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?
So the next month is going to be spent doing a draft thesis prospectus for university, which may end up being the 4,000 words most likely to drive me crazy out of all the things I’ve ever written (at least, until I have to write the thesis). I’m also about 1/4 of the way through a novella about dinosaurs, heavy metal, and bounty hunters, but I’m torn between trying to split my time between these two or just going full-tilt at the prospectus draft and clearing it out of the way.
What’s inspiring me this week?
Joe Lansadale’s Vanilla Ride and Devil Red, two more instalments in his Hap and Leonard series. They’re the books where he came back tot he characters after a long delay, so in addition to being fun books they’re also interesting to look at in terms of the thesis, since they mark a series where the characters exist in very different cultural contexts (they suddenly have cell phones and the internet is a thing).
What part of my project an I avoiding?
Making a call on how to balance thesis work and creative work over the next few weeks. Mostly, I suspect, because the call I want to make (‘I’ll just do both’) didn’t work in a way that’s actually useful to me. I always mean to do thesis work, but i’ll usually end up ignoring it after a day writing creatively or dive into it and work obsessively for two or three days where nothing else matters.
This may be a problem with having no way of putting hard edges around the thesis work, so I can measure when a day is ‘done,’ especially since word-count alone isn’t a good measure for these sorts of things.
