Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 138
May 5, 2016
Solo Act Dept.
First off: I had no idea Bookslut was closing its doors. Second off:
RIP Bookslut, 2002-2016 — Vulture
I see young writers all the time who are overwhelmed by the need to brand themselves, to get their career going, to build up to respectability. I dont think thats healthy. ... Theres always space to do whatever you want. You wont get as much attention, but fuck attention. Fight for integrity. ... This weird conformity just takes over as soon as the possibility of money or access or respecta...
April 29, 2016
Green In The Face Dept.
It is hard not to be jealous of other people's successes, and maybe it ought to be hard. The act of fighting that feeling teaches us something we might not have garnered any other way.
April 28, 2016
All The Wrong Lessons Dept.
Why is video game lore so awful? Eurogamer.net
... video game creators are prone to making two erroneous assumptions about what constitutes a deep narrative. The first is that volume equals depth. In the classic tradition of epic science fiction and fantasy literature, studios will craft thousands of pages of backstory, often involving many hundreds of characters and vast intergalactic wars. Sometimes it seems as though, early in a narrative meeting, one writer will say to another, "okay, l...
April 27, 2016
A Narrow Beauty Dept.
Can a Book With Bad Politics Be a Good Book? - The New York Times
When politics — of the good or the bad kind — mess with our enjoyment of a book, its usually because the authors proselytizing impulse has muted whatever is interesting or particular about his way of seeing. Tolstoys novella The Kreutzer Sonata is a bad book, I think, not because it is the work of a nutty Christian ascetic, but because its nutty Christian asceticism has stamped out everything generous and curious and noticing...
April 25, 2016
We Put The 'Cult' In Culture Dept.
'Game of Thrones'? More like waste of time - LA Times
Hollywood has been working a long time to herd everyone toward the more predictable tastes of a 14-year-old boy — "Star Wars," "Star Trek," "Lord of the Rings," "Harry Potter" and the ongoing plague of super-fantastic-avenging-iron-bat-X-people-movies. "Thrones" only assists Hollywood in further emulating the corporate strategies of Coke and Camel — hook kids when they are young and trap them in a lifetime of addictive regression. ...
Pop...
April 24, 2016
10,000 Hours And Then Some Dept.
Creativity Is Much More Than 10,000 Hours of Deliberate Practice - Scientific American Blog Network
... creativity must beoriginal, meaningful, and surprising. Original in the sense that the creator isrewarded fortranscending expertise, and going beyond the standard repertoire. Meaningfulin the sense that the creator must satisfy some utility function, or provide a new interpretation. This constantly raises the bar of what is considered useful, and puts immense pressure on creators to find n...
The Duke, The Prince, And Me Dept.
Selfish as it might be to say this, I feel motivated only now to say something about the deaths of David Bowie and Prince because of the way I based a character on an amalgam of them.
April 22, 2016
The First Round In The Chamber Dept.
Last night I wrote the first thousand or so words for the first draft toAlways Outnumbered, Never Outgunned.
I'm just as surprised as you might be.
April 19, 2016
I Dunno LOL Dept.
A big part of the freedom that comes with living in an open society is the freedom to say "I don't know" and not be punished for it.
April 14, 2016
Some Good News From The Salt Mines Dept.
Last weekend's work onAlways Outnumbered, Never Outgunned was shockingly fruitful. (This brings to mind an image of someone plugging 220V appliances into a navel orange, but only because I'm weird and love terrible jokes.) Not only did I finally crack the entire end-to-end outline on the 4th try, but I started translating that into the scene-by-scene "beat sheet" that will be used to actually write the book.
