Now I’ll go back into the software industry. I don’t have to wonder what might have been. It was just the standard experience most authors face. No publishers were interested, no agents. During that time, I wrote a book and tried very hard to get an agent. “I lived off of my severance for three years. So I never considered it a realistic goal until 1999, when I was laid off from my job at AOL. I don’t like taking financial risk if I can avoid it. “I wanted to be a writer even when I was young, when I was 12, 13. I guess that’s just how I do female characters.” 3. Just some of those people are also women.

I’m not trying to push an agenda, to make a political or an ideological point. But there’s no feminist message. I never have a point or a goal when I’m writing a story. “People keep saying I have strong female characters in The Martian. Represent, but don’t get preachy about it. I guess people liked the snarkiness of the main character.” 2. “With The Martian, I wanted to write a serial that had tons of maths, show your work, all that stuff. I still have no idea why it has mainstream appeal. I’m one of those guys that’ll nit-pick every little physics problem in a movie!

And they’re all dorks, hard-core science geeks – because that’s the sort of stuff that I wrote. “I slowly accumulated this core group of about 3000 readers over ten years of posting stuff to my website. Pic: Steve Jurvetson What we can learn from the success of The Martian. But I also very much doubt that fact will discourage him from trying.Īndy Weir geeking out with a piece of Mars rock. He’s since published more novels, and written a TV series that didn’t make it past pilot season. As he said when we met, it’s hard to improve on a debut as charmed as The Martian. And he honed his craft by self-publishing a steady stream of short stories – including one, The Egg, that went viral in 2009. He created a web comic, Casey And Andy, that built up an audience of 50,000 readers. He wrote two terrible books before he wrote a good one. “I still have no idea what I did right,” he said, and it’s true that there was a lot of luck involved.īut like most cases of overnight success, his story is also one of practice, persistence, and patience. He was friendly, fun, and still slightly shell-shocked by the steady trickle of journalists coming to hear his story – as well as thrilled to have finally realised his dream of giving up his day job as a computer programmer to become a full-time writer. His condo was modest but comfortable, shared with his cat, a vast collection of board games, and a wide collection of booze bottles for the cocktail and game nights he held for friends. I met Andy Weir at his home in Mountain View, California in 2015, a few weeks before the film of his best-selling book The Martian came out.

Author of the martian