Hugh Howey

Bestselling author of Wool and other books. Currently sailing around the world.

Post hoc learning

Over the past 20 years, I’ve begun and abandoned at least seven or eight books. Usually after a single day of writing. And these repeated failures had me convinced that writing a book is a mystical art practiced only by the lucky few. Either that, or I just didn’t have the correct tools. With a dream of publishing a book before I kick the bucket, I was always on the look-out for some tricky program to learn that might give me a boost. There are tons of them out there,…

The Universe isn’t Flat

Long before Thomas L. Friedman argued that the world was metaphorically flat thanks to the globalization of economics, there was a brilliant piece of English satire written as if the world was literally flat. Edwin Abbott Abbott wrote FLATLAND in 1884 to make fun of a rigid social hierarchy (in the book, the number of sides you’re born with dictates what you can and can’t be within Flatland culture), but as a young child, I didn’t care about this commentary. My mind was too busy being blown away by something…