Hugh Howey's Blog, page 41

Huggers Gonna Hug

I remember exactly where I was when it all came together. I was strolling along San Antonio’s Riverwalk during WorldCon last summer, and I was thinking of this one person in my life who has brought me an enormous amount of suffering and grief, and something turned inside my head, some culmination of all the striving I’ve done to accentuate the positive and downplay the negative, and it hit me all at once, the simplest solution imaginable: I decided to love this person who hates me.

Not fake love. Not pretend love. But real love.

My feet came off the ground. I floated along the Riverwalk. This person’s anger had nothing to do with me. This was a snarling dog, foaming at the mouth, and their madness deserved more than pity; it deserved love.

I would feel nothing less toward an animal consumed with blind rage. I would want to help it; but of course, I would not want to approach it like a fool. And yet, my heart would go out toward any creature that has such anger and cruelty in its chest.

A few weeks later, Michael J. Fox put what I was feeling into words both simple and sublime. My wife and I were in the audience while he gave an interview about his new TV show, and when asked how it felt to have people talk about his deteriorating condition in public, Michael said, “What people think about me is none of my business.”

What people think about me is none of my business.

The words hit me like a sledgehammer. Such a seeming contradiction, such a paradox, but only because we have it backwards when we allow people’s opinions of us to affect us. We are who we are. Our actions and thoughts define us. How someone interprets those actions is none of our business. In fact, it often says more about them than it does about us. But even we can’t interpret that. We can’t know them. We can form opinions, but they will never be truth. And the opinions we choose to have about another person might say more about us than them.

I used to read my negative reviews, despite knowing better. I had to see. It’s been almost a year since I’ve read a negative review. It’s been a long time since I’ve searched out the opinions of those who dislike me. What they think of me is none of my business.

Sometime last year, I coined the overly cutesy phrase: Huggers Gonna Hug. It summed up this philosophy I had been developing for years. I even ordered a few dozen t-shirts with various Jason Gurley designs that feature the phrase. I had hoped to publish this blog post when the shirts came in, but they’ve been delayed, and I don’t want to sit on it anymore. Because Michael’s wisdom has greatly impacted me, and I think it could help others. I wish his interview had been more widely publicized. My wife and I swiped tears off our cheeks while we listened to Michael say one profound thing after another that evening. We have spent hours discussing his philosophy on life and incorporating bits of it into our own, seeing all the ways they overlap and how his phrasings neatly summed up so many complex ideas.

Years prior, I had a somewhat related discussion with a former boss of mine. This was back before I wrote my first novel. I worked for a man named Gary installing AV equipment in high-end homes. It occurred to me, as I put everything I could into that job, that there are two ways to achieve equilibrium in any negotiation. You can either pull for more from another person, or you can push all of yourself onto them. Two people pulling will arrive at some middle ground. A boss can pull for more productivity while paying as little as possible; an employee can pull for as much time off and higher pay. Some balance will be arrived at.

Or, you can see where you end up by pushing, by giving, by being generous.

At the time, I was studying game theory. I had just finished Robert Axelrod’s seminal work on the subject and was reading anything else I could get my hands on. Axelrod spent a lot of time examining the Prisoner’s Dilemma, where two prisoners can choose to cooperate with each other and not rat one another out, or they can defect and turn on their partner. Defecting is like pulling selfishly; cooperating is to give naively. If one person gives while the other takes, this is called the fool’s choice. But that designation is based on the external outcome of being taken advantage of. And while the Prisoner’s Dilemma has numerous implications for evolution and biology, I wondered if the analysis didn’t miss something deeply philosophical. What if it’s okay to be the fool? What if you choose to cooperate, even when your partner is defecting — what if you choose to give while another takes — because you know that doing the right thing outweighs the consequences?

I put this into practice with Gary. I worked my ass off for him and asked for nothing. When he sent me home because he didn’t need me some days, I didn’t complain about the lack of hours or ask for more. I said “Yes sir.” I went home and I studied. I trained myself on remote programming. I came up with custom UI screens for new remotes. I organized the office on the weekends, building new shelves and installing a work counter. I even put together a computer from scrap parts and installed that in the office for testing. And I didn’t care if I was rewarded. My attitude was to find equilibrium through giving, through pushing myself out there rather than pulling someone else toward me. And not to feel superior or feel a fool, but to be happy with my decisions and who I was trying to be.

Gary began to push back, to give more of himself. He started giving me full-time hours. He made me his office manager. He gave me a raise. We became great friends. And when he would offer too much, I would refuse and take less. And when I would give too much of myself, he would ask me to take some time off. We found fairness by being overly fair to one another. In fact, I think we probably ended up where we might have if both of us had demanded more from each other while trying to give as little as possible. The difference, then, was how we felt once we got there.

This is where the phrase Huggers Gonna Hug came from. I can’t remember the negativity spreading at the time, but someone posted a Haters Gonna Hate .jpeg on my Facebook wall to counter it, and I wondered if this wasn’t the best way to defuse hate, this celebration of it. I had been practicing outright love for those who wished me ill, and this naive and corny method had proven to be completely liberating, and so wasn’t there a better way? When a poor dog comes snarling into a village, do you blame the animal? Or do you feel pity for it? Do you not feel love from a safe distance?

If this feels like drum-circle material, so be it. But the power it unlocks, the ability to focus more on the people in your life who are kind while ignoring those who are angry, to combat hate with love, is truly remarkable if you give it a chance. Try it right now. If you have someone in your life who brings you discomfort, find some way to love that person. You can decide to love them. It takes practice, to turn this around, like exercising a muscle. But you can do it. They shouldn’t have the power to poison your mind. They are going to feel what they are going to feel. Don’t let them dictate what you feel. Remember what Michael J. Fox said: What they think about you has nothing to do with you. It probably has more to do with them. Feel pity and fondness. Assume that they are doing their best or that times are tough for them or their past has been hard or their biology is stacked against them or maybe that they need someone to be angry with. Assume that they have made up their mind about you, and nothing is going to change that opinion. Nothing.

But you can change how it makes you feel. You can change how you respond. Haters Gonna Hate is not the answer. That’s a cycle of negativity, even as it tries to laugh it away. Find all that is good in life and wrap your arms around it. Embrace it. And when the bad confronts you, embrace that too. I swear it works. One negative thing among twenty positive used to get me down. Studies have shown that one bad thing among a handful of good things will get most of us down. But it doesn’t have to. These days, twenty negative things can’t touch me. I know who I am, all the good and all the bad. I’m working to be better every single day. What anyone thinks about me is none of my business. I’ll love them no matter what they say.

And a Leaden Age for Others

We are living in a golden age for television. That’s the opinion in this frightening article in today’s New York Times. Frightening for book lovers and writers. The article begins by looking at how chock-full of quality content television is these days. And then the article moves to all the forms of media that are being squeezed out.

Some of us have been beating this drum for a while now. Books don’t compete with books; they compete with everything else. And while traditional publishers worry about what self-publishers are doing, or while they worry about what e-books are doing to print books, or what Amazon is doing to bookstores, they are missing the real battle.

We in the publishing business are storytellers. Others are telling stories with video games, television, comic books, and film. People are sharing stories with one another on Facebook and in online forums. When we see books as being our competition, we fight amongst ourselves, and we all lose.

DRM doesn’t save a book; it kills it and sells something else. The producers of THE GAME OF THRONES credit piracy as being one of the driving forces behind their top-rated show. If we are going to worry about piracy, let’s worry that more video games are pirated than e-books. Let’s worry about whether people continue to read once they leave school and what we can do to fix that problem. When we price an e-book at $9.99, we don’t protect a hardback, we sell a DVD that costs just as much.

Relying on the people who will always read, no matter what, is a bad plan. It is possible to lose these readers, or at least to lose a good number of the books they’ll purchase in a year. This article from the Times is but one anecdote. Start looking, and you’ll see more.

How can we make reading the best form of storytelling it can be? How do we unleash our passion on the public? How do we simplify the discovery of good books, how they are purchased, shared, sold as used, discussed, reviewed? As a reader and a writer, I’m interested in the companies who are trying new things to expand the total pool of readership, not those who see this as a fight amongst ourselves. It is a golden age for some forms of media. I argue all the time that right now we are living in a golden age for books, the best time in history to be a reader and a writer, but let’s not get complacent. Let’s not lose sight of what we’re up against. Leaden times are ahead if we don’t strive to make reading awesome.

Free hour of SAND!

You can now listen to the first eight chapters of SAND for free! Don’t miss this chance. It’s one of the best audiobook recordings I’ve ever heard.

Check it out here.

Approach of the New Times

Anthologies often have something to say about the times in which they were written. I had a science fiction class at the College of Charleston that was taught from an anthology compiled in the 70s. There was a feminist theme throughout, and it wasn’t because of curation. It was because of prevailing currents and social progress.

When submissions for THE END IS NIGH came in, it made me happy that nearly a third featured gay or lesbian themes. There was no discussion about this beforehand, no prompting, just serendipity and a long history of science fiction exploring the frontiers of ethics as well as the frontiers of time and space.

Gay rights may be the defining issue of our generation. This is not the theme of our anthology. The theme of our anthology is the approach of the end-times. But maybe a sub-theme is the approach of some new times…

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Check out THE END IS NIGH on Amazon. 22 brilliant shorts from greats like Ken Liu, Jamie Ford, Tananarive Due, Charlie Jane Anders, Scott Sigler, Annie Bellet, Paolo Bacigalupi, Seanan McGuire, and a new WOOL short from me.

Let’s Be Unrealistic

Was that my wife who gasped? Or was that me?

I think it was everyone. We were watching Thor, and Chris Hemsworth just peeled off his shirt for the first time, and I swear the air just went out of the entire theater.

Swoon

Yes, I went a little gay for Chris at that moment. Maybe a lot gay. I also felt wholly inadequate. This is what a man was supposed to look like, and I would never look like that. My wife could gasp at that ideal, but she would end up going home with little old me. Chris, meanwhile, would carry on being Chris, and the world was chock-full of perfect specimens like him who don’t know what it’s like to eat half a dozen Krispy Kreme’s at a single sitting.

Except . . . there was more to that scene than met the eye. The brutal regime Chris underwent for that short take would be unrealistic for anyone to maintain. Even Chris.

Everyone should read this incredible piece in the New York Times detailing the demanding diet and workout routine actors suffer through for shots such as the one above. The article shows how fragile the careers of these actors can be and how much pressure they face to be bigger and beef-cakier. Even more powerful, perhaps, is this piece looking at how emotionally draining these shots can be for the same actors. As a male who grew up staring at bulging superheroes in skin-tight costumes, who watched Arnold kill aliens on the big screen, who then felt puny in front of his mirror, these stories come as a revelation. I can only imagine this is what women felt when they learned the truth behind those doctored fashion covers. The ideal I can’t live up to isn’t even possible for those who embody that ideal.

This is not to say that eating whole chickens and then cutting water weight for that one shot of Chris’s abs is quite the same as airbrushing and Photoshopping after a fashion shoot, but it is similar to the grueling dietary standards models, actresses, and dancers suffer in order to remain employed. I spent a lot of time around a dance company growing up, and I saw firsthand what those performers suffered. The pressure to stay unhealthily thin often came from each other and from family members. The need to achieve what was deemed to be “perfection” was intense, sad, and unrealistic.

From these exemplars, the pressure then falls to the rest of us. Grueling standards are portrayed as easy or harmless. But they aren’t.

I learned a long time ago that comparing up was dangerous. Reading People magazine or watching MTV’s Cribs is a quick way to make your own life feel unglamorous. I made a habit, then, of comparing down—of looking at those who would cherish what little I did have and feeling damn lucky as a result. This was healthier than peering up and seeing all the glaring deficiencies in my life.

Something like this came up over dinner last night. A friend mentioned the Fabulous Facebook Effect that occurs when we present only our highlights to the world. When all we see of each other’s lives is our vacations, our best meals, our post-workout photos, our new cars, our clean homes, our adorable children, what does this do to us? I like to think it mostly makes us happy for our friends and family, but does it come with a cost? Does it become difficult to look at ourselves in the mirror? To gauge our own lives? It’s the opposite of the wallscreen in the silo, which reveals an ugly world that makes us not want to explore. This is a similarly doctored view but of a utopia we can never reach. The results are largely the same.

Success can be like these culturally defined paragons of beauty, with an undeserved randomness that arises like the mixing of chromosomes. Yes, Chris works out and observes a strict diet and few could probably endure what he goes through—but the photo above captures for eternity what is maintained for only a brief moment. We don’t see Chris pumping iron right before that shot. We don’t see him cutting water weight for two days prior. We don’t hear him complaining and pining for a doughnut or a heel of bread. It looks so easy. Like anyone can do it. And dammit, we are failures if we don’t.

When I started writing, I allowed myself to dream of being a bestselling author. Hell, the funny thing is that I dreamed of this before I even started writing. Without a single book to my name, I dreamed of being a bestselling author. I also dreamed of winning the lottery, even though I have never bought a single lotto ticket in my entire life. These were unrealistic dreams. They were impossible dreams.

They became less impossible as I forced myself to write every day. But they remained just as unrealistic. Writing as a habit can be as grueling as eating 5,000 calories a day and working out for hours without ever slacking off. And as some of the actors in the Times piece found out, there’s no guarantee these brutal sacrifices will even get you a job. Your hopes can be dashed however hard you work. There is no recipe for success. No easy path you can take by placing one foot in front of the other.

What are we to do with this? Resign? Hell no. Finding out that the girl on the cover of the magazine has her blemishes airbrushed away, or that her waist was squeezed in with Photoshop, or that Chris walks around with 8-pack abs instead of a 12-pack abs (seriously, do those muscles even have names?!), is no reason to say “Fuck it” and give up. There is some middle ground of hopeful pessimism, where we know the odds and the expected outcomes, but we allow ourselves to strive and dream. There is some median where we can spend a few blissful moments with our heads on our pillows, thinking of what it would be like to find success or be healthier or happier, and then in the morning working toward those goals with the knowledge that we’ll never reach them. But that we will be better and full of joy for trying.

If you write a book, the reward will be having written a book. If you publish, the reward will be having published. Dream of seeing your name on bestseller lists. But don’t let dreams become expectations. Don’t feel like a failure when the lotto doesn’t hit your numbers.

I don’t have an easy answer for how to do this, how to bounce back and forth between flights of fancy and being sane and grounded. Hopeful pessimism doesn’t quite cover it, and neither does dire optimism. Maintaining a balance between the two isn’t realistic. Perfect bodies aren’t realistic. Expectations of fame and wealth aren’t realistic. I don’t think it’s even healthy to want these things. But it’s also not healthy to throw up our hands and quit giving a shit. It’s not healthy to eat poorly and wreck our bodies when we realize societal ideals are impossible and even unseemly. It’s not healthy to hold back our contributions to art because we fear the works won’t measure up and no one will ever care.

I think what is healthy is to hear how an actor suffers in order to fool us for just a moment or two. I think it’s healthy to see the before and after pics from Glamour Magazine. I think it’s healthy to tell you that the happiest I’ve ever been was those years of writing lottery tickets, not what came after I got lucky and won.

It’s not that I’m not grateful. I love the adventure that I’m on right now. I’m literally living my dreams. I pinch myself every single day. But maybe it helps to tell you that I miss my family when I’m on the road. That talking to my wife is hard when time zones don’t match up. That I cross the street to love on someone else’s dog because I haven’t seen mine in two months. That I took over 50 flights last year, spent more than 6 months of 2013 on the road, that I have to rush back to my hotel room to take a 5 minute nap to get through the next function, that I no longer have time to interact with friends and family on Facebook, that my hair is going gray from stress, and the 16-hour days are not sustainable.

This takes eating whole chickens and spending six hours in the gym every single day. For me, it’s worth it. But it isn’t easy. And wherever you are along this journey, and however you spend your time dreaming, find that balance of being happy for what you have while comfortably striving for what you want. Be okay with not getting it. But don’t give up. Does that sound possible, achieving that balance? It certainly isn’t easy. It might even be unrealistic. But throwing our hands up isn’t an option, and neither is holding up an ideal and hating what we see in the mirror. There is danger either way. Our wallscreens can show us a dystopia or a utopia, and both can paralyze us and make us miserable.

We have to see the world as it is and dream of the way we want it to be. This is the challenge of loving ourselves while wanting to be better. Of being satisfied while striving to improve. My name is Hugh Howey, and I don’t know about you, but I struggle with this every single day.

THE END IS NIGH — Free Story from Wired

Wired interviewed John Joseph Adams and me about our latest anthology. And they are giving away one of my favorite stories from the book. You can read the interview and the piece here.

The anthology released today. It is chock-full of amazing short stories from an incredible and diverse lineup of authors. Really thrilled to have been a small part of this. You can check it out here (read the free sample online if you want to get another story for free!)

Seattle — Slate Magazine — AWP

I’m in Seattle for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs. If you want to come join us, Slate Magazine is having me on for their Audio Book Club tonight (Thursday) at 7:30. Doors open at 6:30. This is a live taping of their book review podcast. We’re discussing Kurt Vonnegut’s SLAUGHTERHOUSE FIVE.

Tomorrow (Friday), I have a panel at 1:30. Lawrence Block is on the panel, who wrote the fantastic novel HIT MAN and the Matthew Scudder books. I love his work. Gonna be hard not to fanboy all over him.

Other than that, I’ll be wandering around AWP, sitting in on interesting panels, and meeting new people.

The End is Nigh!

No, Alaska Airlines flight 27 is not about to plummet out of the sky with me on it. (At least, I hope not!) I’m referring to the looming release of the exciting new anthology, THE END IS NIGH, from master editor John Joseph Adams.

You may have heard of John and his anthologies. I hope you’ve read a couple. John put together WASTELANDS, which ranked as my favorite anthology . . . until now.

I knew something special was going on with this collection as I read the fifth and then sixth submission. Each story was better than the last, and the first story I read blew my mind. It was a bit daunting to offer editorial suggestions to some of my personal heroes, but that’s what I signed on for. You see, John asked me to co-edit and co-publish this project with him. And he wanted me to submit a story as well. Being involved in this project has been one of the highlights of my writing career. I don’t know that I’ve ever been prouder of anything I’ve published.This is more than just an anthology; it’s going to be a series of three anthologies that look at the events leading up to an apocalypse, the events during an apocalypse, and the aftermath. THE END IS NIGH is the first of these three planned works. The lineup of authors is mind-blowing. We have the first short story from Paolo Bacigalupi in five years (totally worth the wait). We have Charlie Jane Anders if io9 fame (who knocks it out of the park). We have the inimitable Seanan McGuire (how does she find the time?). And get this: Jamie Ford, author of HOTEL ON THE CORNER OF BITTER AND SWEET wrote his first work of genre fiction for this anthology (swoon-worth prose from a true master).

We have Scott Sigler and Matthew Mather. Robin Wasserman and Nancy Kress. It’s an embarrassment of riches. Twenty-two stories from twenty-two authors. A mix of indie, traditionally published, and hybrid writers. Every story is brand-new; no reprints here. Oh, and if you’re a fan of WOOL, the anthology includes the first piece I’ve written in that world since DUST. Yeah. That story IN THE AIR that you may have seen on my sidebar. You can read it on Saturday.

The e-book is already up for pre-order. It’s a steal at $6.99. Desirina Boskovitch’s HEAVEN IS A PLACE ON PLANET X is worth that price all on its own. For realz. And the print book is absolutely gorgeous. (Just saw that it’s already discounted!) If you go that route, you can add an e-book for just another 99 cents. Print books are great for anthologies, as you can really skip around, and many of these stories beg to be re-read. You can also use it to collect signatures from these great writers as they swing through your town.

The best thing about all of this is that John and I published the anthology ourselves. That means more of your money is going to the writers involved. These are talented artists who appreciate your support. I hope you get a chance to dig in and that you enjoy the collection as much as I have. Trust me, this is only the beginning.

Of the end.

Poetry Reading and Mail Time!

Heads in the Common Ground

DBW has posted this strange attempt to say “Nothing to see here, Big Publishing. Move along. Everything is fine.”

More than half of what they say is flawed or completely backwards. I find it fascinating that all the vibrant and accurate discussions about the world of publishing are happening everywhere other than with pundits paid to know what’s going on. The discussion on KBoards, once again, gets far more right than anything in this list. And people like Konrath have been predicting the future with startling accuracy, and they are ignored or lampooned. Lest my tone not be accurately captured by text, picture me smiling and shaking my head sadly over here. There’s only pity to be had. What jumps out at me from their list:

2) Data is incomplete. Why aren’t publishers listed here?  They barely let authors know in a clear manner how their own books are selling. And why aren’t bestseller lists mentioned here? And asking for a “Bookscan” for e-books makes it sound like Bookscan is reliable. Nielsen isn’t reliable either. We have a problem of lack of data and a problem of really bad data. An awful lot of the latter has been coming from DBW with no apology for it and no retraction once massive holes are pointed out by the writing community. I’m not disagreeing the point; I’m dying for more data from everyone; but there are shades of “It’s all Amazon’s fault” here.

3) The bias here and the complete lack of basic logic is startling from a website that industry experts look to for clarity and understanding. I dropped out of college, and I can see three things wrong in this single bullet. First, the slant of this article is revealed when the massive sales of genre books are called a “glut of titles.” We don’t know if most of the titles published are science fiction or gardening or parenting. Our data shows what’s selling, not what’s being published. So blaming this on a “glut” of supply is erroneous. This is an outpouring of love from readers showing up in the data.

Secondly, saying that genre writers produce more than one book a year sounds like they are cranking out garbage, and that’s why they are profiting. But our study showed that self-published authors are earning more money on fewer books than their traditionally published counterparts. The lie that a good novel takes five years to write needs to die. There’s no correlation between how much an author procrastinates and how wonderfully literary their creation turns out to be.

Thirdly: The reason subscription based services will never work is precisely because of voracious readers in these genres. Musicians are being hammered with trifling streaming royalties. There’s no way to pay authors what they’ll accept per read and still profit. These streaming companies are pyramids built on VC cash, and not a one of them has a business model that makes sense.

4) The notion that only the authors at the very top are having success is complete bunk. Once again, DBW is missing the #1 story in all of publishing right now, which is that everyday authors are paying bills and quitting their day jobs. There are people on KBoards criticizing our report by pointing out that their books don’t even show up in our data, and they are earning money and even writing full-time. DBW also wrote a piece showing that most authors aren’t earning minimum wage while missing the fact that this money is being earned on work already performed. Or taking into account multiple titles selling at once. Or the fact that this is only Amazon sales. Multiply these earnings times the five or more outlets, plus audio, plus print-on-demand, plus direct sales, before you know how a writer is doing. An author who appears to be making $5,000 in our data set (which is only a single-day snapshot) might be making $30,000, which is far more than 99% of traditionally published authors. To repeat, a website devoted to spotting trends in 21st century publishing can’t see what is clear at every writing conference I go to, what I see at KB, on Facebook, in my inbox: Writers are doing better than at any other time in human history, even those filling a tank of gas every week, and nobody wants to talk about it!*

*Which isn’t to say that everyone who writes makes money, or that you can toss a few books out there and reap the rewards, but that thousands of authors are changing their lives and doing it on their own terms with direct relationships with their readers.

6) Saying that none of this would be happening without Amazon shows us that we aren’t dealing with a very bright thinker here. I would recommend Kevin Kelley’s WHAT TECHNOLOGY WANTS to this analyst. If it wasn’t Amazon, it would be someone. We give entirely too much credit to inventors and not enough credit to the flow of events and technology that lead to invention. The internet created this boom. This would be happening on some level even without e-reader devices. We saw the first hints of e-book adoption when PDAs took off. There would be some semblance of this revolution from smartphones alone (entire bestsellers have been written on smartphones in Japan). But don’t worry: E-ink readers would exist today with or without Amazon. The self-publishing revolution would have happened with or without Amazon. Maybe it would be at 80% of its current capacity right now, but it would be heading the same direction with the same inevitable outcomes.

It’s fascinating to have watched, for the past three or four years, history being made. And the absolute dearth of anyone willing to write about it or cover it. Maybe because they don’t see it. As someone who mostly reads history books, I’m reminded of generals in tents pushing tin around while those in the trenches can plainly see which way the fighting is going.