Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's Blog, page 5

Writing like Anne Rice?

I apparently write like Anne Rice.
There’s a tool called I Write Like (iwl.me) that uses a Bayesian classifier (which I’m told is also what’s used for fighting spam) to analyze text from you and compare that to other writers. I fed it the scene from Numbercaste where Patrick Udo is at his father’s deathbed, and voila:

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Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness

It’s been a busy month. In addition to my target of finishing the first draft of Blue Mountain, I’ve been getting obsessed with . . . LEGEND OF AWESOMENESS, the Kung-Fu Panda series.

Who knew there was a Kung-Fu Panda series?

I love Kung Fu Panda as much as I love the first three Pirates of the Caribbean movies. (Not the rest: fuck you, Disney. There are things called character arcs, you know. My morning rage against the shittiness of the latest Pirates movies led me down a rabbit hole to Jo...

Big Data + Big Brother: when China moves to rate its citizens

Image by Kevin Hong for Wired – used under fair use. All copyrights belong to Wired / Kevin Hong. Hi.

My apologies for the long spell of incommunicado. My day job is as a Big Data researcher, and I’ve been working on a new novel; between the two, I haven’t really had much time to do any of the other things that I’m supposed to do, like writing emails and blogposts.

My boss from work recently shared an email titled ‘Numbercaste in the real world’, pointing to a new article by Wired. The articl...

On the rising tide of scifi on our screens

My first introduction to science fiction was an old Nickelodeon show called Space Cases.

It wasn’t a great show by any standard. It was a bunch of kids on a space ship, with a whole lot of recycled props from other shows, and they canceled the thing after the second season. But no words can express how ardently I glued myself to the screen for those adventures and aliens and tales of strange planets. When the show ended, I’d sneak off to my knockoff Chinese LEGO sets and replicate the episod...

At the AK Lit Fest, 2017

Sri Lanka has two major literary festivals that people hear about.

One’s the Galle Lit Fest, which is a high powered forum that has a lot of money going in and out and puts the Galle holiday scene in overdrive just after New Year’s. GLF is a 1%-er event: tickets are expensive, the stay at Galle doubly so, and over the years it’s turned into as much a marker of social prestige as much as a gathering of literary people.

The other festival is Annasi and Kadalagotu, the brainchild of aviation pio...

Words Complete – September 30th, 2017

I just uploaded the manuscript for my new book, Story Plot, and hit Publish.

And then I clicked some more buttons, and filled out some more forms, because that’s how the self-publishing process works.

Today is an important moment for me, even if it doesn’t feel like one. When I started publishing this year, I told myself that I would write four things. 4. Here we are, six months later: one novel, two short stories in the space opera genre (TSSRW and Dreadnought in the upcoming Expanding Univ...

Numbercaste: Winning the VFC Award for Hard Scifi

Last Saturday the Virtual Fantasy Con bestowed on me the gold award for Hard Scifi.

This is a huge thing. It’s the first award I’ve ever won, and while it’s no Hugo or Nebula, it’s a global indie award and thus an incredible capstone for Numbercaste’s little journey. My debut into the world of hard, speculative fiction now has 25 reviews on Amazon with a 4.9* average; rave reviews on print and digital media from science fiction readers, thinkers, researchers I greatly respect; and even the o...

Comparing V and the Watchmen movies with Moore’s originals

I’ll not lie: my appreciation of Alan Moore’s work is recent.

Say, circa 2010 – that was the year I moved from a 350 MB-per-month 3G connection to something that could actually let me search for things other than study notes and bitmaps of WWE Divas. That was the year I purchased a DVD drive and turned my creaking computer into the family TV.

One of the first films I watched was V for Vendetta, which famously propelled the Guy Fawkes mask to worldwide Anon fame. I didn’t like it. While V sto...

Iterative cover design: how my friends and readers guide the visuals

I have a confession to make: I design my own book covers, and they are, from reader feedback, pretty good. Nothing that will win design awards, but functional stuff that works, like this:

But I’m not a designer.

I cut my teeth as a writer, as a blogger and tech journalist, and now as a data-scientist-in-training. What I’ve come to realize, by hanging out and getting plastered with a lot of folks from the ad industry, is that drawing, design and art is a different ball game. Very few people k...

Progress Report – 13th September 2017

The August grind really paid off.  For the handful of people reading this blog – welcome! And as you can see, I’ve changed the layout a bit…hopefully, more readable and less pretentious. Also, the title. Jim Butcher does this Progress Report thing, and the title makes it feel so much more positive than just Update . I’ll adopt it.

That said:

In writing:

Numbercaste has been nominated for the Virtual Fantasy Con Award for best Hard Scifi. It’s the first award I’ve ever been nominated for, and...