Find out more about The Sunday Circle at Peter M. Ball’s site.
Kicking off the week’s check in a little early here on Saturday night, but want to get it out of the way before the week starts. Although I took last week almost entirely off, which I needed, I did take some time to map out what steps and edits I need to take to wrap up the current short WiP and get it to a submittable form. I roughly used The Clockwork Muse format in a hand-drawn spreadsheet, task/estimated words/estimated rate/#ofdays/date due, and utilized the TCM method of actually *looking* at my calendar and figuring out what days would be work days and which ones couldn’t be counted on, and that’s given me –I think–a fairly realistic due date for submission. It’s not as early as I’d like (I’d have liked to know I could get it out by the end of November, but with Wisdom Teeth/Vacation/Thanksgiving, I do think the mid-December date is more realistic), and who knows? I might get more time to work on things or work faster than I’ve estimated, which would bump that deadline back, but for now, it’s nice to have some concrete predictions and deadlines for each step of each phase to help me limp along when times get crazy!
This week I’m working on: Hitting the first few deadline dates for the WiP edit before Friday, when I get my top two wisdom teeth out at long last. I’ve left myself some significant recovery time which–if all goes well–I may not need, but I’d rather play it safe. Otherwise, I’ve also got an itch to tackle an opening chapter of a for-the-love project, and that may or may not happen, but I’m keeping it close at hand, just in case.
This week, I’m inspired by: Just finished the Shirley Jackson biography, and it’s an amazing book. Really, just, so fascinating. It feels like getting a glimpse inside someone else’s very intimate, out-of-the-public-eye life, and has made me look at some of my own tendencies and processes in a new light. (And it’s made me pick up doodling again, and I forgot how much I love it as an alternate creative outlet.) Also still plowing through Gotham, and admiring the Little Guy’s sudden aptitude for his tricycle!
I’m avoiding…: The week off did me some serious good. It was a tough week all around, and if I’d been pressuring myself to be productive on top of everything else, it would have been awful. So I’m actually rather charged up and ready to go, and the ordinary tendency not to want to start up the edit again has been a little mitigated by the Clockwork Muse-style micro-deadlines, since each one seems fairly obtainable. We’ll see!
Maggie Slater 