Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 140
March 15, 2016
Can You Picture That Dept.
I've mentioned before about how when we talk aboutimagination, we're not just talking about the ability to make things up — worldbuilding, or what-if scenarios, or what have you. Imagination is also about being able to see more of what's actually there than others might, to not approach the material in question wearing blinders. Nobody ever really knows all the ways they do not see things (I think now of James Tiptree, Jr.'s story"The Women Men Don't See"), and so when they have their blind s...
March 14, 2016
The Dose Makes The Cure Dept.
Neither here nor there, but here's one of my long-time pet ownership tricks that's worth sharing: how to pill a cat without the use of eyedroppers, blowguns (for shooting the pill into the back of the throat), Pill Pockets (often ignored once they realize what's inside it, etc.).
March 13, 2016
Open Up And Bleed Dept.
A fellow author of mine posts a regular video diary where he talks about various things writerly, and in a recent posthe described how one of the ways to introduce a character to the reader in a galvanizing way is to make the character the recipient of undeserved misfortune. Emphasis on theundeserved; you want to make it clear they didn't have this coming, and so we feel for them and want to see them do well. Harry Potter is one such example; the kid's living under the stairs when he first ge...
March 11, 2016
Still Sorting It All Out Dept.
Continuing from my discussion about using a wiki to sort out creative projects. Out of all that I've derived two general observations, and a theory I am attempting to put to the test:
March 7, 2016
Sorting It All Out Dept.
I've mentioned in the past that I use a wiki application, TiddlyWiki (I think the name is silly, too), to organize notes for creative projects. How I ended up using it was twofold: just writing stuff down in a linear fashion wasn't scaling, and the existing creative-organization apps out there didn't cut it. Version 5 of TiddlyWiki made major changes to the way things worked under the hood, but the net effect is the same: it's a tool that conforms to your expectations of how the tool is suppo...
March 2, 2016
Rules Are Made To Be Broken Dept.
Busy couple of days, so not much blogging time. Much of it has been eaten up by trying to whip into shape the fourth iteration of the outline forAlways Outnumbered, Never Outgunned. It's turned into a grinding wheel, and my job through this iteration is to stop that grind from perpetuating itself.
Here's how I lost a boot inside this whole quagmire, and how I hope not to lose any more footwear in it in the future. It will require at least two parts, so brew some coffee.
February 23, 2016
App Happy Dept.
Most of my writing about technology, I reserve for my day job. Today, a break from tradition, wherein I run down the software tools I use as a writer for the curious. Read for flavor.
February 21, 2016
Mind Your Manners (And Manner Your Mind) Dept.
When people talk about "civilization falling apart" or "the death of manners" I can't help but think they are either looking for those things in the wrong place (like, say, a prison or a stockyard), or just sensitizing themselves to those particular offenses against their sensibilities because it gives them something to be good and steamed about.
This isn't me saying that anyone who gets offended is just being touchy. Rather, it's about the way cultivating a sense of offense is insidious.
February 20, 2016
The Goalless Goal Dept.
If you have forty-five minutes or so to kill, you could do far worse with it than to watch this video, in which a number of innaresting postulates are, um, postulated:
Setting an objective can block its own achievement. This can be an obstacle to creativity and innovation in general even if you have no particular achievement. You can only find things by not looking for them. It is in your interest that others donot follow the path you think is right.Bear in mind, I'm no fan of most of what...
February 19, 2016
Larger Than Fiction Dept.
One of the lines that gets tossed around about Donald Trump goes something like, "If this person were a fictional character, no one would ever believe in them" or "If this real-life event were a novel, it would be dismissed as implausible".
I think this only says that we haven't begun to explore just how refined and perceptive a good piece of fiction can be. Imagine a novel (or a movie, or a stage play) about an outsized real-life character like Trump. Imagine it embracing all of his maddenin...
