Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 127
June 3, 2017
It Takes A Worried Man Dept.
I'm still in that last stretch for Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned,��and at the rate I'm going, I will have wrapped up the first draft of that opus by the end of June. Those damn goalposts have grown legs and started skittering downfield. I hate it when that happens.
Some of this slowness have been the aforediscussed time dilation business, some of it has been — and I was loathe to admit this at first but here goes — simple exhaustion. The last few months have been really harrowing for me...
May 29, 2017
What E Say? Dept.
So far Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, my current novel-in-progress, has become a personal first in several ways. Item: it's one of the first projects I can think of where I started by way of changing horses, so to speak; I ditched out on a project that was already most of the way towards getting in motion to work on this one. (No regrets.) Item: the book features a character of nonbinary gender — and one that's explicitly identified as such, not someone that could be that if the reader...
May 25, 2017
Fail Better Dept.
The trick to learning from failure, I think, is to not make it into a morality play. This is something my friend Steven Savage had to grapple with recently, when his attempts to apply Agile methodology to his new writing project hit a roadbump. When he tried to pull together a plotline for the project, he ended up with something that felt patchy, stale, not entirely there, not entirely alive.
May 24, 2017
Drowning In The Popcult Goldmine Dept.
It's a shame this blog this isn't being updated anymore, because you could easily lose a month of weekends reading the gems contained within. To wit:
Something Old, Nothing New: When Were Movies Invented? 1977? Or Later?��(2010)
... I was discussing the fact that on most areas of the internet, movie history is basically about 25 years long. This also applies to a lot of movie magazines, critical videos, and so on: you'll get people discussing movies in historical context, or making lists of...
May 23, 2017
Brevity Being The Soul Of Wit And All That Dept.
Paradox time: It's far harder to write a good short book than a good long one.
For my rule of thumb about why, I defer to Martin Scorsese, who once said that cinema was a matter of what was in the frame and what was out of it. Selectivity is what makes art, not inclusiveness. Stories are defined as much by what they leave out, where they pick up and leave off, and what they elect not to elaborate on, as they are by what they��do contain.
May 22, 2017
Authorial Time Dilation Dept.
SF fans and science nerds generally ought to be familiar with the concept of time dilation, where the closer you get to the speed of light the more time slows down for you subjectively. You emerge from your space capsule after a few months to discover decades have gone by on Earth, and Nirvana and Faith No More are now on "classic rock" stations. The hell.
I'm noticing a similar time-dilation phenomenon with my novel manuscripts. No, not the inexplicable presence of Faith No More (that said,�...
May 21, 2017
Empathy Machine II Dept.
Earlier I wrote about my skepticism in re how reading is purported to promote empathy. Not because I hate reading — I love it to wicked death — or because I think empathy is a bad idea, but because I dislike applying either romanticism or cynicism to discussions of human nature.
May 16, 2017
Engines Of Empathy Dept.
No one is immune to mythologizing or self-mythologizing. The mythologies woven by artists about themselves and their trades are no more immune to being punctured or deflated than any other. Sometimes I think the only people who��can��let the (hot) air out of such things are other artists, because it's only from inside that a valid and accepted criticism of such things can be launched. Nobody would pay attention to a thing Stephen Hawking said about literature — or, at the very least, they wou...
May 8, 2017
Time Manglement Dept.
My friend Steven Savage is the most ruthlessly efficient person I've ever met. This is no denigration; I wish more people had his kind of man-month-isms. He is experimenting with how to apply Agile methods to his own life, a way to figure out what kinds of tasks can be accomplished efficiently in a given timeframe. For those of you who don't follow the latest and greatest in time-management trends, there's a lot more to it, but that's the basics.
One thing Steven blogged about recently was wh...
May 4, 2017
Character Building Exercises Dept.
That Nile Rodgers interview, man. So much to mine out.
In the old days, Rodgers said, "we have to overcome all of those [technical] problems that the equiment gave us, and the net benefit of overcoming all of those variables was an artistic statements in and of itself."
This is a slice of something from that interview I've chomped out before — the idea that, as Nile put it, "the old restrictions in technology forced us to do things right." There's a danger to romanticizing that idea — just be...
