Serdar Yegulalp's Blog, page 4

Mythmaking Demythologized

Every group you can put a label to, or that puts a label to itself, has its own self-mythologizing -- what it wants to believe about itself, and what it wants others to believe about it.

Advice On Taking Reviewer Criticism Gracefully

You learn a great deal from studying the unforced errors of other people in whatever space you inhabit.

Very Badly Indeed

Why "How badly do you want it?" is actually a terrible motivator.

To Be Skeptical Of All That's Here And Now

I do think it's healthy to cultivate skepticism for what exists, for what we are offered as the default by our world. What's not healthy is to let that shade over into sneering contempt.

Disposable Worlds

Maybe there's only so much work you can do in worldbuilding before it becomes diminishing returns.

Off The Rails And Into The Crowd

Smart people are not immune to flattery. If anything they are horribly susceptible to it when it involves the very things they think they deserve to be flattered for.

This Isn't A Therapy Session

Unpacking "To me, art is not therapy, and there���s no catharsis" (David Cronenberg).

Diamonds Among The Dung

More on why I feel the most important creative work of our time may not be anything we know about right now.

The Desert Of The Unreal

We now live in weird times, and our sense of what's plausible in fiction has been moved.

My Utopia, Your Dystopia

Our job is not to show how things could be best, but how they could perhaps be less terrible.