If you're interested in reading my novel "Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned", I'm now offering a giveaway on Prolific Works.
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2021-01-23 12:00:00 No comments
If you're interested in reading my novel Always Outnumbered, Never Outgunned, I'm offering a giveaway on Prolific Works. AONO is available there for free along with many other SF&F ebooks.
This offer is only available for a limited time, so go grab it while you still can!
It's about time I checked back in with all of you as to what I'm up to, bookwise.
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2021-01-22 12:00:00 No comments
Last I checked the country hasn't completely burned to the ground, so it's about time I checked back in with all of you as to what I'm up to. This is Rumor Control; here are the facts.
Title tells it.
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2021-01-20 21:00:00 No comments
Yes, it's been a rough few weeks ... couple of months, really ... and not only for the obvious reasons.
The purchase links for Fall Of The Hammer went to the wrong books. This has since been corrected.
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2021-01-16 18:00:00 No comments
The purchase links for Fall Of The Hammer went to the wrong books. This has since been corrected.
The book is available on Amazon in dead-tree and dead-electron versions.
The rest of normal service will resume shortly. I hope.
On the (easily misunderstood) Zen doctrine of not looking for fulfillment through outside phenomena.
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2021-01-04 21:00:00 No comments
The hardest lesson Zen has to teach, and the most important one, is that whatever it is we're looking for is not outside ourselves. It's also a widely misunderstood lesson, because it sounds like narcissism to those who don't know much about Zen or Buddhism. After studying it on my own for around fifteen years now, I'm certain it's not about navel-gazing or self-importance. Too bad it's also pretty hard to explain to others! But I can try.
Sometimes there is too much of a good thing.
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2021-01-04 12:00:00 No comments
A great line I read in a Goodreads review: "There is a threshold of awesomeness beyond which I stop caring about a story." The term threshold of awesomeness is a great one, and it immediately got my gears spinning.
Upgrade time. Not the best time for it, either.
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2021-01-03 21:00:00 No comments
On top of everything else these last couple of weeks, I had to replace my phone. Not the time of my life I wanted to do it in -- more on that later, it's a long, long story -- but time was nigh whether I liked it or not. Four years is about the outer limit of use for a phone these days -- and that's about two more years than the phone makers and the carriers want you to get out of them, so I've beaten the odds nicely there, I think.
With a wide-eyed and dismayed sense of overwhelm.
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2021-01-02 12:00:00 No comments
The end of the old year and the beginning of the new one is proving more crowded and complex than I expected. More about that when I am ready to talk about it. But for now I have a few things to muse about.
Something we got to mumbling about the other night, I ended up christening "the paradox of technical awareness:. The more you know how complex a particular thing is, or how broad the space is, the harder it is to feel like anything you would do at all in that space would matter, the more conscious you are of your insignificance.
One of the greatest of American films generally, and certainly the most incisive and insightful one about the criminal life.
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2020-12-29 12:00:00 No comments
As far back as I can remember, I always wanted to be a gangster. To me, being a gangster was better than being President of the United States.
Fitting that in 2020, when I sat down to watch Goodfellas 30 years after its release, we would have a president who amounted to a mobster. Here we have, still have, one of the greatest of American films generally, and certainly the most incisive and insightful one about the criminal life, because of how it tricks us emotionally into thinking the Mafia code actually amounted to something for those who lived inside it.
Most Hollywood mob movies are about kingpins who rise and then fall: Little Caesar, Scarface (both of them), The Godfather. Goodfellas is unabashedly about a low-level guy, someone who has just enough of a taste of the life to enjoy it, but who will never rise very far -- presumably because he's half-Irish and half-Italian, but really because of his urges to shirk the disciplines of the mob world. He never rises very high, but he he still has a long way to fall.
Sometimes I get ideas for a project by way of nothing but a potential piece of cover art.
By Serdar Yegulalp on 2020-12-28 12:00:00 No comments
This may sound cheesy, but I won't lie: Sometimes I get ideas for a project by way of nothing but a potential piece of cover art. Remember that post from the other day about the four projects that graduated to my incubator (in a matter of speaking) this year? At least two of them got booted to incubation because I whomped together cover art for them at random. Imagining something that looked like that on my shelf made it easier for me to imagine what the back cover blurb might be, or what might be inside.