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 am overrun with half-finished short stories and writing-adjacent admin tasks at the moment, so I am giving myself a single task this week: submit a story somewhere. Doesn’t matter which one it is, out of the various in-progress options on my hard drive, so long as I pick one and get it out before next Sunday.
What’s inspiring me this week?
I’m a huge fan of Elizabeth Bear’s New Amsterdam series featuring the pairing of a vampire detective and a forensic sorcerer solving crimes in an alternative history America, and I eagerly bought each new edition as the novellas were released through Subterranean Press. What I hadn’t realised until I read a recent interview was that Bear’s works were a homage to the Lord Darcy series by Randal Garrett, which featured the notion of a forensic sorcerer getting teamed with a Sherlock Holmes analogue in an alternate history Europe.
Naturally, I went searching and picked up the collected version of the Lord Darcy stories that came out under the Fantasy Masterworks brand, and I’ve been devouring them at high speed for the last week. Incredibly entertaining stories, but Garrett is one of those writers where his approach to a scene will suddenly spark new ideas or solutions for stories I’ve been stuck on for ages.
This really is one of those pitch-perfect executions and I can totally understand why Bear would want to put together her own homage.
What part of my project an I avoiding?
I am having a bit of an existential crisis when it comes to writing at the moment. My suspicion is that it comes from using a certain level of process to try and fend off the dodgy brain chemistry, so I am suddenly a bit lost now that antidepressants are taking over that job. I’ve been putting off doing productive work as a result, preferring to stick to the low-challenge, low-risk stuff that I do for fun instead of stuff I do with the intent to publish.
Basically, I’m avoiding anything that requires a level of ambition, and it may be time to rectify that.
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
4 Responses
Good luck on the short stories! I’m really in the same boat with a lot of half-finished ones at the moment and it can be a real drag.
My Sunday Circle is here.
A plan to get one story submitted sounds like just the thing to get yourself moving forward again! Best of luck this week!
As for being stuck on moving forward on the projects you mentioned, how would you council another writer in your situation? Sometimes the comparison between the things we’d say to others to help them move forward, verses the things we’d say to ourselves can be enlightening. (Particularly since being generous and encouraging with oneself is often a challenge with writers, it seems…)
This week, I’m working on: Reviewing a rough draft (short story) I wrote a couple weeks ago to start planning the edit, shooting for an early September submission. Core idea’s there, but it needs a lot of clarifying. If I’ve got time, and if things work out, maybe I’ll start up a new short story, but mostly, I really need to revamp my reading.
What’s inspiring me?: It’s an age old story: girl tries FlyLady, and it goes well for a while, but then life gets busy, the girl moves, and forgets about the habits she’d started forming. Then, years and a child later, when the girl is buried in housework up to her ears and craving enough time in her days to indulge in her own interests, girl rediscovers FlyLady and starts shining her sink again. Miraculously, her home becomes clean and tidy forever, the end! (Okay, maybe not so much the end, but the small habits like the Swish and Swipe, the sink, and the focus on Hot Spots have been a major game changer around the house. I’ll be the first to say all the “blessing your home” nonsense gets old pretty quick (and I downright REFUSE to do the cultish “lace up shoes”), and there are WAY too many emails, but seriously, I hate housework and doing even just a few of these small habits keeps the house in surprisingly good shape and relaxes the hell out of me. Definitely worth it if you struggle to keep up with housework.)
What am I avoiding?: Not really avoiding anything–just trying to go with the flow, which seems to be working. I *need* to avoid is checking my email for two beta critiques of the current short story, but that’s it for now… 🙂
Honestly, I would tell them to pick a small, achievable goal and work towards it. And I would tell them to try and figure out what they really want from writing, since having that kind of focus tends to make it a little easier to get to the keyboard. Which is why not knowing what I want from writing kinda freaks me out 🙂
I can understand that, for sure. But it’s an opportunity, too! My mother (the councilor) likes to remind me that the feelings of anxiety and excitement are physiologically almost identical–it’s all how one perceives the situation. Perhaps it’d be useful to think of this uncertainty as an opportunity to rediscover/redefine your focus, rather than trying to hang on to what that focus has been in the past? Kind of a fresh start, in a way?