Yudhanjaya Wijeratne's Blog, page 6

Indies at DragonCon!

Richard Fox won a Dragon for military scifi, and Ronnie Virdi became a two-time Dragon-nominated author.

Both are indie authors. They act as both author and publisher, putting out their books mostly through Amazon and other digital retailers.

For the record, other winners of the Dragon this year:

Babylon’s Ashes by James S.A. Corey (an Expanse novel)
A Closed and Common Orbit by Becky Chambers
Death’s End by Cixin Liu
The Collapsing Empire by John Scalzi
The Secret Kings by Brian Niemeier

Se...

An Unlikely Collaboration

“Terry Pratchett and I met in February 1985, in a Chinese restaurant. I was a young journalist. He was a former journalist and Electricity Board PR, and a writer who had just published his second Discworld novel. I was the first journalist who had ever interviewed him. I remember we made each other laugh a lot. We laughed at the same things. We became friends. It was easy.“

– Neil Gaiman

Not too long ago, Suresh de Silva rang me up. Suresh is the lyricist and vocalist of Stigmata, Sri Lanka’s...

Why The New York Times Bestseller list is mostly irrelevant, but still important

In a bizarre case yesterday, Pajiba aired a long, investigative piece into a new book that gamed the New York Times Bestseller list. It gamed its sales through a bulk buying campaign by the publisher or the author (later confirmed by book vendors) and even shipped with a plagiarized cover.

The story started when YA author Phil Stamper started questioning how a publisher nobody had ever heard of managed to land a book in the NYT bestseller list, and started digging (and sharing) on Twitter.  A...

A Few Thoughts on OpenAi, Dota2, and AI versus humans

Two articles caught my attention today when I woke up. One was the list of 2017 Hugo Award winners (we’ll talk about that some other time). The other was an article from the Verge:

The world’s best Dota 2 players just got destroyed by a killer AI from Elon Musk’s startup by T.C. Sottek Aug 11, 2017, 10:48pm EDT

 

Sottek doesn’t go into much detail, so let me add some context. The OpenAi bot beat  SumaiL, Arteezy, Pajkatt, Fogged and CCnC, and then took on Dendi in a limited 1-1 matchup....

Brandon Ellis: From Ohm Totem to the Stars

 

Like many of the scifi authors I actually know, I met Brandon Ellis through Facebook.

 

Brandon interests me. Not just because of his writing (science fiction and fantasy – my two favorite genres), but also because he is a writer progressing up that curve to the midlist, and because he’s someone who’s very visibly putting in the work. He asks for feedback, takes it, discusses the challenges that he’s going through, his progression to a full-time author, and pays forward what he knows. Ev...

A quick update on everything that happened with Numbercaste

SO Numbercaste launched to great praise. I’d say it’s the most successful book launch I’ve done so far, except

It’s only my second book launch It’s my debut novel It’s also the first thing that I’ve actually asked people to pay for

It all worked out fantastically well, much better than I’d hoped for: my writing career is sorted for (at least) the next two novels now. But this is still a postmortem, not a playbook.

A WAVE OF PRESS

Numbercaste had a wave of really good press – especially...

Three fabulous works of science fiction that you should experience

July is my month of relaxation. Theoretically, I’m supposed to be putting down the pen and taking some time off for myself.

In practice, yeah, some of that is happening. But in reality, I’m studying science fiction, revisiting stories I’ve always loved with an eye to picking apart how they work. The results of that are mixed, but here’s some of the works I believe deserve to be recognized as some of the most epic sci-fi ever.

A Fire upon the Deep by Vernor Vinge The Bobiverse by Dennis Taylo...

Numbercaste: Introspecting on the process of writing a novel

Today I uploaded Numbercaste to Amazon – both print and Kindle versions.  I did the muckwork – formatting, cover, bleed, trim, selected paper, studied bestsellers in my genre, selected keywords –  and I very carefully saved it and logged off so that I can send everything live at the end of this month.

Numbercaste represents two years of work – two very interesting years that have changed me a great deal. I remember when I had the idea behind it. I usually scribble my ideas down and forget the...

Journal – 29/06/2017: On Travel, Newsletters and Disconnecting

So a friend recently asked me why I hadn’t been sending out these newsletters recently. Fair question. I’m in Thailand at the moment, doing literally the most boring thing you can be doing in Thailand – studying.

Yep. Geodata systems, satellite imagery, things of that sort. It’s interesting, but I’m also looking forward to when this course ends and I can take off for the city. I hear there’s a temple shaped like a UFO near hear, apparently 8 times the size of the Vatican. That’s item #1.

Thos...

Journal: 14/6/2017

It’s been a while since I blogged here. I hope I’m not too rusty.

The end of last month – and the beginning of this one – was a pretty tough time.  I’m putting myself through courses from Johns Hopkins and Duke University, and crunching through two five-week courses a month while holding down a day job and writing means you burn some rubber and some soul. But it was also pretty fun, and all it did was keep me off the Internet more.

That, and I got into Doctor Who.

I think you understand.

Yes...