Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 3

To Confront The Moment

I never wanted to use my fiction to rub peoples' faces in how we've gone wrong, but suggest ways out instead.

We Have Always Been The Bad Guys

Fascist tendencies in SF&F aren't an aberration, but a constant temptation to be resisted.

Maybe We Just Need Fewer Not-Idiots

It is less important that we have tons of geniuses than we have plenty of people who are simply��not stupid.

The Picnic Kit Theory Of Storytelling

Or, how not to get stuck in the swamp of your story's middle.

Promises, Promises

What's happened to the world I had been promised? Wait a moment - what world, exactly, and which promises?

Have Faith In Your Tomorrow Mind

It takes a cultivated kind of faith to believe that whatever you don't have a good way of talking about now, you might well have a great way of talking about in even twenty-four little hours.

Inescapism

How many people do you know who, right now, would rather reside in the world of whatever escapes they favor, instead of this one right here?

The Flavor Of The Thing

My new book is in some ways the most��conventional thing I've done, but I am trying to make that a strength and not a weakness.

The Real Story Is Three Feet To The Left Of This One

Terry Pratchett is credited with an aphorism I've taken to heart often: "The first draft is just you telling yourself the story." My gratuitous amendment to his insight goes like this: The first draft is you��discovering the��real story.

You Like It Darker (well, actually, no)

An expansion on something that has bothered me for a long time: the use of rape as some kind of token element of "realism" or "grit" to add to a story.