September 2024 Updates
On ongoing projects, writing, reading & more.
It’s the first week of September and fall is closing in so it’s as good a time as any to post some updates going on here at Circles In Space HQ.
Per usual, I’ve got way too many projects going on which I’m always struggling to balance and juggle. I have three different types of writing I focus on during the week.
First, my fiction writing for a project I’ve been working on for the past four years, in one form or another. I try to set time aside for this project every morning. This week I completed 100 days of (almost) consecutive writing on this project since the end of May. I’ve just committed to another 100 days which will bring me to December. The first 100 days was incredibly successful in getting me to make sure I get my daily words done - I aim for 1000 words a day, but usually average somewhere between 500 to 800 words.
Second, this newsletter which I’ve successfully published every Friday since May 2022. I still enjoy reading, hearing and seeing stuff throughout the week and then sharing it with you and I really appreciate all those who send me stuff to check out! While this newsletter doesn’t take me as long to write as it used to, I’m always thinking of new ways to have fun with it, from changing the format to writing more in the introduction.
And third, blog writing - my essays and longer form posts on movies, music, history and everything in between which during the month of August I managed to publish one blog per week, bringing my weekly posts up to two per week. I still haven’t managed to fit in longer posts yet though, on books I’ve read or longer historical pieces. For instance, during the summer I read Annie Jacobsen’s book Nuclear War and the process of extracting the information I need to write a blog post on it is going slowly. I’d hoped to finish this post by the end of August but now it looks like I’ll be lucky to finish it by the end of September. For this kind of writing, I haven’t been doing a great job of planning out these blog posts, and more or less have been writing about whatever grabs me during that week, which works sometimes, but longer, more in-depth pieces with lots of research need to be planned better.
In addition to the above projects, I’ve also been spending some time archiving my past newsletters into a spreadsheet with the goal of compiling a zine or book of some kind for all subscribers. I view this zine as a collection of some of my favorite bits and pieces offered within the Friday newsletter over the past 2+ years. My end date goal for this is by the end of the year.
During the month of July I finished what I think was some of the most difficult writing I’ve ever written - writing my wedding toast speech for my brother’s wedding. Over the past year or so, I’d been taking notes, writing down quotes, and brainstorming about how to approach this assignment. Several weeks before the wedding, I started by writing letters first, to my brother and his wife to-be. I didn’t send these letters but they helped me pinpoint the things I wanted to say in my toast. I wrote and rewrote the speech, refining it over and over, and starting from scratch while doing these re-writes helped to bring everything together into a cohesive package. I finished the final draft the day before the wedding and I think it’s some of my strongest writing. And the toast went over well!
Getting back to fiction writing, Ray Bradbury’s point about writing a short story each week of the year has been resonating in my mind. Perhaps the reason I’m struggling while working on a novel-length idea is because I don’t have any practice finishing novels. If I write short stories, I’ll work on strengthening the story basics of plot, character and other elements which may help me to finish longer ideas. As Bradbury says, if you write 52 short stories, at least one has to be good!
Currently I’m still reading Moby-Dick which I began back in May. I thought it might be a nice summer read - I was wrong. It’s a tough, behemoth of a book, but I've stuck with it and have about 200 pages left. I’ve gone through phases with it. I devoured the first 100 pages, but then the next 200 pages was very difficult and slow-going. I’ve never read writing like Melville’s. Much of the book reads like non-fiction with sporadic references to the actual story that’s taking place about Ahab and the white whale. While exploring a bookstore on Shelter Island over this past weekend, I picked up a copy of Nathaniel Philbrick’s Why Read Moby-Dick? to help me stay on the path. I read about 75 pages of the book - just enough to elucidate some of Melville’s quirks as well as some interesting passages. I stopped reading Philbrick because I felt it was beginning to color my experience of actually reading Moby-Dick. But I’m glad to say that I’m now enjoying Melville’s writing again with renewed spirit and have been reading a lot lately.
So that’s what I’m up to. I’ve got several projects, both reading and writing, which will easily carry me into fall and some of which I hope to finish by the end of the year. I’ve found some sort of balance but I need to keep refining my process and stick to the commitments I’ve made on what I’m already working on before jumping into something else!