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?

This week, thesis work and writing take a back seat to clearing a bunch of marking of the decks and preparing for the next few weeks of classes. The first half of this semester’s teaching was dominated by books I knew really well, but the back half involves two books I’ve never read (Gone Girl, Eleanor and Park), and one book that I’ve not read in a lot of detail (A Game of Thrones), so I’ve got a bunch of reading and annotating ahead of me before the semester returns from break.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’ve been watching bits of Jane the Virgin lately, well into the second season, and I’m incredibly impressed with the way they make use of the omnipresent narrator to generate effects within the narrative. It’s an incredibly smart show that’s hyper-aware of the genre and how to both deliver upon- and innovate the generic expectations. Their ability to quietly set stuff up in the A-Plot and then use it to deliver a surprising pay-off in the B-plot is fantastic, and I keep wanting to pull episodes apart to better understand their structure.

What action do I need to take?

Having consolidated all the unfinished drafts in on my various hard drives, it’s time to start taking a closer look at all the unfinished drafts I’ve got floating around in notebooks. There’s a small stack of projects that never actually made it onto a computer, including one finished novel draft and a handful of novellas. Since a lot of the big, thinky work this week will be spent on marking, it seems like typing these up and logging them could be a useful task for the more-braindead parts of my working day.