Hugh Howey's Blog, page 47

They Ain’t Givin’ It.

I love how autobiographical this album is. If you haven’t listened to THE HEIST all the way through, you should. SAME LOVE, a song about equal rights for gays, might be the anthem of our times. Macklemore raps about his alcoholism, his obsession with shoes as a young man, and his reasons for going independent with his music. The beauty of rap and hip-hop is how self-aware it can be. How personal the story can be. Few albums pull it off like this one.

Happy Chinese New Year!

Okay, it’s another month away. But on February 1st, I’ll be spending the first day of the Chinese New Year flying to Taiwan to celebrate with my publisher, Nautilus Press, and do some book promoting. What will we be celebrating? Well, I just found out the following today, so my palms are still a bit sweaty, and I only feel like I can brag because this wasn’t my doing at all. Eric Chen, who founded Nautilus Press, translated the book himself. He’s a phenomenal writer, and I can only imagine his text improves upon my own. How else to explain the following email from my agent, Gray Tan:

As 2013 comes to a close, I’m thrilled to report that WOOL has officially become THE  bestselling new foreign novel in Taiwan of the year. See the lists below:

 

Eslite Books:

 

- #1 in the Foreign Literature & Fiction category (of the whole year)

 

- #4 overall and outsells any other fiction titles (#1-#3 are all non-fiction)

 

- 28 weeks on the bestseller list (including 12 weeks at #1) has never fell out of top 10.

 

Kingstone Books:

 

- #9 in the Fiction & Literature category (of the whole year), behind EL James, Dan Brown and Rick Riordan

 

- Chosen as one of the Ten Most Influential Books of the Year, and the only translated novel on the list (there’s another novel but by Taiwanese author, and eight non-fiction titles).

 

Books.com

 

- #11 in Foreign Fiction category (of the whole year), #7 if you count only titles published in 2013.

 

- 28 weeks on the Literature & Fiction bestseller list (highest at #4).

 

The e-book edition came out earlier this week and has not left  the top 20 overall bestseller list and is the #1 bestselling foreign novel.

 

19 titles cover the Top 10 bestsellers of the year of all three major chains, 9 of them are fiction, 8 of them translation, they are two Fifty Shades, Dan Brown’s INFERNO, Keigo Higashino’s new novel, Yann Martel’s LIFE OF PI, Rick Riordan’s THE HOUSE OF HADES. All are books by repeat bestsellers. WOOL is the only debut.

 

Holy moly. Unbelievable. So thankful for the awesome work Nautilus has done. Really hope I’m not the literary version of Sugar Man in Taiwan, and they have legends over there of me being beaten to death on stage with a typewriter.

Delicious Filling

When I was a kid, I had my very own set of invisible armor. It also had a magnetic deflector field for diverting armor-piercing bullets. And on my hip, a small box (invisible, of course), that could temporarily teleport me out of existence and right back again — all in the blink of an eye — in the very special case of ceramic armor-piercing bullets.

All of which explained why my best friend Nathan could point a finger at me from point blank range, yell “Bang,” and I could reply: “You missed.”

Whatever he came up with, I had an antidote. And he had a new poison. And on and on it went in that imaginative arms race familiar to anyone who ever fashioned their hand into a gun.

I carried this same imagination into other forms of entertainment. When I started playing DOOM back in the mid-90s, one of the things that struck me immediately was the inability to jump. You could slam on the spacebar all you wanted, and it might open a door or throw a switch, but your feet weren’t going to leave the ground. This was a shock to a kid who spent years pretending to be a mustached Italian plumber. A raised floor no more than knee-high would completely flummox my badass space marine.

Ah . . . but I had an answer. I was carrying EIGHT weapons, you see. Including a chainsaw and a chaingun. And a BFG. Of course I couldn’t jump.

“But what about in the very beginning, when all you have is a pistol?” my friend Nathan might ask.

“Oh, well, you see, my space marine has a bum knee. That’s why he doesn’t jump around. He tore it up in that bad tumble he had from the heli-jet on Titan. Hasn’t been the same since.”

Every video game limitation simply became a part of the story. The same for plot holes in films. And also in books. If my imagination could protect me from armor piercing bullets, it could certainly stitch together an odd tear in a plot here or there. In fact, the stories I used to fill these holes with often became the best parts of the stories. Like donuts suddenly stuffed with cream.

Sure, you can choose to be disappointed with the limitations of that game or the oversight from that filmmaker, but why? Why not augment the story a little and make it even better? Being impressed is a decision as much as being happy. Choose wisely.

Nathan Bransford Spills a Secret…

…self-publishing ain’t rocket science. The hardest bit is writing the book. Everything else takes a week, after which you have an infinite number of widgets that will last your lifetime.

http://blog.nathanbransford.com/2013/12/self-publishing-was-way-easier-than-i.html

Really worth the read. Short and sweet. Just how I imagine Nathan. But taller.

Minds Explode at 1:45

The Sky is Falling! The Sky is Falling!

Waits.

Okay, maybe tomorrow.

Or the day after that.

I’ll get back to you.

But it’s definitely going to fall. At least, that’s what authors keep telling me about Amazon’s 70% royalty rate. I have heard this at least once a month for two years. Rates used to be lower before the iBookstore and B&N began competing for self-published clients, so the argument goes that once Amazon forces out their competitors, they’re gonna halve the royalty rate and rake in all those juicy profits (the Wall Street crowd is laughing right about now at the concept of Amazon raking in profits).

Let’s ignore the wild assumption here that Amazon is somehow going to force all competitors out of a market that has almost no barrier to entry. (We could all sell PDFs on our websites for 99 cents if we want). I think this second and equally irrational fear of halving our payout arises from the huge discrepancy between what online distributors pay self-published authors and what traditional publishers pay their authors. How can Amazon and B&N and Kobo afford to continue paying 70% royalties when major publishers only pay 12.5%? Surely this is a false market that must eventually collapse, right? Right?

Wrong. There’s a fallacy in this fear. Two fallacies, in fact. The first fallacy is to ignore the fact that traditional publishers have expenses besides the author. They have buildings to lease, employees to pay, printing costs to consider. That 12.5% is just one expense that comes out of a larger pot. So the first fallacy is that the royalty split is insanely generous. The second fallacy is that this is even a royalty we’re earning. It isn’t. It’s not a royalty at all.

When I worked at a small bookstore, we typically received 40% discounts on the books we ordered. That means we were happy to keep 40% of the profit and send 60% back to publishers (which they split with the printer, author, etc.) 40/60 isn’t far off from 30/70, which is what Amazon and B&N pay. Nearly the same split, but the difference in overhead is enormous!

So the fear mongers want us to be terrified of a profit split that is nearly identical to the profit split that bookstores have used for decades. The reason is that they confuse a wholesale price for a retail good offered for a royalty. My 70% pay isn’t a royalty. When I hand Amazon a book to sell, I’m telling them they can have it for 30% off my retail price. A price that I get to set.

Just like a publisher, I do all the work of producing and delivering a product. They get 30% in exchange for distributing it. That’s not a crazy deal. What blinds people to the fairness of this rate is the comically smaller royalties from major publishers. We have come to think of 12.5% as fair. But again, this is a bad comparison. Royalties to authors aren’t the same as profits to publishers. We are the publisher when we self-publish. So start comparing our 70% take to a publishers’ 60% take when they deliver a book to a bookstore —  keeping in mind that we don’t have a physical location to lease, shipping costs, or employee wages — and you’ll see that this is a very fair, sustainable, and permanent rate. If anything, there’s room for it to be more generous.

Just like the sky, this rate isn’t coming down. And I’m not afraid to put a public declaration on this. Because hey, the chicken littles and the Jeremiads are wrong every single time. Yes, even tomorrow. Especially tomorrow.

I Disagree!

Disagreeing is becoming a strange thing, isn’t it? The more connected we become and the more social media binds millions of voices into a tsunami roar, the more powerful our disagreements can get. I’ve watched friends “un-friend” each other on Facebook over mild disagreements that got out of hand. Sure, it’s not much different from olden options like walking away from a conversation in a huff or slamming a phone down in anger, except that the disagreement and un-friending are much more public and far more permanent. That political rant that received 82 comments and lost a couple of friends? It just showed up in your Facebook “2013 Year in Review!” You don’t have to rely on fuzzy memory to relive all you regretfully said. You’re still saying them all the time. Forever and always. There’s not even a scab to pick.

I’m obsessively fascinated in how technology, society, and the individual affect one another. I ask my wife about her therapy all the time in order to gain insight into the digital natives. I don’t want to hear anything that might identify an individual, just general stuff — like how is texting and social media affecting the travails of puberty, adolescence, high school, and college? What I find out is that kids are quick to whip out their phones in sessions and repeat, verbatim, an offending text, a bit of bullying on Facebook, or that forever Tweet that will not die for it is given a regular transfusion of bloodtype RT+.

Kids have surely done the unthinkable and have killed themselves over bullying in the past. I know I wanted to die in middle school. I was terrified of a kid who tormented us daily. My stomach knots up thinking about the guy. But now, these people just have more tools at their disposal. And they no longer have to be the biggest kid in the group. Just the most sociopathic. The most cruel. The most connected. The most tech-savvy. Those with the most friends. Those with the most time on their hands.

Every year, I read about another kid who killed him or herself over a shared video or a campaign by classmates to drive them bonkers. I don’t seek these stories out, so I imagine what I’m seeing is the tip of the iceberg. And for every one that goes to this extreme, there are tens of thousand of other kids who are just miserable. Not just kids, either. We’re all susceptible. We now have tools at our disposal now that allow us to reach out across time and space. Time, because our touch is eternal. Space, because we all exist inside the same internet, whether as avatars,  anonymously, or fully ourselves. How we touch is up to us. Many share hugs and high-fives. Many others reach out with virtual fists.

There are plenty who decide to pull away from this level of connection. I’ve seen a number of celebrities decide that they can’t handle the abuse. Lauren Goodger gave up an acting career because of the hate. Anne Kirkbride left Twitter completely. Mary-Louise Parker said she might quit acting because of online abuse. Phil Fish gave up work on the sequel to his masterpiece video game because of it. There have been too many cases involving authors to list, and it got so bad on Goodreads that the website had to take drastic steps to try and clean it up.

For anyone hoping I might stop writing because I can’t handle bad reviews, I hate to disappoint you. That’s not where this is going. I do find it fascinating, though, that some people can shatter dreams and that this can make them feel a little more whole inside. I’ve had some friends email me this year in tears over campaigns to ruin their careers. Several fellow writers have had bullies put a lot of time and energy into 1-starring all of their books, including those that aren’t even out yet. (The same has happened to me, but I’ve gotten to the point that I laugh it off). All the power these days is now with the faceless crowd. There are more of them, with more time on their hands, and nothing to lose. Also: there’s no recourse. Just more potential fallout, all stemming from our interconnectedness and the power of disagreement.

An article in today’s New York Times got me thinking about this topic. I was reading in the paper this morning about the guy from Duck Dynasty, who has been kicked off A&E for homophobic and racist comments in an interview with GQ this month. People who disagree with what he said are calling for others to stop watching the TV show (on Facebook, at least). Weirdly enough, the people who agreed with what he said are also calling for a boycott (to protest him being kicked off the show). Everyone wants everyone else to stop watching. They seem to be disagreeing so hard, that they agree on the ultimate course of action!

We have entered a new era of disagreement. Retribution is swift and meted out with nuclear force. Paula Deen felt it this year. Orson Scott Card. Duck Dynasty guy. I’m probably missing a dozen other examples. Hell, there were at least two people who wore offensive Halloween costumes this year who paid heavily for their transgression. Both of these people posted pics on social media. Their identities were found out, their employers notified, their jobs taken, death threats rained down, their mailing addresses shared, until these people had to remove themselves from social media altogether. I was just as disgusted as anyone by what these people wore and what some celebrities have said. But I’ve been even more disgusted with the pitchforks and the brutal public beatings we’ve handed out in order to “get even.”

There’s certainly room to revoke free speech somewhere. I don’t know where that line is. Inciting hate and violence are bad things and should be taken seriously. Countering that hate and violence with even larger doses of hate and violence doesn’t seem like the answer (or a good example). It often feels to me that we could simply share what people have said and allow others to make decisions based on that knowledge. Or we could choose who to support and who not to support based on political views without wishing actual harm on the person. Death threats and ruining careers feels overmuch.

The best thing I’ve read on the subject came from Michael Foley’s AGE OF ABSURDITY. Michael has this to say:

At the level above the individual is the demand for recognition of group identity. Here, attention-seeking, entitlement and complaint combine in the increasingly common phenomenon of taking offence, where some powerful group decides that its right to appropriately reverent recognition has been violated and that it is due retribution. The beauty of taking offence is that the threats of the bully can be presented as the protests of the victim so that the ego can bask in virtue while the id exults in aggression. The arbitrariness is also appealing. Anyone can decide to take offence at anything and this ever-present potential creates a climate of fear satisfying to bullies.

This feels familiar. I know how much fun it can be to pile on, especially when you “know” that you’re in the right. People have been stoning one another long enough for the wise council of restraint to sit there in our books for thousands of years. But now our stones can travel farther, faster, and last forever. They can strike again and again. It gives people joy to watch them hit. And friends are lost; kids kill themselves; dreams are abandoned; the mighty and powerful are torn asunder. And we feel justified for doing so.

This is a new affliction with very old roots. We are the same people that we have been for thousands of years—technology is just giving our base impulses new outlets. Yes, we can spread joy, and pictures of puppies, and e-cards, and hugs, and ASCII only be happy if we can get everyone else to turn their backs as well? Is it the urge to in-group and out-group that drives us to destroy others? What is the solution? I don’t pretend to know. I do think it’s worth talking about and being aware of, so we can at least understand what we’re doing.

Maybe Steven Hughes is the sage of our times. What he has to say about boy bands is spot-on:

There is some place beyond offense where real harm is perpetuated on groups that deserve our defense. Where does this line lie? And how do we retain our civility when someone crosses it? And what happens to us when someone else draws a line well beyond where we stand while claiming to have just as much right to do so?

That large flat rock feels so good in our palms, doesn’t it? We can hurl that rock so far these days, that nobody will ever see where it came from. We are hidden in the far bushes. We can tear down others without threat of recourse. We can tickle our egos and sate our ids at the same time. And none of us will dare rush to the defense of those being stoned, because then their sin becomes our own, even if we disagree with them! Especially if we disagree with them. Has any man or woman ever been brave enough to do this? To throw themselves across the victim of a stoning and risk being subjected to the same abuse, even if they agree that the original act was a sin?

I’m an atheist, so I can’t think of any famous examples. Maybe someone can help me out.

Merry Christmas, everyone.

Bah Humbug! More Blasted Sand!

Andrew Stanton on Story

Worth it for the opening joke.

Peace in Amber

Writing this blog post is going about as well as writing PEACE IN AMBER went. A lot of staring at a blank screen. A lot of writing followed by just as much deleting. That weird sad and hollow feeling I used to get at my grandmother’s lake house in the summer, that feeling of not knowing what to do next, but feeling like you’re supposed to do something, and then feeling queasy and upset about the free time and the utter lack of drive or desire.

Yeah, that’s how I wrote this short story. It’s how I feel writing (and deleting and re-writing) this blog post. It’s how I used to get thinking about 9/11 and how I felt standing on the docks of North Cove Marina with my wife, Amber, a few years ago.

I’d been back to NY quite a few times since 9/11. I never went down to the World Trade Center, though. I avoided Lower Manhattan altogether. I didn’t even know I really had issues going on until I met my wife and started exploring my feelings more. I mean, I knew something was up when I was taking a boat south from NY the week after 9/11, and a military jet screamed overhead, and my heart pounded for half an hour afterward. Sweaty palms and panic attacks and all that stuff. You think (at least I thought) PTSD was for soldiers. Or you feel shame (at least I did) at feeling mentally weak and not being able to hold it together.

I don’t have any unique ownership of any kind of trauma. There are many people who had it worse that day, including my best friend, who features in this story. And proximity means nothing. My mother and a lot of other mothers watched on TV and worried about their loved ones. Distance can be worse in its own way. There’s a feeling of being out of control, of being too far away to lend assistance, a feeling of helplessness. Everyone has their own demons. I guess my problem was that I denied having any for so long. It’s weird how writing even tangentially about the day like this has me crying, and it’s how many years later? Still . . . it is what it is. That day fucked me up. I live in denial. I try to write about it, but I can’t.

I’ve looked for excuses. When I lost my dog Jolie, I was able to write about that. And it helped. So I started probing this old blister, seeing if it was time, if it’d healed, if maybe that was just air beneath. I wrote the first few chapters of a book that was going to be something like a memoir. Just accounts of my life anywhere it touched the sea. It started with me sitting on the top of M/Y Symphony in New York Harbor, kissing a stranger, the lights of Manhattan like fireworks frozen in place, this amazing new life stretched out before me of living in the greatest city on the planet, working on three yachts owned by a hedge fund billionaire, living by myself and captaining his 74-footer, and serving hor dourves to the rich and famous while we did laps around the Statue of Liberty.

Within weeks, that dream life would turn into tragedy. My memoir went no further than that perfect moment on the brow of Symphony. I wrote a chapter about my childhood on Figure Eight Beach, learning to sail a little Sunfish. I wrote anything but about that day. Instead, I tried to freeze my life in place or move to an earlier time. Avoidance. Avoidance. Bottle it away.

When Amber’s job took us to North Carolina, I got a job at Appalachian State University’s bookstore. It allowed me to write in my spare time, and it also came with the perk of a free class each semester. One of the first classes I signed up for was a summer course on science fiction. We studied Ender’s Game, The Left Hand of Darkness, Watchmen, and Slaughterhouse Five. I’d read most of these previously, including Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five back in high school. But it was different this time around. I read the book twice for class, not understanding it the first time around but really seeing it the second. It’s a strange and yet powerful story. The main character is dissociative, but he believes his fiction so clearly that the reader is left doubting what’s real and what isn’t. We are brought into Billy Pilgram’s insanity even as we learned what caused it. It’s impossible to judge him after that. We are left judging only war and the absurdity of sending youth to slaughter, generation after generation.

When someone from Amazon’s Kindle Worlds program asked me if I would consider writing something in Kurt Vonnegut’s world, I said I would think about it. I’ve become somewhat linked with fan fiction and the Kindle Worlds program by allowing fans and fellow writers to play in the world I created with Wool. But I’d never written any fan fiction of my own. How is someone like me supposed to write in a world created by a great author like Kurt Vonnegut? What would he even say about any of this? It’s impossible to know, but we’re talking about a guy who turned his friend and fellow science fiction author, Theodore Sturgeon, into the inimitable Kilgore Trout. We’re talking about a master of satire and humor and cynicism. A man with an incisive wit who could cut right to the emotional heart of a subject. Writing fan fiction in his world was a tall order. It seemed impossible. But then I thought of a way to make it even worse.

I emailed a reply to this offer and said I would write something. I decided right then that I needed to write about 9/11. I needed to get it out of my system. Writing it as a piece of fan fiction fooled me into thinking I could somehow defuse the weight of the topic. Taking on the heavy task of playing in Vonnegut’s world gave camouflage for the difficulty ahead. Most importantly, there was something meta and right about finding catharsis while modeling a story on Vonnegut’s work of catharsis. I was going to write about 9/11 in much the same way that he wrote about Dresden. Except, I was going to lose the dissociative aspects. And rather than write from Billy Pilgrim’s perspective, I was going to explore Montana Wildhack’s response to being abducted and finding herself in an alien place and under a glass dome. I knew what this felt like. I was going to write about that kiss on the brow of that boat, but I was going to push into the tragedy that took place just a few months later.

A quick confession: I wrote the first draft of Molly Fyde and the Parsona Rescue in 7 days. The draft was over 70,000 words long. In the next 7 days, I cleaned up the draft and added another 30,000 words. The book you read today took two weeks to write. I can pour it on. This is not how Peace in Amber was written.

I promised the piece by a certain date. For those who know me, you would expect that I turned it in weeks ahead of time. It’s what I do. Not this time. The date rolled around, and I had written and deleted over 30,000 words. Two times over, probably. For once, I didn’t keep what I deleted. I made it go away forever. And I felt like shit every time.

This is, without a doubt, the hardest thing I’ve ever written. It might also be the best thing I’ve ever written. I immediately shared it with a handful of people who I thought would understand the piece. My mother, my wife, my best friend who was with me that day. To be honest, it terrifies me to think that anyone else might read this work. I don’t know if I want anyone to. I’ve never felt so conflicted about a piece before. Never felt so miserable and yet satisfied to have something out in the world. But if I need to know if this story has served as the catharsis I’d hoped it might, here’s the test: Writing even this. And staring at the “publish” button. And feeling my palms sweat. And seeing what I do next.