Popular - Hugh Howey

Post date February 20, 2018
Categories Popular, Wayfinding

El Dorado and the Meaning of Life

What would happen if all the agnostics, skeptics, and atheists out there were open and vocal about their secular lives? Would would happen if the vast majority of people admitted that their sense of morality came from internal and communal reasoning rather than from a religious text? My best guess is that we’d recognize the United States as not very different from parts of the Middle East. A religious war would break out. We saw what people did to America’s #1 sport just because players wouldn’t kneel to a flag…

Post date August 20, 2017
Categories Popular, Publishing, Writing

Writing Insights Part One: Becoming a Writer

I started writing my first novel when I was twelve years old. I was thirty-three when I completed my first rough draft. That’s twenty years of wanting to do something and not knowing how. Twenty years of failure and frustrations and giving up. A big part of the problem is that I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I didn’t know which questions to ask, much less who might have the answers. These days, people write to me as if I know what I’m doing. Or like I have a…

Post date April 11, 2015
Categories Popular, Writing

The Five Tibetans

They are known as the Five Tibetan Rites, a handful of simple exercises that can be performed in less than ten minutes. How old the rites are and where they originated is up for debate. Some say they are over 2,000 years old. What is beyond doubt is their efficacy. If you do these every day, you will see results in a week. You will see profound differences in a month. Practitioners claim that these exercises will keep you young, and I’m a believer. They fixed a nagging shoulder injury, and my back has…

Post date September 27, 2013
Categories Popular, Writing

MASSIVE SPOILERS!

We had a Q&A session at a Boston event last weekend, and a reader wanted to know if they could ask questions about DUST. Most of the audience had only read WOOL, so I suggested we do something online at a later date. And then yesterday, I received an email from a reader with a load of questions, and after firing off my responses, I thought they would make a good launching point to really dive into the trilogy. I have blogged about this before, but I should say…

Post date March 14, 2013
Categories Popular, Writing

My Advice to Aspiring Authors

Yes, that’s an ambitious title for a blog post. It might even be seen as egotistical (it feels egotistical to me). But I recently did an anniversary AMA on Reddit, and this question came up over and over again: “What advice would you give an author just starting out?” It was too big of a question to answer during the AMA (over 700 comments!), so I promised a blog post. I’ll start by knocking the ego right out of the lungs of this thing and say that what works for…