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?
Man, you know how I thought I was done with the first act of my story last week? Turns out, it wasn’t so. I found a whole ‘nother fifty pages of story which, when I hit it, immediately proved to have all the hallmarks that identify the first act (namely: newly arrived B plot and the transition to a vastly different landscape/setting).
A useful kind of rabbit hole to go down, but it does mean I’ve still got all these editorial tools that I need to trial, and some stories in dire need of revision…
What’s inspiring me this week?
So many good movies and documentaries this week – including The Imitation Game and a surprisingly good SBS docymentary series on hipsters – but the best of them was checking out Francis Ford Coppala’s 1973 film, The Conversation. It’s an old-school seventies thriller featuring Gene Hackman as a surveillance expert with a guilt-ridden past, who comes to realise that there is something hinky about his current assignment. Most people will probably come to it for the cast, which includes a pre-Star Wars Harrison Ford, or the fact that it came out in the same year as Watergate and features the same technology.
I got to it because it’s one of the early films in which Walter Murch served as editor, and there are references to it all through Michael Ondaatje’s The Conversations. Fascinating stuff, if you can track down a copy to read beforehand..
What part of my project an I avoiding?
The editing exercises. ‘Cause they’re hard and unfamiliar and bring me closer to the fail-state of writing, wherein I finish things and send them off and people tell me they’re still not fixed enough to be publishable.
