This Sunday Circle is an initiative of Peter M Ball (see here). I don’t get to it every week (in fact, I’ve been away since May), not because I’m not working but because in the tides of weekend routines it often doesn’t fit (case in point, I’ve been interrupted three times before getting this blog up – once to finish off a pavlova, and two child-crying incidents). But here, we are, last one for the year.

What am I working on this week?

I’m writing the first draft of my next commercial novel, Twenty-six Letters (a working title that will no doubt change before publication … a bit of a conceit as I’m writing this one without a contract, quite deliberately – more on that another time). I’m actually enjoying myself (still, though I’m in the middle now), perhaps because the only pressure is my need to get it down on e-paper.

My last novel (which I was editing last time I did one of these Sunday circles) is actually due out in just a few weeks. That one (Saving You) has been a long time coming, delayed due to promotional schedules and editing. It’s the first one of my books that was delayed in that way, which vexes me greatly. It was a product of immense child-related sleep deprivation which extended nearly 3 years. I don’t want to talk about that here, but I might somewhere else another time. It was my first experience of personal circumstances spilling over and affecting my ability to deliver on work promises. In any case, the imminent publication of this book comes with a fairly intense promotional schedule, so I’m also beginning to think about topics for all those library talks.

My thesis, thank goodness, is on hiatus as my associate supervisor has my exegesis draft and my main supervisor (and other beta readers) have the novel.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Lego. I’m spending a lot of time checked out mentally and nicely putting some serious constructions together. I found out a Technic set I’d been oggling for a while was about to retire, and was also on sale, so I bought it before descent into the vintage set black market (lego vintage sets hold their value quite appallingly). In between, I’m doing actual construction finishing a back-yard shed. All that stuff is rather nice balanced with sitting in front of a screen.

Otherwise, I’m a true latecomer to The Vampire Diaries, the advantage of which is that I can watch without waiting. The narrative storytelling is really solid, and neglecting the occassional Suits-tic problem (where characters seem to have the same conversation over and over) in season 2, it’s been an epic enjoyment, mostly of marvelling at how much gets crammed in a season, and of course watching the artistry of Damon Salvatore … while being slightly bothered that his character is allowed to be forgiven and redeemed because he’s hot, whereas some others of less hotness are not. Still, overall it’s a great foil, perfect for when I’m not writing spec fic.

What I mean by that is the narrative solidarity of spec fic sometimes comes down to it being able to always be utterly primal (crises of death and love) in a way that contemporary fiction cannot without being melodramatic. Contemporary fiction has to work hard to construct potential losses that have real meaning for the characters (and so can be at risk and therefore create story-traction suspense) – those types of losses can be way more existential than physical death. I’ve found that asborbing very primal narrative (which is about physical death and the emotional death it comes with (i.e. love vacuum)) helps to hone the stakes when writing about wants that are closer to balancing your check-book than being laid in the ground.

What action do I need to take?

Just do my words on the new novel, a little each day. Today I should crack 40,000 words, and that should mean I make it half-way before beach holidays next week. I aim to have the draft done (or nearly) by the end of January. The only other thing to do is put in my documents for my next (last) thesis milestone meeting, which hopefully takes place in early Feb.

So that’s it for the year. In many ways, 2018 has been a shit, and I’m very glad to be putting it in the rearview. In other ways, I perhaps learned more about myself than I have in the ten years before, so there’s that. I’m also fitter than I’ve been in living memory (thank you, CrossFit). Perhaps all that means I can light a fire under 2018, and have that bonfire light up next year.

This Sunday Circle is an initiative of Peter M Ball (see here). I don’t get to it every week (in fact, I’ve been away for nearly a year), but I’ve been given a Mother’s Day moment at the computer, so here goes.

What am I working on this week?

I’m expecting to receive the copyedits on my next commercial novel, now called Saving You. In between that, I’m reading background for my PhD thesis exegesis, specifically Norman Holland’s Literature and the Brain, because it’s on non-renewable inter-library loan to me and I must finish it before the London trip in 5 weeks.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’m being anti-inspired by E. M. Forster’s Aspects of the Novel, which I read for exegesis background last week. It’s the transcripts of a series of lectures and is at times meandering, snobbish, vague, contradictory, and everything I dislike about criticism and venerated texts. That is, it contains very little practical advice to a novelist, because everything needs still further reckoning with. He treats the reader as a spectator, and sees readers in very stark terms – the stupidly curious (who can’t handle plot) and those with intelligence and memory who can. He sets character above plot (that old nugget), but, having taken such pains to show us how plot is about cause and effect, then conveniently ignores the cause and effect that resides in characters.

Still, valuable to read it was; this is the origin of the term ‘Homo Fictus’ (still somewhat useful), a useful definition of story and plot, a less useful treatise on flat and round characters (actually, really only on flat ones, as he decides that defines the round ones), and the origin of the somewhat arbitrary way that a lot of creative writing standard wisdom frames the construction of a novel. Understanding the foundations of how your profession talks about what it does is always valuable. However, Aspects is also extremely dated, narrow, and called into serious question by a lot of the reading I’ve been doing this last year. But that’s how we get progress: we update what doesn’t really work.

On a side note, I’ve found much useful life skills in Dan Harris’s 10% Happier, which is a memoir about how an ambitious anchorman learned something from meditation. If you’re jaded af about anything self-help, this is the self-help book for you. I note with interest that it completely takes to heart the narrative-structure approach to teaching material. I found it incredibly engaging, easy to process, and easy to remember, which is what narrative is supposed to do for non-fiction.

What action do I need to take?

I’ve been cutting back this last month to get on top of the chronic sleep deprivation, exhaustion and shitty PTD that’s marked all of the last 18 months. So, it’s just do the copyedit when it comes in, do the reading, and stay on top of the inbox.

This Sunday Circle is an initiative of Peter M Ball (see here). I don’t get to it every week, but this is one of them, so here goes.

What am I working on this week?

I’m marking this week, and when that’s done I’m developing a new course for second semester at UQ. In the background, I’m subconsciously going over the several weeks of academic work on the neural underpinnings of reading stories, and trying to make sense of what is a huge, complicated and sometimes frustratingly muddled discussion around brain science and narrative.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’m taking inspiration from the You Are Not So Smart podcast episode 100, which had the tagline, “Science is wrong about everything, but you can trust it more than anything.” See, my PhD confirmation readers took significant issue with me using a scientific approach to understanding stories. I was challenged as to why I was “privileging science” (I don’t think I was, but anyway), and the approach was called variously crude, overreaching, and ignoring the “rich traditions” of literary criticism/theory. Despite the fact that neither of my readers have to my knowledge a background in science (or creative writing that much) I was really taken aback to find such hostility towards a scientific approach. I’m coming at this in a spirit of cooperation, interested to see what science might support (or challenge) in traditional literary fields. I’m interested in the fundamental “why” questions that I think only science can robustly begin to answer. And yet, I can’t help feel very much out of place in my faculty. So that podcast is inspiring because it acknowledges science has limitations – of course it does – but that doesn’t make it useless. Evidence is quite to the contrary. So, onward I go.

What part of my project am I avoiding?

I’m avoiding (legitimately) the big edit of my next women’s fiction novel, The Lucky Escape. I must begin next week, and it will need a lot of work (as my first drafts always do). I can hope it isn’t as bad as I imagine, but that isn’t always true. Hopefully I can subconsciously summon courage along with everything else.

This Sunday Circle is an initiative of Peter M Ball (see here). I don’t get to it every week, but I am this week, so here goes.

What am I working on this week?

I’m editing my sci-fi time-travel Victorian Tesla novel (for my PhD). The first draft was horribly awful in many ways and this edit is incredibly challenging. I’ve just come through the dark point with it. Since the last Sunday circle, I’ve finished the draft of my next contemporary novel, and gone through PhD confirmation. It wasn’t a positive process. I’ve been left destabilised as to the whole rationale of my project, which is echoing through my edit. The destabilisation goes something like this: Me: I’m a writer, interested in how writers make their stories work, and when I say “work” I’m interested in that idea at a deep, neuroscientific level. *whispers of confirmation readers*: why don’t you read X literary theory? We don’t understand what or why you’re doing this. Me: … I say this solely to acknowledge that working on the sci-fi novel also means grinding subconsciously on how to attack the project critically, and whether I’m even capable of satisfying an academic audience. Onward we go.

What’s inspiring me this week?

Jeff Vandermeer’s Wonderbook. It’s a stunning illustrated guide to writing, that fundamentally imagines stories as strange living creatures. Vandermeer’s thematic and tonal fingerprints are all over it. While not everything resonates with me, it’s still a beautiful experience.

What part of my project am I avoiding?

For the last week, I avoided dealing with the “spaghetti junction”, which is where a whole new beginning to my sci-fi novel had to merge with the old beginning (much later in the story). I have actually resolved that (largely), but now I’m avoiding dealing with the fallout of the merge, which means scraping/rewriting/resetting the next six chapters or so. That’s what I’m about to force myself to address now.

I haven’t responded to a Sunday Circle in a while (an initiative of Peter M Ball, see here) because I haven’t felt the time to post has been worth it. But since the toddler is out in the garden doing things with dad, and I’m about to embark on a BIG PROJECT, today is one of those days.

What am I working on this week?

I’m starting the next contemporary women’s fiction novel this week. That means about two months of grinding out the words of the first draft, about 2000 per day so that I can finish it before the end of March, and have a good month to rest it before editing. At the same time, I’m working on my PhD confirmation presentation (just submitted all the documents last week) and the next chapter of the thesis, so I have to be organised. Lots of index cards planning and working at night whenever I can.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’ve just finished It Ends With Us by Colleen Hoover. An amazing book. Heavier than my next project (just a little) but a truly surprising book, and a careful balance of romance and seriousness. I have to try to do the same. I’m also into Yellowlees Douglas’s How Neuroscience Can Make You a Better Writer. The book focuses on non-fiction, but it dovetails nicely with my PhD research into the neuroscience of narrative and reading, and what makes engaging texts. Attempting to transfer and marry up where the principles in that book apply to fiction. My PhD novel first draft is finished (but is awful) so I’m resting it and letting all the research percolate until I need to revise. I’m going to be thinking and applying it to my next commercial book, though.

What part of my project am I avoiding?

Resolving the ‘B’ story in my new book. I have the ‘A’ story down for my protagonist, but the history behind the accompanying characters is loose and dark. Need to firm and illuminate so I don’t dig myself into a hole.

This post is again for the Sunday Circle, an initiative of Peter M Ball (see here). I work every Sunday, but I sometimes don’t post the Sunday Circle, simply because with limited time, working on a project is preferable to posting a blog. But I do it when I can.

What am I working on this week?

I’m continuing to work on my PhD project. I’ve been having real trouble not trying to let the academic side push the creative projects into directions it wasn’t meant to go. I have an opening, and the characters, but I need to go back and do some development before I go further (see next section) so that’s what I’m doing today.

What’s inspiring me this week?

I’ve been reading How to write science fiction and fantasy by Orson Scott Card. It’s reminding me of all the things I’m being lazy with in my world development. I also finished this week Fear the sky by Stephen Moss which was surprisingly rollicking sci-fi thriller.

What part of my project am I avoiding?

All the backstory stuff, which is why I have to look at it today.

This post is again for the Sunday Circle, an initiative of Peter M Ball (see here). I work every Sunday, but I sometimes don’t post the Sunday Circle, simply because with limited time, working on a project is preferable to posting a blog. But I do it when I can.

What am I working on this week?

I’m continuing to work on my PhD project. After a month of being intermittently lost in the woods, reading articles and coming at it backwards, I’ve finally seen the vision of what the creative project is. Not the novella I’d been working on (though it’s useful background and testing, all 11k of it). Today and for the week, I’m doing work tandem – planning the novel (working title The Incident at St Alberts) and reading “antecedent works”.

I’ve also met with my writing buddy to get her feedback on The Paris Wedding. As usual, she found a bunch of stuff I’d been hiding from, or hadn’t considered. I’m letting that turn over in my subconscious. Once we’re on the plane to Paris in 2 weeks, I’ll be doing revisions.

What’s inspiring me this week?

The Martian by Andy Weir. It’s a serious technical novel, which is where my focus is heading for my PhD. I’m listening to it on audiobook, and the techniques used to navigate all that technical material are both interesting and impressive, and the reading by R C Bray is really well done. I can see why it’s an award winner.

I also finished Doomsday Book by Connie Willis (also on audiobook). An awesome (but very different) story; not really at all technical in the sci-fi spectrum, but full of ironic humour and savage humanity. At 26+hours in audiobook, it was a serious investment, but worth it to have the voice actor reading those lovely phrases in Middle English and Latin. Not technical sci-fi, but meticulously researched all the same.

We were sick this week, so I’ve also revisited that old fave, the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice, complete with Colin Firth. Always a winner.

Why these three things inspiring me? Because levity is an essential part of any narrative, as essential as serious consideration (Aristotle said: “Humor is the only test of gravity, and gravity of humor; for a subject which will not bear raillery is suspicious, and a jest which will not bear serious examination is false wit.”), but it’s the part of writing that challenges me the most as a writer. Anyone can be a serious bore, or be fluffy (I tend in the former direction) – balancing both is difficult but so critical. Discussion of this aspect of narrative will form an essential part of examining the technical novel for my PhD project, so I’m sucking up as much example as I can and trying to improve myself.

What part of my project am I avoiding?

I’ve been avoiding being too concrete with the plan for the novel, because it starts to change form once I write it down. Starting to break that today I hope.

This post is again for the Sunday Circle, an initiative of Peter M Ball (see here).

What am I working on this week?

I started my creative writing PhD this week, so I’ve been reading academic papers and planning the first creative piece to explore into that project. I read 13 journal papers, and parts of different books this week, plus mapped a beginning of a novella. Not too bad.

I’ve also been (at night) compiling the scene map for The Paris Wedding. Some parts of it are ok. Others need a heap of work.

I also made some modifications to my Edit your novel, step by step ebook and pushed it off to beta readers.

What’s inspiring me this week?

“Charlotte Incorporated” by Rachael K Jones (via LightSpeed podcast). This story is amazepants. Gave me a serious reality check as to the level of my skill at present.

Zwart’s paper on Michael Crichton’s novels (Zwart HAE. Genomes, gender and the psychodynamics of a scientific crisis: a psychoanalytic reading of Michael Crichton’s genomics novels. New Genetics and Society. 2015;34(1):1-24.). For anyone who’s ever given me crap about him being “lowbrow airport fiction”, get that up ya. Also to the doctor I worked under in my first year as a med student, who told me that Michael Crichton “wasn’t helping anyone” because he took up writing instead of medicine, get that up ya, doublequick.

Also, Latour’s Laboratory Life. I spent time in labs as a research student and as a researcher, and they were filled with personality quirks and very overt humanness that overshadowed the science. I’m not sure how much non-scientists realise that (not that I’m a scientist, but engineers sometimes occupy similar spaces). It’s an interesting theme to draw out of science fiction, but Latour did it as anthropology. I believe he later recanted some of his views, but so far they mesh with my experiences.

What part of my project am I avoiding?

Finishing the scene map for The Paris Wedding. And starting writing on creative work. The story isn’t ready yet, and for once, I am actually going to follow through the research a little further before getting to words.

[So, this post is again for the Sunday Circle, an initiative of Peter M Ball (see here)]

What am I working on this week?

During the week I finished the draft of my next women’s fiction novel, The Paris Wedding. Of course, it has lots to fix, but before I can do that I need to read through and make an accurate scene list and time map, so I’m doing that now.

Speaking of which, during the week, I also finished the first draft of a book about my editing process (creatively titled Edit your novel, step-by-step), which is the one I both use and teach. My writing buddy is reading through now, and I’m finishing up the e-book conversion in Jutoh. Hoping for a Valentine’s day release to all the major platforms.

On the spec fic side, the PhD begins tomorrow!! I’m hitting the ground running with reading about the neuroscience of narrative, and ideas for two stories in the world which I’m going to flesh out over the week. One is called The Two Victorias (an intrigue involving the Queen, her daughter, a doctor, an AI and some timetravellers) and the other, Destoryed (a more military flavour one about the future time of the timetravellers, where geoengineering politics have ended in war with Tesla-style energy beam weapons; it’s basically one guy protecting the travelgate).

What’s inspiring me this week?

The historical doco Queen Victoria’s Children. Man, she was a serious piece of work. So great for my narrative purposes. Also, Harlots, Housewives and Heroines. It’s too early for my projects (being 17th century) but still inspiring. I never knew about Aphra Behn (the first professional female writer) – when we’re in London in April, I must go and find her tomb in Westminster.

What part of my project am I avoiding?

The reading and scene mapping of The Paris Wedding. The beginning is where a lot of the fixing needs to happen and reading how bad things currently are there is kinda horrible.

I also am avoiding writing the synopsis for the love story I’m writing after The Paris Wedding, mostly because I can’t think of a good title. But the idea is good, I hope. Hahaha, they’re always good at this stage. I’m starting on these avoidances right now while Master A sleeps, then will continue when I head to write club.

So, this post is for the Sunday Circle, an initiative of Peter M Ball (see here) and I’ve decided to not be lazy and post my stuff here before I head to write club today. So …

What am I working on this week?

I’m finishing up the first draft of my next women’s commercial fiction novel (yes, actually finishing the draft). I’m at 77k now, and aiming for 80k. That should be less than two days’ work. Should. I’m aiming for 80k because my usual MO on commercial novels is to write to the word count (90k in this case), then end up adding 10% in the edit (Stephen King and I are in polar opposite universes, it seems). Then I panic because I’m over budget on words, and spend a copyedit stripping little bits here and there to take out 3 or 4k. No more. Last time I wrote under and it worked perfectly when I added missing subplots etc in the edit. So, that’s one thing.

On the spec fic side, I’m about to start my PhD in a little over a week, and so I’m busily doing background reading from the multitude of genres I’m drawing on, and just ruminating in the background in the part of my brain reserved for spec fic.

What’s inspiring me this week?

H G Wells, and also Douglas Adams. I re-read The Time Machine this week, and also a short story by Adams in The Time Traveler’s Almanac (eds. Vandermeer). It’s been years since I last read Adams and I noticed how wonderful his turns of phrase are, in between the comedic bits. Never noticed that before.

What part of my project am I avoiding?

Finishing the commercial novel. I could have probably had it done by now as I was a long way ahead of my planned word-count, but I’m tired. Writing a novel in under 2 months is doable, but fatigue sets in, especially as I realise in the end the things I need to fix, and I dither about whether to write the end with the fixes I envision (not usually a good idea) or just to get to the damn end and fix it later. I’m aiming to get to the damn end by tomorrow.