Hugh Howey's Blog, page 80
October 21, 2012
Which one is it?
Hint: It’s starts with a ‘W’ and has something to do with the number ’2′!
My Sunday Times
There are few things that bring me joy like the Sunday New York Times. When I lived in Lower Manhattan, the Sunday Times meant a brief respite from boat work. It meant a few hours with a bagel in North Cove Marina as I read the thing from front to back. It was one of the great perks that came with my bookstore job. This morning, it meant finding one on my driveway with my name inside.
I think the video misses the part where I show the list to the camera. Maybe it was as nervous and excited as I was.
October 18, 2012
FIRST!!!! (Updated!)
Don’t you hate those annoying commenters who have to scream that they are first? They’re almost as bad as the people who have to shout that they were second! They don’t really have anything to contribute to the story; they just want to leave their mark. Forums and news sites are full of these dolts.
And now I’m one of them!
FIRST!!!
In what might seem to some as a meaningless coincidence or a bit of good fortune (but to me is the damn awesomest bit of news this week), I just got an email from Amazon letting me know that the FIRST item shipped out of their new fulfillment center in California was A COPY OF WOOL!!!
How freakin’ badass is that? Or meaningless? I don’t know! But get this: The General Manager of the fulfillment center is slated to do interviews (plural) in the LA area today, and they are supposedly going to hold up a copy of WOOL and tout it as the first item shipped!
They’ve done this with other products in the past as they open up new facilities. It was a crockpot once. This time it’s my book. Well? Comments, anyone? Anything you’d like to say about this gallon of awesomesauce over here? Anything completely and absolutely predictable?
FIRST!!!!
Don’t you hate those annoying commenters who have to scream that they are first? They’re almost as bad as the people who have to shout that they were second! They don’t really have anything to contribute to the story; they just want to leave their mark. Forums and news sites are full of these dolts.
And now I’m one of them!
FIRST!!!
In what might seem to some as a meaningless coincidence or a bit of good fortune (but to me is the damn awesomest bit of news this week), I just got an email from Amazon letting me know that the FIRST item shipped out of their new fulfillment center in California was A COPY OF WOOL!!!
How freakin’ badass is that? Or meaningless? I don’t know! But get this: The General Manager of the fulfillment center is slated to do interviews (plural) in the LA area today, and they are supposedly going to hold up a copy of WOOL and tout it as the first item shipped!
They’ve done this with other products in the past as they open up new facilities. It was a crockpot once. This time it’s my book. Well? Comments, anyone? Anything you’d like to say about this gallon of awesomesauce over here? Anything completely and absolutely predictable?
October 16, 2012
Another Silo Story…
…and not a mention anywhere of Jules.
We’re probably three or so weeks away from SECOND SHIFT – ORDER being available on the Kindle store. It could be a week longer, as there are many rough patches to smooth over, and one of the more complex plots I’ve ever tried to weave together. Once again, no Jules in this one. She’ll be back in the 9th Silo Story.
After the break, you can read the rough draft of chapter one. I did this with FIRST SHIFT, just to give you a feel for the new story. I’m also thinking about doing the beta read a bit differently this time. I’ve considered creating a Google document that a dozen or so readers and editors could access at the same time, leave notes on, see what each other thinks and comments on. I’ve also thought about serializing the editing process by sending out an entire section as I get it done, let the betas read that while I’m revising the next part. It’d be fun to experiment.
Okay, don’t continue further unless you feel like reading a rough draft of chapter 1. Some of you probably already skipped all this nonsense and went straight for it. This is me sticking my tongue out at you people: 
Keep in mind that this is rough draft material. I included the title, dedication, and section page as images because WordPress is crap at whitespace. The first chapter follows those pages.
•1•
Deathdays were birthdays. That’s what they said, anyway, those who were left behind. They said this to ease their pain. An old man dies and a lottery is won. Children weep while hopeful parents cry tears of joy. Deathdays were birthdays, and no one knew this better than Mission Jones.
It was the day before his seventeenth. Tomorrow, he would grow a year older. It would also mark seventeen years since his mother died. The cycle of life was everywhere—it wrapped around all things like the great spiral staircase—but nowhere else was it more evident, nowhere else could it be seen so clearly that a life given was one taken away. And so Mission approached his birthday with no joy, with a heavy load on his young back, thinking on death and celebrating nothing.
Below him three steps and matching his pace, Mission could hear his friend Cam wheezing from his half of the load. When dispatch assigned them a tandem, they had flipped a coin, heads for heads, and Cam had lost. That left Mission with a clear view of the stairs. It also gave him rights to set the pace—and dark thoughts made for a brutal one.
Traffic was light on the stairwell that morning. The children were not yet up and heading to school, those of them who still went anymore. A few bleary-eyed shopkeepers staggered toward work. There were service workers with grease stains on their bellies and patches sewn into their knees coming off late shifts. One man descended bearing more than a non-porter should, but Mission was in no mood to set down his burden and weigh another’s. It was enough to glare at the gentleman, to let him know that he’d been seen.
“Three more to go,” he huffed to Cam as they passed the twenty-forth. His porter’s strap dug into his shoulders, the load a great one. Heavier still was its destination. Mission hadn’t been back to the farms in near on four months, hadn’t seen his father in just as long. His brother, of course, he saw at the Nest now and then, but it’d still been a few weeks. To arrive so near to his birthday would be awkward, but there was no helping it. He trusted his father to do as he always had and ignore the occasion altogether, to ignore that he was getting any older.
Past the twenty-fourth they entered another gap between levels full of graffiti. The foul sting of home-mixed paint hung in the air. Recent work dribbled in places, parts of it obviously done the night before. In bold letters that wrapped across the curving wall of concrete far beyond the stairway railing read:
This is our ‘Lo.
The slang for silo felt dated, even though the paint was not yet dry. Nobody said that anymore. Not for years. Further up and much older:
Clean this, Mother-
The rest was obscured in a slap of censoring paint. As if anyone could read it and not fill in the blank on their own. It was the first half that was a killing offense, anyway. The second was just a word.
Down with the up-top!
Mission laughed at this one. He pointed it out to Cam. Probably painted by some kid born above the mids and full of self-loathing. Some kid who couldn’t abide their own good fortune. Mission knew the kind. They were his kind. He studied all this graffiti painted over last year’s graffiti and all the many years before. It was here between the levels, where the steel girders stretched out from the stairwell to the cement beyond, that such slogans went back generations. Atop the angry words were pockmarks, scars, and burns of old wars. Atop these wounds lay ever more angry scribbles, on and on.
The End is Coming . . .
Mission marched past this one, unable to argue. The end was coming. He could feel it in his bones. He could hear it in the wheezing rattle of the silo with its loose bolts and its rusty joints, could see it in the way people walked of late with their shoulders up around their ears, their belongings clutched to their chests. The end was coming for certain.
His father would laugh and disagree, of course. His father always disagreed. Mission could hear his old man’s voice from all the levels away, could hear his father telling him how people had thought the same thing before he and his brother were born, that it was the hubris of each generation to think this anew, that their time was special, that all things would come to an end with them. His father said it was hope that made people feel this way, not dread. People talked of the end coming with barely concealed smiles. Their prayer was that they wouldn’t go alone.
Thoughts like these made Mission’s neck itch. He held the hauling strap with one hand and adjusted the ‘chief around his neck with the other. It was a nervous habit, hiding his neck when he thought about the end of things. But that was two birthdays ago.
“You doing okay up there?” Cam asked.
“I’m fine,” Mission called back, realizing he’d slowed. He gripped his strap with both hands and concentrated on his pace, on his job. There was a metronome in his head from his shadowing days, a tick-tock, tick-tock for tandem hauls. Two porters with good timing could fall into a rhythm and wind their way up a dozen flights, never feeling a heavy load. Mission and Cam weren’t there yet. Now and then one of them would have to shuffle their feet or adjust their pace to match the other. Otherwise, their load might sway dangerously.
Their load. Mission’s grandfather came to mind, though he had never known the man. He had died in the uprising of ’78, had left behind a son to take over the farm and a daughter to become a chipper. Mission’s aunt had quit that job a few years back. She no longer banged out spots of rust and primed and painted raw steel like she used to. Nobody did. Nobody bothered. But his father was still farming that same plot of soil, that same plot generations of Jones boys had farmed, forever insisting that things would go on, that they would never change.
“That word means something else, you know,” his father had told him once, when Mission had spoken of revolution. “It also means to go around and around. To revolve. One revolution, and you get right back to where you started.”
This was the sort of thing Mission’s father liked to say when the priests came to bury a man beneath his corn. His dad would pack the dirt with a shovel, say that’s how things go, and plant a seed in the neat depression his thumb made.
Weeks later, Mission had told his friends this other meaning of revolution. He had pretended to come up with it himself. It was just the sort of pseudo-intellectual nonsense they regaled each other with late at night on dark landings while they inhaled potato glue out of plastic bags.
His best friend Rodny hadn’t been impressed. “Nothing changes until we make it change,” he had said with a serious look in his eye.
Mission wondered what his best friend was doing now. He hadn’t seen Rodny in months. Whatever he was shadowing for on thirty-four kept him from getting out much.
Thinking of Rodny brought back memories of happier days. Growing up in the Nest with friends tight as a fist. Mission remembered thinking they would all stay together and grow old in the up-top. They would live along the same hallways, watch their eventual kids play together the way they had. But all had gone their separate ways. It was hard to remember who had done it first, who had shaken off the shadowing expected by their parents, but eventually most had. Like a group decision never discussed. They had broken dozens of repeated cycles by leaving home and choosing a new fate. Sons of plumbers took up farming. Daughters of the cafe learned to sew. None of them bothered to ask how many of their parents had done the same. Everything felt new and unique, and so it had to be.
Mission remembered leaving home angry. A fight with his father, throwing down his shovel, promising he’d never dig a trench again. He’d learned in the Nest that he could be anything. And so when he grew miserable, he assumed it was the farms that made him feel that way, and he decided to become a porter.
These thoughts led to a brutal pace. Mission thought on old friends he no longer saw and family he had never known, and a ring of fire burned steady around his neck, the remnants of a rope’s embrace. There was a welcomed soreness in his legs, a raging fire in his calves, pain that reminded him he was alive. A few steps behind him, Cam gasped for air and joked how vandals couldn’t spell.
Birthdays were deathdays, Mission told himself, two sides of the same coin. He and Cam had flipped a dime back in dispatch, heads for heads, and now Mission could feel a man’s shoulders pressed against his own. And when he lifted his gaze to survey the steps ahead, the back of his skull met the crown of the dead man’s through the plastic bag, birthdays and deathdays pressed tight, both halves of a single coin.
Mission carried them both, this load meant for two people. He took the stairs a pair at a time, a brutal pace, up toward the farm of his youth.
October 12, 2012
An Unbelievable Honour!
So I woke up to a very cool email this morning. A reader was looking for one of the original copies of the Omnibus, the one with the yellow cover (if you’ve got one, I’ve got a buyer). And he mentions how excited he is for one of the Limited Edition copies from Goldsboro Books in the UK. The one with the slipcase.
This didn’t process at first. Goldsboro is one of the highest calibre bookshops in England. They have the largest 1st edition book club in the country. So when I popped over there to see what the reader was talking about, I saw that WOOL is going to be their February Book of the Month!
This is an absolute thrill and honour! It’s the equivalent of landing on the cover of the New York Times Book Review. Except there are 52 of those a year rather than 12.
A while back, Dave, one of the owners of Goldsboro, got in touch to let me know how much he enjoyed reading the proofs from Century Press and Random House. He asked if I would like to sign some 1st editions. But I had no idea I was being selected for something like this. Or that the book would come with a slipcase!
(I’m totally geeking out over here. I’m a sucker for slipcases. My book collection has quite a few tomes I’ll never read, but that I picked up for their lovely case).
I’m so gaga over this that I already ordered two of them for myself. That leaves a measly 498 for the rest of England. I pray they’ll manage.
October 10, 2012
Come to my Writing Workshop!
I’m teaching a 3-day writing workshop in November as part of the Miami Book Fair. The title of the workshop is: The Novelette, Science Fiction’s Little Jewel. Here’s a link to the official page. Each day is a 3-hour session for 9 total hours. After the break, I have a rundown of how I plan on running the workshop to try and entice you. I want that puppy full up! And I think the price is spectacular.
The goal of the workshop will be to help writers form the bones of a novelette in three days. We will briefly discuss the history of the short form and its importance to science fiction, how practicing with shorter works makes for a better written novel, and how new markets are opening up for shorter works. I’ll use WOOL and THE WALK UP NAMELESS RIDGE as examples, both for their writing, marketing, and how they were published. I plan on taking a stack of newspapers and magazine articles for writing prompts and will discuss how what we read informs our ideas for what we write. For the final two hours of the first day, I’ll have attendees brainstorm, outline, and begin writing, and make myself available to them for assistance and guidance.
The next day will be all about writing. I’ll begin with some tips that I’ve learned over the years, what I feel makes for decent prose (subjective, I know), and how not to get stuck. Each half hour, I’ll stop and impart some other prepared lesson or bit of advice. If anyone asks a question that I feel is germane to the group, I’ll write that on the board with a short answer. I’ll also be writing choice bits of prose or ideas that I see from others on the board.
Homework each night will be to read part of one of my stories to tie into a lesson the next day and to work on their own piece. I’ll explain the need to balance writing with all else life throws at us, stressing time management. Now will be the time for them to learn if they can handle the pace. Writing hard and swift makes for a tighter story, I’ll argue, and the prose can be cleaned up later. I’ll mention NaNoWriMo, even though this will be in the middle of November. Camp NaNo is always going on, I’ll explain. On the last day, I’ll give advice for a top-down approach to publishing their piece once they get done with it.
Sounds awesome, eh? If you can get the time off and live in the area, join up. Oh, and the description might say 9 am to noon every day, but I’m pretty sure it’s from 2 pm to 5 pm. I’m hoping the workshop fills up, so spread the news and sign up fast!
The British Invasion!
Another date and destination to add to my schedule! If you check out the lineup for The Weekender, a science fiction conference being held in North Wales in March, you’ll see little old Wool mentioned. It appears I’m heading overseas to promote the launch of the Wool hardback Random House UK is publishing! Yay! Who’s coming?
October 8, 2012
My Upcoming Schedule
I probably need an Events page. Until then, my upcoming schedule looks like this:
Spooky Empire in Orlando October 26th to the 28th.
Halloween horror nights will be going on at this time as well!
The Miami Book Fair in Miami from November 14th to the 18th
I’m teaching a 3-day writing workshop that runs from 2-5 on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of this week.
Digital Book World in New York January 16th and 17th.
I’ll be speaking on a couple of panels, I believe. Looking forward to a return to NYC!
SXSW Interactive in Austin, TX March 8th to the 17th.
I won’t be there for all of those dates, just for my interactive panel. Not sure what day that is yet.
The Virginia Festival of the Book in Charlottesville, VA. March 20th to the 24th.
This one is extra special to me. It was at this festival that I became motivated to write my first novel some four or five years ago. Amber and I lived in Charlottesville for two years, so I’m super excited about this.
October 7, 2012
Jumping up and down on Amazon’s couch
It was a sad day for writerdom when Oprah Winfrey went off the air. Gone was the dream of winning the lottery beyond the lottery. If publishing a novel was a miraculous stroke of good fortune, Oprah was the Power Ball. She turned any novel she touched into a bestseller. By stepping down, she left a powerful void. Not that most of us stood a chance of getting on her circuit, but she took the dream with her when she went.
Enter Amazon. There’s a new holy grail for writers, and it goes by the name of The Kindle Daily Deal. This is the shot of nitrous oxide that can vault pretty much any story into the top 20, often the top 5 on the Kindle store. For one day, Amazon discounts an ebook to $1.99 or thereabouts. There’s no discernable algorithm for who gets selected; it seems to be partly random and partly based on a book’s prior performance. You get an email asking if you’d like to opt in, and you regain consciousness a few minutes later. Once the shock wears off, you reply with a resounding “yespleaseletmesacrificeagoatforyou.” And then you hope and pray that you’re selected. You wait. You dare not dream too big. You make vague allusions to huge news you can’t talk about on Facebook. The consternation and confusion of your readers offsets the frustration you feel for not being able to say anything.
What happens next is the equivalent of having the largest chain of bookstores in the world switch out their window displays to feature your novel. Every single store. Except now those stores are in every home, on every laptop, every computer, every tablet, every smartphone, and every Kindle. With the push of a button, Amazon can do what it would take an army of bookstore employees to do. It’s all digital. No plannagrams. *Pop,* and you’re a hit.
WOOL was featured as the Kindle Daily Deal on Saturday, October 6th, 2012. I’ll never forget the day. I watched as my book shot from #200 to #1 in the Kindle store, and many other books have shot to the top from much further back. This is what’s so amazing about the Daily Deal. Someone else is enjoying the rush right now. Another person will wake up tomorrow to have the best day of their life. Another person after that. 365 authors this year. Every year. More on Leap Years. No threat of retirement or going off the air.
Unlike many promotions that see their magic wear off over time, the Daily Deal has the potential to get bigger and better as the number of Kindle owners increases. Imagine being the Daily Deal on Christmas morning. My heart bursts with joy for that future soul. It bursts with joy for every person who has been through this and for all those to come. This is like Oprah having an author on her show every day. And the weekends. No holidays. That’s the power of Amazon.
It was a fun day, lounging on the Daily Deal couch. Of course, I spent quite a bit of time jumping up and down on it like a loon. I even went Gangnam style, which lowered the worth of the internet a few notches. And as I make room for the next person, and they the next, all I can do is hope that all of my writing friends get a turn. It was easily among the top experiences of my young writing career. And one of the best days of my life.
