Hugh Howey, My New Hero

Greetings from Sasha, your friendly neighborhood SWG blogger. How are you? I'm fine, thanks. Actually, this week, I'm feeling inspired. Please allow me to share why.

One of the many hats I wear is the hat of "local film reviewer". As such, I subscribe to Entertainment Weekly magazine. I was surprised to come across a blurb in the last issue, in the book section, about one Hugh Howey, author of Wool. Hugh is my new hero. I think you'll find his story quite remarkable.

According to the blurb, Hugh went from a veritable nobody to a literary super hero almost over night. He self-published a 12 thousand word novelette on the Kindle Store about a year ago. The title of the piece is Wool. It's a dystopian story about the future, in which the remnants of society live deep underground. You can find it on Amazon.

Well, here comes the miraculous part. Even after zero advertising, readers couldn't get enough of Wool. They demanded more, so Hugh turned the piece into a series. Now, he's in talks with some very big Hollywood names to turn his creative work into a movie.

I stumbled upon a blog entry of Hugh's describing his incredible journey. Re-printed with the Huffington Post, it details, in his own words, how a self-published book became a "hot movie property".

Here is a highlight from his post. I will warn you that readers have to swim through several paragraphs of (geeky to some, cool to others) back story before arriving at the meat and potatoes of his tale.

"...Who was I? A few months ago, I worked part time in the university bookstore, dusting the shelves and tackling shoplifters to pay the bills. How could someone like that, who spent his mornings and lunch breaks pecking away at his keyboard ever get mentioned in a press release along the likes of [Ridley] Scott...?"