Man V. Nature

@eriktorenberg Hi Erik, everyone, happy to be here. You probably have no idea who I am. I'm a writer who likes to go off the grid and deactivates her Twitter often. My stories are about apocalypses, people surviving large and small disasters. My book boasts monsters eating people AND people eating people. Not for the faint of heart, but stories with a lot of heart too. I got asked to be here I think bc Product Hunt is trying to do for all kinds of books what it's done for new tech and products. Which is cool. So if you've ever wanted to know anything about writing, how unlikely books get out in the world, or how an artist can think like a start up and become successful (my model) then ask me anything. And for more info, here is artist/director/author Miranda July extolling the virtues of my book in the Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/1... And the SFGate: http://www.sfgate.com/books/arti...

@jorgej I listened to "New Ocean" by Jake Bellows about 7,000 times (NOT an exaggerated number) when I was editing my book. It is definitely my book's theme:

@ems_hodge Yes, it is the best song! So glad you like it. To answer you q, when I got out of grad school for writing, I had all this new knowledge and energy but I was also I was kind of broke, needing an income, and expected to get a job. All my friends were. But I felt like, if I didn't keep writing I'd never finish this book that had started to nag at my mind. Artists are never expected to make any money, and we wring our hands a lot as a group about how hard it is to pay the bills and do our art. My husband, who had worked in tech, developing an amazing app for UNICEF (http://www.rapidftr.com/) and now works at the start up DETOUR (https://www.detour.com/) and so had a better philosophy about this stuff said: "Don't get a job. Take a year and write your book. You'll be our start up. We'll invest time and money into this project of yours. If it takes off, great. If it doesn't, that's okay. At least we tried. But you can't make this happen if you don't take some risks and try." And so that's what we did. He was also just getting out of grad school, so both of us were broke then. But we tightened all our belts and just risked it all and did it. I wrote this book. And then, happily and thankfully it sold and was published. I had to take a big risk for it. I think having a successful start up and publishing a book have some things in common--the odds are against you in both cases. It became important to me to realized that art making could be thought about in the same risk-taking frame as starting a business.

@ems_hodge (and thanks for the Q!)

@thedmc @ems_hodge Thanks for the answer! It's really interesting to learn the similarities that span industries, and that risk, hard work, courage and some great support come into play to achieve most things worth getting. I love that you took the risk to go after it. It's inspiring. Really looking forward to reading the book and thanks again.