a book of single-line poetry fragments, along with an accompanying essay about his method. Proving to be an absolute goldmine. Lesson: Never underestimate talking to random writers in bars and being very specific about what you’re working on/struggling with.
What part of my project am I avoiding? Pretty much nothing as far as poetry goes. Got a couple of sub deadlines coming up that I need to get onto.
Hope the deadlines go well, and kudos for the lack of avoidance!
Woohoo on progress! Sounds like you’re kicking butt and taking names. Way to go! 😀
Thanks, M and K. 🙂
What am I working on this week?
Despite the best of intentions, monthly review got pushed back by necessity to this week coming, after a bit of a messy week dealing with wrangling people to organise voice acting sessions, and website grief. So, working on monthly review, along with continuing work on updating a number of websites that need love, and finishing the updates to my performance resume (which I DID manage to start this week)
What’s inspiring me this week?
Really looking forward to sitting down with Uncharted 4 starting tomorrow. It’s put together by one of my favourite video game studios (Naughty Dog) and has two of my favourite voice actors (Nolan North and Troy Baker) so I’m super-chuffed at getting to sit down and enjoy it, and see what they do with the work.
Morning schedule continues to be a huge shift in mindset, even if on some days it’s more like a 6:30 wakeup rather than a 5:15 wakeup. Looks like I’m gravitating towards 5:30 as a happy medium. Not feeling like I need to play catchup for the entire day is such a huge gift.
What part of my project am I avoiding?
Been dragging my feet a little on a few things – providing quotes to clients for voice acting sessions I’m organising/directing, for fear of sticker shock, although I’ve eventually gotten them out the door. Also, landing on choices for WordPress themes for new website. Things have been getting done, it’s just felt like moving through taffy.
Super impressed by the AM routine. Not sure I could pull that off, but I can only imagine how relieving it must be to have some critical work done before the day starts!
As for sticker shock, I swear I read somewhere that psychologically speaking, mentioning a bigger number first and then following with the actual price (lower, obviously) can make people feel like they’re getting an excellent deal and feel like the actual number is lower than it is (like, well, typically I do this for $500/hr, but I’m currently doing a special offer of only $250/hr, so you called up just in time!) XD Not sure that’s all that applicable for voice-acting quotes, but it’s a fun psych tidbit, and I’ve found it very useful in small, everyday things, too–like “Well, at first I thought the car repairs were going to be like $1500, but turns out, they were only $800!”) 🙂
Good job with the morning schedule. I’ve slipped back into my night-owl routine, and am trying to ratchet back–it is amazing what you can get done first thing. The happy medium is a good one–it’s usually the time that’s sustainable.
Getting things done and not being rewarded by them getting faster and easier is the worst. Well, pretty bad. Hope the sense of momentum increases!
What am I working on? Prospectus documents for uni, and the Big Illustration Project. Both have definitely started, and both are at the “I am a terrible person” stage.
What’s inspiring me?
-Chicken Kiev
–Fargo. I’ve finished season 1 and it ended… very much in keeping with the show it was. It reminded me a bit of Das Versprechen/The Pledge in some ways, but more comfortable. Also, oddly, of John Wick, to the extent that you feel something mythic is being enacted, but can’t quite work out the allegory. Both splice semi-religious imagery in the way we’re used to remixing fairytale tropes.
–Pawn in Frankincense, which I picked up trepidatiously this afternoon. By the start of the second page, my stomach felt the way it does when you get near the top of a rollercoaster.
What am I avoiding? Struggling with both the prospectus and the BIP. Every day is a fight to get into them, and no momentum. Which is a shame, because each time I do some things I’m genuinely happy with – or at least, didn’t know I was capable of. But it’s a grind, complicated by knowing that I have to jettison a lot of projects because of travelling at the end of June.