Tessera
Folgen

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne

@yudhanjaya.bsky.social

96 Posts1077 Follower184 Folgt
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne@yudhanjaya.bsky.social · last yr.

Thank you! Glad to see Pilgrim getting some love. PS: love the Bobiverse, and DCC is probably one of the greatest binge-reads I've read in the last ten years. Good taste!

Tyson aka GM Meeple@gm-meeple.bsky.social · last yr.

Just finished Pilgrim Machines by @yudhanjaya.bsky.social The language and especially the dialogue is very poetic in nature. As a result it hits differently than traditional SciFi. I don't remember the last time I was so engaged at the end of a story. It was profound

A chart showing a 2025 book challenge with the following: Red Sonja by Gail Simone, coral Kingdom by Douglas Niles, We Are Legion, For We Are Many, All These Wolds, Heaven's River, & Not Till We Are Lost by Dennis E. Taylor, The Inevitable Ruin by Matt Dinniman, Salvage Crew by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne, Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir, the first three He Who Fights With Monsters books by Travis Deverell (Shirtaloon), and Pilgrim Machines by Yudhanjaya Wijeratne
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne@yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 2y ago

Nerd card: 📚 Fantasy & sci-fi 🔧 Mad engineering 🌱 Gardens and farm life content 🎧 Classical music and Lo-fi beats to chill/study to 🎮 Video games and dev. Think FFVII, Cassette Beasts, Pokémon, Rimworld 🎼 Linkin Park, Audiomachine, Yosi Horikawa, anything scored by Ramin Djawadi or Clint Mansell

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne@yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 2y ago

This is an excellent essay with a lot of food for thought. I keep thinking of Kafka’s or Satre’s various protagonists, where the story is as much about things happening to them as much as it is about them happening to things; where the story is about enduring more than inflicting.

Vida Cruz-Borja@laviecestmoi.bsky.social · 2y ago

On its 4th anniv, I'm reposting for bsky my most popular Twitter thread: a defense of the "inactive protagonist," which birthed the essay below, in exactly the way it was written. But first I need to contextualize how and why it was written. psychopomp.com/fantasy/augu... +

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne@yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 2y ago

I think the inverse statement holds true: if you don’t enjoy the writing, the audience can tell.

Charlotte Francis@cfranciswrites.bsky.social · 2y ago

I met a novelist at my choir practice. She’s published 15 books, and she said something that made me think: some writers are unsuccessful because they write for themselves, rather than their audience. Do you agree or disagree? I definitely write books I enjoy, but maybe that’s where I’m going wrong!

Yudhanjaya Wijeratne@yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 2y ago

We’ve actually managed to grow something here in Colombo. Our mulberry bush shares its fruits with us daily. Going to take it to Kandy and see if we can get a few plants going. I’ve been told they’re fairly hardy plants!

Bild
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne@yudhanjaya.bsky.social · 2y ago

Honestly, the Internet is still full of promise. It’s just that the promising stuff is hard to find and requires us to dig beneath the noise and the ubiquitous identical interaction templates built for the lowest common denominator of users. It’s what happens when something goes mainstream.

Micah@rincewind.run · 2y ago

periodically I look around at the state of the internet and the way it is clearly contributing to making the world worse in so many ways, and I think back to dicking around in a computer lab in the early 00s and how full of promise it all felt, and I feel sad it didn't have to be this way

Shiv Ramdas Mens Rice Activist@nameshiv.bsky.social · 2y ago

these excerpts, from an essay on the modern use of first person perspective are gonna stay with me for a long time, even if a whole lot of this feels way more like a reaction to literary than speculative fiction. But really interesting food for thought here

This generation of writers did not grow up as readers. They grew up as watchers. Their experience of consciousness is fundamentally a mediated one. It exists solely on the surface. A highly mobile face shifting through expressions that convey, symbolically, something to an external viewer. The something is never clear. But the faces are described in exquisite, minute detail that loses all significance. I have read pages and pages of scenes narrated from the first person in which an unnamed narrator sits in a room looking at light on a wall or at a cell phone, describing without affect a whole range of physical expressions—gestures, faces they pull—and yet nowhere on those pages does a single thought appear. Not even glancinglyWe talk a lot about the effects of televisual media on prose fiction. We call it cinematic when writers transcribe visual phenomena from the reel in their mind. Clunky, dull description. I call it trite physicality. She lifted the glass to her lips. Or she walked across the room and stood at the window. Or, he extended both of his arms and flapped them up and down. I would argue that this issue runs even deeper and turns into a faulty understanding of point-of-view itself. When you find yourself noting the perceptual apparatus rather than just giving the reader the perceived world, then you are in fact participating in the retrograde mediation of cinema into prose. That is, every time you write, She could hear or He could see or They felt, you are describing looking at someone while they undergo perception. You do not need that extra step of noting that someone is noting something. Where did that come from? I believe that extra step was inserted by cinema. You are so accustomed to looking at someone looking at something that you don’t notice you’re doing it anymore. Prose literature lives and dies on the immediacy of its contact with experience. Any barrier to that experience should be eradicated. I feel that this is especially in true in the case of first-person fiction. It causes me a special pain when I read lines like I frowned or I felt my lips twitch into a grin or I could see or I could hear or I wiped sweat from my brow. As far as I am concerned, these constitute grave breakdowns in the consistency of the POV. If you are writing in first-person POV, then every object noted in the story is perceived. If there are sounds, obviously, the narrator has heard it, otherwise it would not be in the story. If there’s a glass on the table, I don’t need you to say I could see a glass on the table. Sometimes people write first person as though they are describing something happening to another person instead of to the person currently narrating the story.