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 finished my marking on Wednesday night last week, and immediately settled into a few days of rebuilding routines and re-establishing my areas of focus.

Right now, I seem to have settled on four seperate projects that I’m trying to advance every day, with the bulk of the work taking place in notebook rather than on the computer (a tactic that kept me writing when the bulk of my marking needed the PC). This week, the to list looks like this:

• Progressing past the first act of Project Rad after doing a brain-dump of the project revealed a whole bunch of places where the original first act was going astray on me (Keith, the working-class monster slayer, got to fly instead of drive–the moment the book switched back to driving while he boss did the easy stuff, everything fell into place).
• Moving into the second act of the Exile redraft, after redrafting a bunch of scenes in the first act. I’m tossing up whether this is a point to stop writing new stuff this week and type up what I’ve already done to lock it down–swapping back-and-forth between versions makes it tricky to keep in mind what I’ve setup.
• Trying to finish a short story–let’s dub this one Project Long View–which has slowly become a project after playing with a writing prompt.
• Writing approximately 1,000 new words on my thesis, pulling together all the bits I’ve previously written for the current chapter and adding in the connective tissue as it becomes a unified whole. 

What’s inspiring me this week?

Going by the sheer number of notes taken and potential story ideas scribbled into the BuJo while reading, Joe and Casey Landsdale’s Terror is Our Business: Dana Roberts Casebook of Horrors is the clear winner this week.

It’s also a book that I want to press into the hands of a very specific subset of friends–the kind of folks who enjoy Lovecraft and the Carnacki the Ghost Hunter stories and the Quartermass serials. It’s very much the territory Dana Roberts occupies–the first few stories in the book are all “club stories,” with a gentleman’s club inviting a famed ghost hunter to regale them with tales of her adventures studying the supernatural and applying scientific method and skepticism to the process. It’s got that great blend of horror and sci-fi, without tripping over into overt science fiction.

These stories are great in and of themselves, but the series morphs halfway through when Casey Lansdale–Joe Lansdale’s daughter–creates her own character in the Dana Roberts universe and the pair start co-writing Watson-and-Holmes style investigations of the occult. Joe Lansdale does buddy stories very well, as evidenced by his long-running Hap and Leonard series, but the addition of his daughter’s voice really elevates this partnership and gives him someone with a different experience of the world to bounce off. 

What action do I need to take?

I’m stalling on this one this week. Not because there’s nothing that needs to be done, but because there’s a long list of projects that need to be picked up and moved forward, but I’m wary of trying to add anything more to my to-do list. 

What should probably go here, given that I’m nearing the end of my Bullet Journal, is going through and transferring all the story ideas, research notes, and brainstorming for current projects to a new home. Then set up a new journal for July, thinking through the techniques worth keeping from the current one and which are’t working as well as they should.