Hugh Howey

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

NFTs for Authors

Cryptocurrency is bunk. Bitcoin is absolute garbage. Elon Musk is a weirdo. Okay, now that we’ve gotten rid of those folks (0r at least moved them to the comments), let’s talk about NFTs, or what I like to call “the worst acronym since PCMCIA.” NFTs sound to me like an alien encounter mixed with some kind of low-fee investment fund. But don’t worry, what they’re known as will probably change in the future as they become widely adopted. And they will. NFTs are going to change how future Earthlings think…

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…

The One. The Only. The Publishing dynamo. Nadene Carter.

I was only three weeks into the querying process when I found my match. Her name was Nadene Carter and she had three qualities that put an end to my search. 1) She is a dynamo. A whirlwind of focused energy. Tackling several things at a time, she manages her schedule in a way that gives each project her full attention without ever becoming overwhelmed or frustrated. I saw this in her treatment of my submission, going through the reading with haste, but managing to catch every nuance. At the…

A Thread of Hope

Getting published is a wild ordeal. Let’s forget, for just a moment, the wacky adventure that writing a book can be… once you’re done with that, you’ll find yourself at the beginning of a path, not at the end. And where you want to go is over the horizon and out of sight. What you can see is hoards of people heading in that direction, many of them crawling, some of them prone–unmoving. Joining you at the beginning of that journey are a few happy travelers not yet broken by…

The cosmic unfairness of it all

So, James Frey, the guy who lied to millions of Oprah viewers in order to sell his fiction as if it were real, is preparing to write teen science fiction. And of course, since he’s already famous for being a big fat liar, the movie deal is already signed. Meaning the guy is going to get paid millions, rewarded for being unethical, and flood the market with more of his rubbish. Meanwhile, here I am writing about the VERY REAL events that are going to take place in the 25th…