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?

As the tenor of my blogging may have suggested, a lot of plans went out the window over the last week–one member of my family got diagnosed with cancer, while another fell over and broke their hip, had surgery yesterday, and now have a lengthy hospital stay while they heal and rehab. Given that it’s the family member who has advanced Parkinsons and dementia, said hospital stay and rehab is going to be all kinds of tricky. 

So my main task for the coming week has moved away from “getting writing done” and towards “be part of people’s support network,” with a schedule of hospital visits and getting-people-to-specialists that cuts into th larger blocks of writing time.

I still have goals on the writing front, but my focus is pretty much lowered to “get some writing done every day.” I’m less worried about which projects I’m working on, and more worried about keeping my practice as active as I can during a week high in distraction and stress. I tote my notebook containing my thesis draft with me when I’m on the move, so it tends to get the bulk of my attention by virtue of being the easiest to access.

What’s inspiring me this week?

My reading took a big hit over the last seven days, but we finished the second season of The Dragon Prince on Netflix. This show remains a glorious experience, taking the very familiar tropes of a D&D style epic quest fantasy and quietly updating them so they’re fresh and new. The second season has some great fantasy action sequences–the dragon vs castle fight is brilliant–and the way the narrative pushes characters to make choices they don’t want to make is just great, great storytelling.

What action do I need to take?

I cancelled a lot of stuff that was easy to cancel when my dad went into hospital, but there’s still a couple of more complex commitments that were both not-so-easy-to-cancel, but also not-high-on-my-priority-list-now that need to be rescheduled. Beyond that, the coming week is one where I get done what I get done.