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?

I’m locking down the first act of Wail this week–there’s a bunch of scenes already down, but I’m coming up on the moment when the story transitions and escalates into the second act through the discovery of bodies and the reveal of the “monster-of-the-week” at the heart of this novella.

Wail is slower to write than I’d been hoping–I tend to average 1,200 words a day instead of 2,000–but a lot of that comes down to managing continuity and making decisions in that regard. Occasionally it slows down due to research, such as the discovery that the timeline I’d set up means that one of the recurring characters is now six years past the mandatory retirement age, and thus needs to be handled differently now. 

What’s inspiring me this week?

I fired up Mark Waid’s 2012 run on The Indestructible Hulk this week, and it’s both spectacular and useful-for-the-thesis. The great thing about comic books is their long-term storytelling–characters have been around for decades at this point, fulfilling certain archetypes. Every now and then a writer comes along and looks at a character in a new way, shifting the position of the lamp so you see a whole new set of shadows and surfaces that were hidden in the previous portrayals. Waid does that by asking a simple question: what happens if Bruce Banner stops looking for a cure for the Hulk, and does everything he can with his genius to help humanity while he’s human?

In four words–Hulk Smash, Banner Build–Waid defines an entirely new direction for the character without making any fundamental changes to the backstory or the personality that break the suspension of disbelief. It’s a neat trick, and one that’s nearly impossible to pull off outside of comics where the long-term storytelling has built these kinds of iconic protagonists. 

What action do I need to take?

I acquired a new phone this week, converting from android to iPhone for the first time. This seems like a minor thing but has resulted in all sorts of hiccups as I try to adapt to a new lay-out and look up app passwords I haven’t had to remember for nearly three years. Similarly, the layouts are just different enough that I can’t mimic the old set-up on the new phone, leaving all my instinctive process around things like posting to social media or making notes wrong. 

I really need to sit down and set the new phone up properly–set up all the apps correctly, position them in places where they’re going to be useful–and take a look at any new tools that I can upload given the change in platform.