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’m kicking off a six-week project sprint tomorrow morning, throwing the bulk of my focus into getting Hell Track finished and off my to-do list. I’ve set myself a benchmark of about fifteen scenes to get through over the next five days, which is more than I’m used to doing, but I’ve also cleared of most distractions until the sprint is over.
What’s inspiring me this week?
I spent some quality time with Matthew Rielly’s Hover Car Racer this week, taking notes about it’s structure and the way it builds tension in the racing scenes. It started out serialised on his website back in the early days of the internet, building in discrete episodes that close down, and I’m really interested in the way that form has impacted on the novel structure. I’m also curious about Rielly’s approach to action scenes – races are a tough thing to render in prose fiction, so it’s intriguing to see how he gets around the fact that everything needs to be contextualised in prose.
What action do I need to take?
I packed on a little extra weight over summer, as one does when deadlines and holidays coincide, but it’s starting to have a really negative effect in terms of my apnea making me tired and vague from about 9:30 PM. This leaves me with two things that absolutely need to start kicking in: paying closer attention to the sleep window I’m leaving myself every night, and working to ease off the weight and get my sleep a little more solid.
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
25 Responses
Peter: is the issue with the weight gain diet, or is it exercise rituals falling by the wayside? I find one of the big issues with dropping weight down (something I’m working on myself at the moment) is the eating instinct. I’m finding that almonds and pitted dates are helping as a substitute some of the time… YMMV though.
Good luck on the six week run – looking forward to hearing how that goes!
Both. It’s a combination of all my exercise habits shifting now that I’m working from home exclusive, plus the loss of incidental exercise that comes with using public transport, plus all my eating habits shifting (and, in particular, a lot of take-out getting ordered over recent weeks).
The exercises that are really kicking my ass at the moment are all home-friendly – half or full dips with triceps, squats and lunges – would short breaks with an exercise program be a potential benefit to break up the day and keep energy levels up for you?
What am I working on this week?
This week is a chunk of time on the day job, prep for GDC (starting to line up them appointments) and a quarterly review, which has really snuck up on me.
What’s inspiring me this week?
I’ve been playing through Batman: Arkham Origins (an older game) so I’m going down a bit of a Batman rabbit hole and looking at some of the newer stories thanks to the local library, as well as revisiting some old ones. Also putting the sound scores from the films on high rotation (especially Dark Knight) I’ve been on a bit of a cyberpunk jag at the moment thanks to Altered Carbon popping up, so I’m wrapping my head around the Blade Runner 2049 sound score as well. It’s all feeling a little disjointed (but still absorbing) so I’ll see what makes sense for organised stimulus for the next three months post-quarterly review.
What action do I really need to take?
I’ve got my sleep schedule reset back to how it should be now which is a huge benefit. The next step is getting 2 hours solid work on v/o in the mornings before working on the day job, to get some consistency back up.
How is Altered Carbon? I’ve seen it around, but haven’t watched any yet.
One episode in so far. It’s very pretty, very stylish. Interested in seeing if it avoids the squicky stuff that grossed me out with Richard Morgan’s writing (mostly icky obsessing over the sex appeal of young bodies)
Joel Kinnaman is riveting, so I’m hoping it gives him good things to do. I loved his turn in House of Cards, but wasn’t super-happy with his arc there.
Have I ever recommended Networking Exposed to you? It’s a really useful book to check in with ahead of a big networking conference.
You have, and I have a copy sitting on the shelf. I think I need to push through that book this week. I keep starting and stalling due to bigger priorities coming in, but now that the film is done I’ve got a lot more time on my hands.
Hooray for self-care! It’s so easy to let it slip a bit during the holidays. All the best getting back to where you feel good, Peter. 🙂
My Sunday Circle is here!
*Ahem* The link again. I swear, it’s going in right the first time, but somehow I’m still messing it up. Ah well. Trial #2: Second Attempt
Good luck with the planning. I tend to really struggle with year-long plans – three or four months out is about as good as I get before real life (TM) starts kicking the plans in the teeth 🙂
Oh, inevitably! I tend to be very big-picture on yearly plans, and I probably get only as much done in a year as you all would get done in a four month block! But I do find it helpful for keeping me generally on track, with a few slip and slides along the way… ^_^
Impressed by your tackling goals for the year – how do you begin to approach planning on that scale? Hope the week treats you well – would love to hear what your map for the year looks like on the other side of planning!
Will do! Mostly, it’s pretty general–aided by the fact that at this point, I can really only count on an hour a day of dedicated time, so the scope of what I can get done in general is much smaller than if I had more time. I basically just want to come up with a gut-instinct safety-net for when I ought to be switching over to different projects rather than letting others dominate, guided by life commitments of all kinds during those periods. We’ll see how it goes!
All admiration! I’m on an hour-by-hour projection of events at the moment:) I’m curious about the Murakami – haven’t quite got around to reading any yet.
I really like his work. I started with The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles and if you like that one, you’ll probably like almost everything he does. It’s a great primer for his style, I think. ^_^
What am I working on this week?
A plan for salvaging all of my files from my PC, which died on the weekend.
What’s inspiring me this week?
My desperate need to salvage all of my files from my PC, since of course I’m a goddamn idiot who hasn’t backed his shit up in like a year.
What action do I need to take?
Take a wild freakin’ guess.
Ouch, that one sucks. The back-up lesson is one we all keep learning, over and over.
Although, once the pain is over, I can recommend a Google Drive subscription and using it as the default drive for everything. It’s the one thing that finally moved me away from keeping everything saved to a USB drive and obsessively backing it up at the end of every day.
Oh no!
EEK.
Have you considered taking the drive to a professional recovery service? Aiden recommended this mob on Facebook – http://www.prestoncomputers.com.au/
That is definitely a possibility, since drive recovery seems to be the way forward.
I’ll try it myself first, then escalate if needs be.
So sorry to hear this! All the best with it. 🙁
What am I working on this week?
– All the work. OH MY GOODNESS. As in, everything is due, and tutoring is starting up, and trial shifts at a new job are happening, and people keep offering me other gigs, and I need money but the whole point of this exercise is also to DO ART AND WRITE. On the plus side, I was juuuust $250 or a couple of hours off being able to pay for January without dipping into savings, which is the closest I’ve been to breaking even since I started living on savings.
– Trying to distill notes into an exegesis.
– As a daily treat, I am finally back to editing the Novel Formerly Known As The Large Amorphous Manuscript.
What’s inspiring me this week?
– I really enjoyed I, Tonya and would like to watch it as a double feature with Love and Friendship.
– Finally read The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and like it.
– I’m listening to Harry Potter in French to try to get my head used to the sounds while I learn the language from scratch again. I pretty much jump up and shout, “I know that word!” whenever I hear “Dursley”, but I’m recognising the patterns of the story and remembering how much I like it.
What action do I need to take?
– Just keep taking it day by day, hour by hour, and not beat myself up for not getting unreasonable numbers of hours done.
– Move.
HUGE congrats on getting so close to the break-even point – that’s a great milestone!
It’s got to be hard to balance the urge to hit that milestone against healthy practices to maintain a marathon mindset…
Oh wow! French Harry Potter sounds like an absolute blast (and a mind-buster, too!). I’ve been meaning to start working on French again–I took it in high school, but for some reason we know a LOT of French Canadians currently, so brushing up on it again would have some good immediate payoff. I’ve mentioned Pimsleur before, as a language learning method, yes? I’m a total convert after we picked up the Swiss German conversational disks (I think they’re MP3 now, too) for our honeymoon waaaaaay back when, and we managed to get through the entire two week trip almost entirely without people switching into English for us, which was a major triumph after my two years of French hadn’t gotten me comfortable ordering hot chocolate the previous visit! I’ve got the Mandarin Level 1 too, which has been great, and more often than not, I can be understood (thick American accent, of course, but ah well ^_^), but more than that, it helps immensely with that quick listening-comprehension, which is almost more important when one’s starting out, it seems. (And I’m definitely a visual learner typically, but these worked for me despite being audio-only.)
My mother also used them for German (she’s semi-fluent), and said they helped a ton with those odd little common phrases a lot of classes don’t cover, but make your speaking sound more natural (and she said it helped her immensely with accent-honing, too).
#Pimsleurplugover 🙂