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 hit a point where the original draft for Wail wasn’t working–the pacing was all off and I felt consistently stuck–so I went and rewrote the first act to move certain things earlier into the story and replay some of the rhythms established in Horn and Bleed.  It feels better now–tomorrow I get up and writ the transition into Act Two, and with luck I can drive towards the midpoint of the story and get it clear before the next check-in. 

Of course, the changes have made the scenes in the second-act harder to write now that a lot of the key info is delivered in act one….

What’s inspiring me this week?

So I picked up Nick Pizolatto’s Between Here and the Yellow See a year ago, read two stories, then set it aside to finish when I had a little more time to process it. That turned out to be this week and, my, do I regret waiting.

Pizolatto’s more well-known these days for being the guy behind True Detective, but I’ve only ever read his fiction rather than his TV work. That said, you can see his interests in noir all over these stories–even when they’re not concerned with criminals and investigators, they retain that interest in charting precise details that’s important in good detective fiction.

Pizolatto goes out of his way to chart nuances in emotions, locking them down with precise language and unexpectedly glorious metaphors. I spent my reading time with a notecard by my book, noting page numbers whenever he employed a particularly elegant phrase or scene that was worth going back and studying. 

What action do I need to take?

It’s an exceptionally basic action, but I need to buy a new mouse and mousepad to take to my workstation at uni.

I’ve been getting horrible back-pain while working out there over the last couple of weeks, largely because I’m hunching over the desk like crazy and the chairs are intensely ergonomic in the way they want you to sit. Last week I took out a laptop riser and a spare kepboard, so I wasn’t leaning forward and looking down all day, but utterly failed to take a mouse to finish that particular set-up because I just don’t equate “mouse” and “laptop.”

Without a mouse, the set-up is better for the back but infinitely more distracting. Therefore, it’s time to trek down to the newly-opened Officeworks and go shopping for something cheap and usable…