Wil Wheaton's Blog, page 5

a couple of og star trek kids, talking about what it is like to be the og star trek kids

Cirroc Lofton played Jake Sisko on Deep Space Nine. I played Wesley Crusher on The Next Generation.

And before this week, he and I never talked about it, which is something that’s been on my mind since we saw each other at the Star Trek: Picard season 3 premiere.

This week, things finally lined up and I was a guest on his show, The 7th Rule. We talked about The Game, our space families, and what it means to be the og star trek kids.

I’ve embedded it below, or you can follow this link to watch it.

And while I have your attention, I wanted to share this exciting bit of news: I narrated Bill Gates’ memoir, Source Code.

Here’s the description:

The origin story of one of the most influential and transformative business leaders and philanthropists of the modern age

The business triumphs of Bill Gates are widely known: the twenty-year-old who dropped out of Harvard to start a software company that became an industry giant and changed the way the world works and lives; the billionaire many times over who turned his attention to philanthropic pursuits to address climate change, global health, and U.S. education.
 
Source Code is not about Microsoft or the Gates Foundation or the future of technology. It’s the human, personal story of how Bill Gates became who he is today: his childhood, his early passions and pursuits. It’s the story of his principled grandmother and ambitious parents, his first deep friendships and the sudden death of his best friend; of his struggles to fit in and his discovery of a world of coding and computers in the dawn of a new era; of embarking in his early teens on a path that took him from midnight escapades at a nearby computer center to his college dorm room, where he sparked a revolution that would change the world.
 
Bill Gates tells this, his own story, for the first time: wise, warm, revealing, it’s a fascinating portrait of an American life.

I didn’t want to let the work get dry and academic, which is a real possibility when doing someone else’s memoir, so I treated it as if I were playing a character, the character of Bill Gates, who is telling you this story of his remarkable young life, and the founding of his company. I got into his head, into his character, and did all the work I would have done if I were playing him on camera or on stage. I’m so proud of how it all turned out. I would never be cast to play him on camera, and it’s the kind of work that isn’t really recognized in my industry the way on camera is, but that doesn’t diminish it in any way. I am so grateful that I got to do it.

It released last week, and I am intensely proud of it. We talk about it a bit in this podcast, that I feel like I leveled up my skills when I was doing Source Code (and Picks & Shovels, and When The Moon Hits Your Eye), and it’s some of the best work I’ve ever done.

“that’s the picard maneuver. you can’t do that.”

There’s a post in r/startrek collecting some of the more memorable stories we have told, and fans have remembered, over the decades.

I added one of my own, which I know I’ve written about before, but not here, I don’t think.

It’s about Patrick Stewart tugging on his tunic top, which always wanted to ride up when he (or anyone wearing the uniform) sat down. Because Patrick can’t do anything halfway, he made it very dramatic. Over time, he began to use it as a little bit of business in appropriate moments.

This is a story about that.

We were filming on the bridge. The scene started with Wesley standing, and after half a page or so, he sits down at the conn and I think plots a course or something.

Whenever Wesley sat down, he pulled his jacket tight, just like Picard always did. If you look, you’ll see that we all do that. That’s an important bit of context: we all did that.

So it was like take four of the scene. After we cut on take three, this producer came into the set and stood off camera, just to the right of the viewscreen, as we were looking at it. We do take four, and while we are resetting for take five, this producer comes over to me, leans down so nobody can hear him, and says, “You can’t pull your tunic down like that. That’s the Picard Maneuver, and only Picard can do that.”

So, first of all: this guy is so far out of his lane, he isn’t on the map. If anyone is ever going to talk to an actor, especially in between takes, it always goes through the First Assistant Director, and the Director. It’s a matter of professional respect, and it’s important for our work. If anyone can come up and give us notes or whatever, we will end up with all these conflicting notes, unsure which one to actually listen to.

I’m just 17 or so, and even I know all of this, but I don’t want to get in trouble, so I just say, “…okay. How am I supposed to stop it from riding up to my tits when I sit down? Because that’s what happens.”

He looks so annoyed at me, and sort of bark-whispers, “Just don’t touch it.” And he scurries away into the darkness of the stage.

I am so tired of being treated differently than these same people treat the adults, and I still haven’t learned how to speak up for myself, directly. But I am about to engage in a bit of malicious compliance, the only form of resistance I know how to employ.

We reset, they roll, and when Wesley sits down, his tunic comes all the way up, just like I said it would. It exposes my fake muscle suit, my bracers holding up my trousers, and absolutely ruins the take.

“Cut!” The director calls from offstage.

“Wil, you have to pull your tunic down,” he says, with this tone of utter confusion. Like, obviously.

“Yeah, I know,” I say, looking straight at the guy who is about to wish he’d stayed in his lane, “but [his name] told me that I wasn’t allowed to do the Picard Maneuver, so…” and I shrug, the tunic still bunched up.

That guy turned so bright red, he lit up in the darkness. Everyone on the entire crew looked at him. He sputtered something, and quickly fled the stage.

I made eye contact with Brent and with Frakes. They both looked back at me, communicating their approval. It felt great.

I can’t say for sure that we printed the next take and moved on, but it’s a great way to end the story so let’s go with that.

That guy never gave me a note again. If I recall correctly, my little tunic tug (similar to, yet legally distinctly different from the Picard Maneuver) is in the final cut of the episode

ur fascism by umberto eco

Four years ago, I recorded and released narrations of short material that I pulled from the public domain. I did my best to release one a week, as an experiment. I wondered if I could, one day, so something like this that actually paid some bills.

I had fun doing it. I picked pieces that were interesting to me, and didn’t spend any time at all trying to master perfect audio. It was a deliberately DIY effort. The audience wasn’t huge, but the people who listened to it really liked it. At some point, I even got a few requests, including this one.

This is Umberto Eco’s essential essay, Ur Fascism, originally written in 1995. It was shockingly relevant in in 2020, after four years of attempted tyranny, and it remains terrifyingly relevant after one week of ongoing tyranny.

I humbly submit this and ask for a bit of your time; I believe it’s an important, timely, essay.

ur fascism by umberto ecco

Four years ago, I recorded and released narrations of short material that I pulled from the public domain. I did my best to release one a week, as an experiment. I wondered if I could, one day, so something like this that actually paid some bills.

I had fun doing it. I picked pieces that were interesting to me, and didn’t spend any time at all trying to master perfect audio. It was a deliberately DIY effort. The audience wasn’t huge, but the people who listened to it really liked it. At some point, I even got a few requests, including this one.

This is Umberto Ecco’s essential essay, Ur Fascism, originally written in 1995. It was shockingly relevant in in 2020, after four years of attempted tyranny, and it remains terrifyingly relevant after one week of ongoing tyranny.

I humbly submit this and ask for a bit of your time; I believe it’s an important, timely, essay.

i did some great work on some audiobooks that are about to be released, and i want you to know about them.

I closed out last year with two straight months of audiobook work on a number of projects I am so thrilled to be part of.

One of them was just announced yesterday, and as many of you correctly guessed, it’s When The Moon Hits Your Eye, by John Scalzi:

The moon has turned into cheese.

Now humanity has to deal with it.

I could quote more, but I feel like the people who are going to love love love this book like I did don’t need to know any more than that. You can pre-order the audiobook right here.

Another is Picks and Shovels, a new Marty Hench novel about the dawn of enshittification, from Cory Doctorow.

This is a rollicking crime thriller, a science fiction novel about the dawn of the computing revolution. It’s an archaeological expedition to uncover the fossil record of the first emergence of enshittification, a phenomenon that was born with the PC and its evil twin, the Reagan Revolution.

The year is 1982, and PCs are weird. Marty Hench is not yet Silicon Valley’s most accomplished forensic accountant, scourge of tech-bro finance scams. In 1982, Hench is a newly arrived MIT washout with a community college degree and his first job: working for Fidelity Computing, a PC company run by a Mormon bishop, a Catholic priest, and an orthodox rabbi. Sounds like a joke, right? But the joke’s on their parishoners, who are recruited into a pyramid selling faith scam that exploits social bonds to sell junk PCs that are locked in – from the gimmicked floppy disks that only work with their high-priced drives to the gimmicked tractor-feed paper that only works with their high priced printers.

Marty’s job is simple: figure out how to destroy Computing Freedom, a rival company started by three women who broke away from Fidelity, whose products are designed to unlock every customer the Reverend Sirs of Fidelity have locked in. Marty isn’t that far into this assignment when he realizes that he’s on the wrong side, and he throws his lot in with Computing Freedom’s founders: a queer orthodox woman who’s been expelled from her family, a nun who’s thrown in with antiimperialists liberation theology radicals resisting America’s dirty wars, and a Mormon woman who’s left the church over its opposition to the Equal Rights Amendment.

But when Marty sends his resignation to the Reverend Sirs, he learns that Fidelity isn’t just a weird PC company running a faith scam: it’s a violent criminal enterprise. Suddenly the stakes get a lot higher.

Picks and Shovels is a rollicking tale of the AIDS crisis, queer hardware hackers, gifted punk rock Unix programmers, Reaganomics-fuelled pyramid schemes, and the moment where the seeds of tech’s enshittification were planted in Silicon Valley. 

Cory is one of my favorite authors and thinkers. He is going to be remembered and lauded in the future for his work in this moment, when we find fascist tech broligarchs threatening to take complete control of how we communicate and how freely information — true information — flows in America and the world. His novels are not just incredibly fun and satisfying to read (or listen to me read to you), they address very serious and meaningful issues of freedom, security, equality, and human rights.

Both of these books, as well as the not-yet-announced book, were tremendously satisfying to narrate. And something wonderful happened during the sessions. My favorite director, Gabrielle, gave me a simple note at the top of a page, a suggestion that I approach this part of the text with this particular thing in mind (I’m not going to get into more detail now. I may in the future.) and when I did that, something inside of me fundamentally changed.

Imagine a few elements all sitting next t each other on a workbench. You can put them together in various orders, and get generally the same thing with some subtle differences that most people won’t notice because they don’t know to look for them.

Now imagine you are handed a catalyst — a catalyst that was sitting on another table the whole time, that you just didn’t notice — and when you pour that catalyst across the elements, they suddenly reveal something new that you didn’t even know you could create from them. And that new thing looks an awful lot like the things you’ve built from them before, only this thing is clearly different than all those other things. It’s richer, more interesting, more complex, more satisfying … it’s just more.

That happened near the beginning of these sessions, and all the work I did after that was built using this new skill. People have told me for years that I’m a good audiobook narrator, and I have the awards and stuff to sort of back that up, but I’ve never really felt it. I’ve always been afraid that I’m barely sneaking past a guard, and at any moment someone will see me and shout out THAT GUY IS A BIG FAT PHONY!

I know that’s not true, but anyone else who knows the secret handshake absolutely understands what I’m talking about.

Well, for the rest of my life, every time I sit down to narrate a story, I will be using this updated skill set, and all the confidence and serenity that comes with it.

I’m very excited for y’all to hear these books. I hope you like them.

squirrel appreciation day is a thing, i guess?

Last Spring, I entered into a pact with the local squirrels: I would give them peanuts and treats from my kitchen, and they would leave my garden alone. As the year unfolded, though, the pact became more of a protection racket that the squirrel mafia abandoned as soon as my pumpkins started to grow. They murdered all five of the best ones — and the little fuckers did it just a few bites in each one, just enough to let the mold and bullshit get in there and ruin them — leaving me with only one (a really fantastic, 28 pounder I still can’t bring myself to carve). Then they ate all the leaves off my parsley and cilantro, before I made an arrangement with the local Cooper’s Hawk, who is the guy you call when the Squirrel Mafia is getting out of hand.

That’s a lot of background to set this up:

My sister texted me earlier today and asked me if I was celebrating squirrel appreciation day with extra peanuts.

“I am now,” I replied, and there was much rejoicing (up in the oak tree).

This was funny to me, because even earlier today, before I knew that squirrel appreciation day was not only a thing but was also upon us today, I shared this photo on Bluesky:

I’m not sure who that is but it could be Cruise Director Julie or Alex P Keaton based on their size (yes, we have named several squirrels in the neighborhood and that isn’t weird at all why are you looking at me that way) but I am sure that they are enjoying what’s left of a very small late season pumpkin that came up after the rest of the vine had died off.

I mean, I could have put it inside to finish ripening, and it would have been ADORABLE as a little jack-o-lantern (which we can make whenever we want to, don’t let Big Halloween tell you when and how you can enjoy the spooky season). I could have done that. But I knew I’d get more joy if I set it out and waited for a picture like this to happen.

Which I didn’t intend to post on a day I didn’t know existed, but sometimes a plan just comes together.

So, uh … a happy squirrel appreciation day to all who celebrate! Get out there an appreciate some squirrels!

odds n ends

I spent some time in the booth this morning, recording some pickups on an audiobook I still can’t believe I was chosen to narrate. I believe it will come out in March, around the same time as two other books I narrated.

March could be a big month for me, professionally. A project I have been developing and working on for almost two years may be ready in March, as well. After years of gratefully doing what I call “other people’s work,” I have been focusing intensely on something that is all mine. I’m even spending my own money on it, something they tell you to never do.

Whatever. They aren’t the boss of me. It’s worth it, and I believe in it.

Anyway. Since I’m coming home to my blog, how about one of those old school posts about random stuff I’ve been doing? It’s on the other side of the thingy.

* The news is all terrible, and it’s all overwhelming, so I’m looking for the helpers. I’m doing my best to be a helper when I can, too. I am fiercely proud to be from Los Angeles. I love our culture, our diversity, our endless collection of unique neighborhoods that generally coexist in harmony. Nearly everyone who lives here knows someone who was affected by the latest firestorms. It’s been so wonderful to see people from all over the county come together to support and help people from other communities who have suffered terrible losses and traumas.

It’s equally infuriating to see so many despicable people (who absolutely know better) spreading so many lies, and so much disinformation, all to get clicks and clout. I say this with all sincerity and full offense: Shut the fuck up forever, you pieces of shit. And to the incomprehensibly stupid people who credulously believe those lies: the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.

* I’m about halfway though The Ministry of Time, and I continue to love it. The way Kaliane Bradley uses her words is inspiring me to level up my own writing, which is nice.

* In November, I was talking about video games with a friend. I’d been in Fallout 4 for nearly 800 hours, and my experience in the game had shifted from story missions to building settlements. She asked me if I’d played Fallout 76. I told her I had not. I really don’t like games that require me to interact with other people, given the overwhelming volume of loud, angry, unaccountable, toxic masculinity I encountered literally everywhere. Hearthstone? Toxic men. Destiny? The MOST toxic men. WoW? I don’t like anything about this, and it’s not worth crawling over the broken glass toxic players kept scattering in front of me.

Like, I know that not all games are like this, and maybe I was just unlucky, but … it just wasn’t worth it to me, navigating all that shit for games I didn’t even like that much.

She told me how Fallout 76 encourages cooperation, how I can just mute other players and only use emotes, and her experience — as a woman, no less — was in a community of overwhelmingly supportive and chill players.

While I was processing this, she told me about settlement building, crafting, and her conviction that I would love all of it.

I saw that it was included in my PlayStation+ membership thingy, so I decided I’d spend at least an hour in it, using the settings she advised (turn off pvp and mute all players). I will admit that, at first, I wasn’t getting it. I was very skeptical about a game that wanted me to spend money on it every month, because most of the games I have played that have a “you don’t have to pay to play” option also have a “you must pay if you want it to be fun” requirement. I’m going to jump ahead and tell you I have about 120 hours in 76, haven’t spent a dime, and absolutely love everything about it. I am absolutely going to be spending some Fallout 1st money on this game, so I can design and build settlements.

It’s been such a fun escape for me. I feel like there’s a ton of story left for me to explore and uncover, and I haven’t even been into all of the areas on the map. I figured out early on that a lot of my fun and joy comes from just wandering the map and seeing whatever I come across. I haven’t yet done the Nukashine (is that what it’s called?) challenge where you ditch all your gear, get blind drunk on it, wake up in a random place on the map, and try to find your way home without using the overview map. That sounds epic, and I want to do it when I have an hour or more because who knows how long it’ll take and I think it’ll be more fun if I do it in one session.

And the community I have encountered has been awesome. People keep giving me really good gear and mods, and every player I come across either ignores me (best) or exchanges hellos (second best).

I feel like I’ve barely scratched the surface of what is available in this game. I hope I’m right, and it’s going to be as much fun and as satisfying as I think it’ll be for hundreds of hours.

* Speaking of video games, I’m building the NES LEGO set. I have completed the console, and started on the TV yesterday.

Check out this Easter Egg that’s hidden inside!

When I’m done with this, it’s either Endurance or the Batmobile.

* Did you hear about the rumored TNG LEGO set that’s allegedly coming out next year? It’s the bridge of my Enterprise, and it includes minis of all of us — including Wesley! — and I hear a rumor about a GWP shuttlecraft with Ensign Ro. Dude, if LEGO goes nuts with Star Trek the way it has with Star Wars, I could be in some real trouble.

Good trouble, to be sure, but still. I’m running out of space and … oh, I hear myself. Never mind.

Earlier this week, I made the most amazing chicken soup I have ever made in my life. I wanted to write a post about it, but I couldn’t get it to a place where I thought it could be its own thing … so here it is in its imperfect form:

In every partnership, a division of labor emerges over time that allows each partner to play to their strengths, stay out of each other’s way, and efficiently get shit done together.

In our house, I do most of the cooking, because I genuinely love everything about it … with one very important exception: I always fuck up the salt.

So I’ll do everything in a recipe until the “salt to taste” step. At that point, I summon Anne (usually with my voice, though in my imagination I am using a bat signal that projects the Morton’s girl with the umbrella) and she uses whatever weird magical skill she has to put in exactly the right amount of salt.

A few weeks ago, I was making soup. Anne had to run to the store when I got to the “salt to taste” step, and I would be lying if I told you that I did not panic, hard. I mean, a normal person would be, like, “Oh, I guess I’ll wait until she gets back,” but not me! Bill Junior was a DAREDEVIL! Just like his old man.

“Look on the Internet,” a mysterious voice echoed in my head, “look for ‘how much salt for two quarts of soup’ and math will save you.”

The voices in my head have never lead me astray (well, except for all those times they did), so I did a quick search.

This is where I tell you that this post isn’t about the salt, but I know at least one of you wants to know the answer, so I’ll also tell you that it’s about a teaspoon, which is what I put into my soup, with trembling hands.

Fuck yeah, math! It was perfect.

But that’s not what this is about. This is about an entirely different recipe that I saw a little further down in the search results; it’s about the Martha Stewart recipe for basic chicken soup.

Martha Stewart always makes food in such interesting ways, I was curious to know what her take was on chicken soup.

Oh my god, it’s incredible.

She tells us to buy a whole chicken, cut it up, and use it to make the stock. Then we pull it out of the stock, cut the meat off the bones, and return that meat into the stock we just made.

Quick aside: this is the point in writing this post that yet another voice in my head asserts that this isn’t interesting and I should just delete it. I’m doing my best to push on through, though.

I showed the recipe to Anne when she got home (after I asked her to taste my properly-salted soup — she loved it) and then texted it to our family chat, because Ryan likes to cook as much as I do (I love that I passed that along to him, without even trying). We all agreed that it looked amazing.

Last night was the first opportunity I’ve had to make this recipe and HOLY SHIT YOU GUYS.

It’s so much fun, it’s so satisfying, and the resulting soup was so magnificent, I almost couldn’t believe that I made it.

And yet, I needed to go further. I needed to make some matzo balls.

That’s also something I’d never done before, but I knew it was simple enough. So I made some matzo meal in the food processor, followed a simple recipe, and ended up with something that wasn’t too bad for a Gentile’s first attempt.

I put it all together and …

It was so good. The matzo balls were a little too big, but that’s an easy fix for next time.

Oh, and the most important thing? It was perfectly salted.

Have a good weekend, everyone. Enjoy the last few days of America, and stay safe.

smash that subscribe button

Note to self: before you make a post on Facebook about how you’re leaving Facebook on account of Zuckerberg is a piece of shit, and tell everyone who reads it that they can subscribe to your blog … ensure that WordPress didn’t change the theme on you when you weren’t looking, hiding the formerly obvious subscribe button.

Here’s what I wrote there:

As an OG blogger who did everything in html, I resisted Facebook for years. I didn’t like the idea of being inside someone else’s garden, where I didn’t own or control my writing, photos, and so on.

But I ended up here because it’s where the people were, and I stayed here to the detriment of my own writing and my own website (that I worked so hard to build on my own in the Before Times).

Over the years, I’ve been put into Facebook jail for absolute bullshit, usually because of bad faith reports from dickheads, but also because a machine did a comically bad parsing of something I said. (Hey, die in a fire, machine!) As a consequence, I have ended up self-censoring, or even writing and creating to serve whatever the fucking algorithm wants, instead of what I want. It’s always bothered me, but at like a 1 on a 10 point scale. I’ve lived with it, and I’ve accepted the compromise.

And it’s been so frustrating to contort myself into all sorts of non-euclidean shapes, while literally every single time I report someone for hate speech, impersonation, scamming, a different kind of hate speech, terrorist threats, even more hate speech, the machine waits for weeks before it tells me that all of that hate speech was just peachy with Facebook and the gigantic piece of dogshit who owns it.

I’ve had one foot out the door on this website for a couple months, and now that Meta will allow and encourage hate speech against marginalized and vulnerable people (obviously so that right wing fuckfaces can do the thing, officially, that they’ve been doing all along) I am leaving for good.

There’s no reason for me to be here. Whether it’s because I’m boring or the algorithm is squashing me or some combination of both, engagement is way, way down over the last half of last year. And there is just way too much harassment, noise, bots, scammers, and overt fucking Nazism all over the place. If I’m going to reach a smaller audience, anyway, I’m going to reach it via my own blog where I actually care to keep that dogshit in the trash where it belongs.

I’ll let my blog crosspost here for a couple of weeks, and then I’m just going to let this account go fallow.

I sincerely hope that, if you have enjoyed following me here, that you’ll come over to my blog. There’s a simple form there, so you can get my posts by email, probably more reliably than you ever saw things here.

I also have Bluesky, though I’m going to use it minimally — the fire hose of social media is extremely bad for my (and your) mental health — and even then, mostly to let folks know when something I made is out in the world.

The people who work for me are going to be unhappy about this. I have a major project coming out in March, and it’s not the best idea to walk away from an account with a few hundred thousand followers … but when I walked away from three million followers on Twitter when fuckface von nepobaby turned it into a fascist propaganda tool, absolutely nothing changed for me, from a business perspective.

Put another way, my experience over the last 25 years has shown me that there is a core of people out there, you are likely among them if you’re still reading this (hi, Aunt Dorothy!), who care enough to go where I am. I’m counting on that pattern holding as I leave what has become yet another tool for fascists, authoritarians, bigots, Nazis, and other disgusting and deplorable people to use in their efforts to hurt people I love.

I’ll keep my Instagram up a little longer, unless or until this Zuckerberg approved policy of hate and toxic masculinity (why is it always the weakest little men who are so toxic, he asked, rhetorically) metastasizes there, as well.

Please come with me, back to my blog, where it all began.

On another note, I’m sure that the block editor is great when you understand it, but I am entirely lost when I try to use it. Nothing makes sense or follows a logical flow (that’s obvious to me, anyway), and it makes me feel stupid.

So I appreciate all of you who came here from wherever you came here from, and I am doubly grateful to all of you who have actually looked for that subscribe option. Because if it was anything like my experience, it was a massive pain in the ass.

Of course, at this moment, I believe you get annoying SUBSCRIBE stuff all over the place, including something you had to click to even see this (I think? Again, the documentation is confusing to my dumb ass) … but at least you can see it. And the layout is going to change a whole lot over the next couple of hours, while I figure this thing out.

If I can wrap my head around this, someone reading this late today or tomorrow will hopefully have no idea what this is all about, and if you are that person, I encourage you to celebrate by subscribing to my blog, so you never miss a post.

Thanks for your patience and support, y’all.

Subscribe

it’s in a book

I know I am not the only person who experienced this, yet I have struggled for years to find any kind of logical explanation for it, or actionable advice to address it.

Starting around 2016, when the world started going to shit, I woke up one day to discover that I simply could not read a book.

Or a magazine.

Or a short story.

Or more than a news item, blog post, or some intellectual empty calories online.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t stop loving books. I didn’t lose my genuine, lifelong love of reading. I just couldn’t find a way to stay focused, to step out of the corporeal world for a little bit, and just enjoy where the words took me.

A friend of mine suspects that it’s an expression of hypervigilance, a consequence of how unimaginably terrible things got, and how fast. (Oh, you sweet Summer 2016 Child, you have no idea how much worse things can and will become). That rings true for me, but it’s incomplete, and I still don’t know what is missing.

“But Wil Wheaton,” you are likely saying at this time, “you are an award-winning audiobook narrator. You read to me almost every day!”

Yes, I can confirm that both of those things are true, and I will gently tap the sign in my house that says “You must go to work, Wil Wheaton.”

So I was able to read, but only when it was for work. See, I wasn’t just dropping into a chair and reading for fun, I was supporting my family. I will crawl over broken glass for my family, so reading a book (which I enjoy!) isn’t a heavy lift. I mean, that’s a huge privilege, and I am grateful for it.

Last year, I think I read … I don’t know, fewer than 10 things of substance — well, maybe that’s not entirely accurate. I’m working on my short story writing skills, so I have read a lot of individual entries in a few Best Of sci-fi collections, and I revisited Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew and Night Shift. But, again, that was in pursuit of developing a skill … using the work excuse again. And I somehow convinced myself that a short story — which is a lot of work to create — somehow didn’t count because it wasn’t a whole book. Well, maybe don’t do that this year, Wil.

But whatever it takes, right? The important thing is, I was making some time to read (and as Stephen King admonishes all of us, gently, but still, if you don’t make time to read, you don’t have time to write.)

This is where I dip off the main spine of this post for a moment to share, without going into specifics, that I made a deliberate choice about two years ago to begin a Season in my life. A Season is, according to whoever suggested it to me a million years ago, a broadly-defined choice to make some changes without the pressure and overwhelm of big and specific goals. The common example comes out of New Year’s Resolutions: “I want to lose X pounds” can be daunting, and when we inevitably stumble, demoralizing, and we give up. Rather than that, choose a Season instead: “This is my Season of Healthy Habits”. What are those healthy habits? Maybe walking more, maybe going to the gym regularly, maybe it’s about food choices. The thing is, I am now doing what I would be doing to lose the weight, but it isn’t about losing the weight. It’s about being focused on these other things that will support losing x pounds all on their own, and I’m not obsessed with the scale. I’m not going to get frustrated and demoralized, and ultimately give up, because it’s about the journey instead of the destination.

So I constantly ask myself, “how does this support my Season?” And I make my choices without judgment, doing my best to choose wisely.

I feel like I’ve oversimplified it, but if that’s intriguing to you, and you want to try it yourself, you have a place to start.

The writing, narrating, and publicity cycle for Still Just A Geek was wonderful, and exciting, and something I will cherish forever. It also uncovered a metric fuckton of trauma that I hadn’t worked through. So I started my Season of Healing, and it’s been ongoing ever since, with truly meaningful results. I still have CPTSD, I still struggle with anxiety and panic from time to time, but it’s getting better. I am in such a better place than I was when I started. The Work continues, and that’s its whole own post.

As 2024 was ending (and the end of the year REALLY crept up on me this time) I began to wonder if I could invite a new Season to overlap with the current one, like those magical days of Winter becoming Spring.

I know it’s only four days into the year, but I did make the deliberate choice — not a Resolution — to begin The Season of Writing More Fiction.

And since you really can’t write if you don’t read, whatever was blocking me from reading since 2016 has simply vanished. Just like that. I know it’s only four days, and I am not getting out ahead of my skis or spiking the ball before I even begin the return. That struggle to stay focused, to find joy in the experience, may come back. If it does, I’ll have to muddle through it, which is something I feel capable of doing, since this is a Season and not a Resolution. This is just a choice, not a test, and there is so much freedom in that. I feel this excitement to devour stories and characters from other creators, to fully experience their worlds while I let them inspire the creation of my own. I feel this desire and excitement in my body in a way I haven’t in so long, I’d forgotten what it felt like. I feel the part of me who identifies as a Reader, the part of me I guarded so closely and protected from all the abuse and exploitation, waking up and getting excited in a way I haven’t felt in at least eight years.

Which brings me to the “tiny little thing” I was “just gonna write real quick in my blog while I have my coffee”:

I started a book yesterday called The Ministry of Time. I’m only 18 pages into it, but I am already captivated by the setting, characters, and the author’s voice (note to self: earn your readers’ attention this way, as quickly as you can, Wil).

This is on the jacket, so it doesn’t spoil anything for you:

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as “1847” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.

Sounds great, right? It is. I am megahyped to get back into it as soon as I publish this post.

I noticed something about the way I read books, yesterday. When I start a book, it’s like I’m sitting in an empty space, completely surrounded by the fog of war. Over some number of pages, that fog is pushed back and the world in the book begins to populate the formerly-empty space. Eventually, that space is on the other side of a portal that I step through as effortlessly as I open the cover of the book. I guess I’ve been doing this my whole life, but I didn’t actually notice and note it until yesterday.

And that’s because, while I was greatly enjoying the world building and meeting the characters, I was really struggling to hear Commander Gore. My brain defaulted to this sort of grandiose, bombastic, entirely wrong voice that seemed to be inspired wholly by Geoffrey Rush in Baron Munchausen.

This was weird, because I have never done this while reading silently. Sure, when I’m narrating I use voices, but never while reading on my own. I have always heard character voices in my own inner voice, or a neutral voice which is really just my inner voice not admitting it isn’t fooling anyone.

I read a few more lines. The author described him as being 37, and even though he’s from 1845, I knew immediately that he sounded like The Guy From The Gentlemen (Theo James, I’m not proud that I had to look him up). It just clicked perfectly.

And I was like, “I just cast an actor to play a role in the book I’m reading. Holy shit. That’s so cool and I can’t believe I have never done that before.”

He’s playing opposite Billie Piper, if you were wondering, and they have fantastic chemistry.

I have never done this before. But now that I stumbled into it, I don’t think I can’t NOT do this with every novel I read.

And now I’m left to wonder if casting actors for character voices when you read silently in your head is a thing that people do, and I’m just late to the party, or if this is some weird thing that only happens in my weird brain.

If it’s just me, that’s a bummer. It’s satisfying and kind of fun to try out different actors in the same role and see who gets the job.

Maybe this is part of the change in my head that’s happening as I begin my season of reading and growing as a short fiction writer?

Maybe it’s best at this time to simply accept the gift with gratitude, and enjoy it.

Yes, that feels like a good Seasonal Choice.

wow it’s really been 40 years

I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, in the 70s and 80s. I remember when this kid — who nobody thought could even make the final, much less win — in the All Valley Karate Championship.

It was a really big deal. They made a movie about it.

I can’t believe that was forty years ago, yesterday.

Dang. Forty years.