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 am overrun with half-finished short stories and writing-adjacent admin tasks at the moment, so I am giving myself a single task this week: submit a story somewhere. Doesn’t matter which one it is, out of the various in-progress options on my hard drive, so long as I pick one and get it out before next Sunday.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’m a huge fan of Elizabeth Bear’s New Amsterdam series featuring the pairing of a vampire detective and a forensic sorcerer solving crimes in an alternative history America, and I eagerly bought each new edition as the novellas were released through Subterranean Press. What I hadn’t realised until I read a recent interview was that Bear’s works were a homage to the Lord Darcy series by Randal Garrett, which featured the notion of a forensic sorcerer getting teamed with a Sherlock Holmes analogue in an alternate history Europe.

Naturally, I went searching and picked up the collected version of the Lord Darcy stories that came out under the Fantasy Masterworks brand, and I’ve been devouring them at high speed for the last week. Incredibly entertaining stories, but Garrett is one of those writers where his approach to a scene will suddenly spark new ideas or solutions for stories I’ve been stuck on for ages.

This really is one of those pitch-perfect executions and I can totally understand why Bear would want to put together her own homage.

What part of my project an I avoiding?

I am having a bit of an existential crisis when it comes to writing at the moment. My suspicion is that it comes from using a certain level of process to try and fend off the dodgy brain chemistry, so I am suddenly a bit lost now that antidepressants are taking over that job. I’ve been putting off doing productive work as a result, preferring to stick to the low-challenge, low-risk stuff that I do for fun instead of stuff I do with the intent to publish.

Basically, I’m avoiding anything that requires a level of ambition, and it may be time to rectify that.