It's time for the annual look back at the year that was. This is continued from .

I saw Watchmen before it was released, and I loved it. When the screening was over, I got to be part of a Q&A with Watchmen's director:

Before I realized it, I was on my feet, getting in line, not to ask a question, but to make a comment.

When I approached the mic, I felt my hands get cold and I couldn't feel my feet. This is typically what happens to me when I'm really nervous.

I cleared my throat and said, "Hi, my name is Wil, and I'm from Pasadena."

He said, "Hey, I'm from Pasadena, too!"

"AWESOME!" I said, and felt stupid.

I steadied myself, as the entire theater faded away and all I could hear was the sound of my own voice, coming out of someone else, very far away. "I just wanted to tell you that I've wanted to see this movie for twenty years."

I took a breath, and was horrified to feel some very real emotion rising up in my chest.

"Oh fuck. Just say it and run away!"

"I just wanted to say thank you for making it worth the wait."

He said something, but I don't know what it was. I was too busy running away.

As I left the theater, and feeling returned to my hands and feet, I thought, "Shit. I forgot to tell him, "If they ask you to make Sandman, please say yes.'"

I doubt he'll ever read this, but just in case he does … Zack Snyder, this is Wil from Pasadena. If they ever ask you to make Sandman, please say yes.

In 2007, I worked on Criminal Minds, rapin' and killin' and gettin' killed real good. I kept a production diary while I was on the set, and included it in Sunken Treasure. When my episode aired in March, I got this crazy idea to create an audio version of the production diary, which I released on Lulu for just five bucks.

The fundamental concept behind Operation Crazy Idea is to publish more things, more often, at lower price points. The simplicity and immediacy of POD technology, the Long Tail, and Kevin Kelly's 1000 True Fans Model (I hate that term, but I love the idea behind it) have all worked together to make the first effort in Operation Crazy Idea, Sunken Treasure, a huge success.

This morning, I got a genuinely Crazy Idea that I've spent much of today creating: An audio version of my Criminal Minds production diary.

"Why aren't you just doing an audio version of the whole book?" You may ask.

"Well," I would say, "because that wouldn't be a Crazy Idea."

What is a Crazy Idea, though, is recording the whole production diary, adding in the usual asides and extras, ending up with something that's about 78 minutes long, and selling it on Lulu for $5.

"Why $5?" You say.

You ask a lot of good questions, person-who-I-made-up-who-is-different-from-the-person-I-made-up-yesterday.

From the first time I colored in my dice and died repeatedly at the hands of the Rust Monster in that one cave (you know the one) I have loved D&D. I've played several other RPGs over the years (most notably GURPS) but with the release of D&D 4E, I've fallen back in love with the system.

Fueled by the Penny Arcade Podcasts and the simple joy of learning a new(ish) system, I began a campaign for my son and his friends:

I haven't DMed anything in ages, and I haven't DMed 4E ever, so rather than start them out in Winterhaven with the events of H1, I started them out in Fallcrest, and planned to run them through a slightly-modified version of the first level Dungeon Delve. I thought this would be a good way for me to remember how to ride the bike, and a good way to introduce them to the new combat mechanics in 4E. And I'll be honest, here: I love a good dungeon crawl as much as anyone. Because I'm running this campaign for teenagers, I didn't think it was wise to dump them into serious roleplaying right away, and I'd use a play session that was primarily combat-based to get them comfortable with each other as players, and with me as a DM.

We had a lot of fun, and played for just under five hours. I had planned for about four hours, but I had to spend more time than I thought I would refreshing my memory in the DMG.

We sat around the table, and I began…

I did my best to make the experience a memorable one:

"Sorry, all you know is that this dragon is pretty pissed that you're in her lair, and the Kobolds down here," I pointed to the end of the corridor, "are coming toward you, now."

"Oh! It's a she!" Nolan's other friend said. "That's so cool!"

"The dragon moves her head back and forth on her long, slender neck. She cocks her head to one side and then to the other. Her lips curl back, as she slowly opens her mouth."

I glanced up at them. Their eyes were all wide.

"She rears back, and a blast of freezing cold dragon breath surrounds you!"

As I rolled for each of them, Nolan noticed the change in the music. "Did you do that on purpose?" He said. I told him that I had.

"That's really cool," he said.

I planted the seed for the rest of the campaign:

"When you return to Fallcrest, you go straight to Douven's office to share your triumph with him. When the door opens, though, you find his wife, standing alone. Her eyes are puffy and red, and she clutches a small holy symbol in one hand.

"'Douven … Douven is gone,' she says. 'He said that something terrible was happening near Winterhaven, but he wouldn't tell me what it was. He just said that if he didn't get there soon, it would be the end of us all!' She looks at you, expectantly." The music, which had been sort of triumphant and energized, had become soft and melancholy, another happy coincidence that I assured the kids was entirely planned in advance.

"Well, guys," Nolan's friend said, "I guess we're going to Winterhaven."

But, sadly, teenagers are flaky and playing D&D with your stepdad isn't nearly as fun as sitting in your room and clicking your mouse over and over again while you try to get armor to drop in WoW. Yes, I remain bitterly disappointed that we never played again, but I'm glad we played at all, because it was absolutely time well spent, and I was able to share some thoughts about things I learned while sitting behind the DM screen:

Today, I wanted to share some of the things that came to mind, as well as some other things from a lifetime of gaming that I hadn't thought about until this week. My hope is that this will be useful for DMs and players alike. I'd love it if you'd add your own comments, if anything related comes to your mind while you read this post.

First of all, in spite of our mistakes, we all had a lot of fun. As far as I'm concerned, the session was a HUGE SUCCESS as a result. The whole point of playing an RPG is to have fun while engaging the imagination, right? Mission accomplished, and not in the fake George Bush way.

Mostly, this session reaffirmed some of the core concepts that all DM guides share, fromGURPS to T20 to D&D and beyond. Among them are surprise! Fear! Ruthless Efficie – wait. Sorry. That's wrong. Put down the soft cushions and I'll try again.

I started a Flickr pool for my books, called Wheaton's Books in the Wild. Turns out my books have been to some very cool places.

I drew ascii dongs on my blog, as part of what I think is a pretty funny post about spammers and the people who believe them.

I played Whil Wheaton on Family Guy with the rest of the cast of Star Trek: The Next Generation.

I went to Emerald City Comicon in Seattle, and performed some stories for the nice people.

Anne and I went to the Nebula Awards dinner, where I presented the award for best script:

I wanted some kind of introduction, so a few minutes before I walked up to the podium, I came up with this:

"Everyone I know who is successful reads books. Everyone I know who is successful andinteresting reads science fiction and fantasy. As a parent, you can imagine how important it is to me that my kids read science fiction and fantasy, so I've used television and movies as a gateway drug.

"The nominees for Best Script are…"

I'm not going to lie: I felt pretty good about that, especially considering that I came up with it pretty much on the fly.

To be continued in part three…

The first time I did one of these posts in 2006, it was to secretly collect material I was thinking about including in The Happiest Days of Our Lives. It ended up being a lot of fun to look back at the whole year, though, and it created a nice introduction to my writing (which is one of those things we writers kind of need to have) so I did it again in 2008 (I'm not sure why there's no 2007 entry; I guess nothing happened that year and we all slept through it) and here I am, about to do it again in 2009.

So, without any further parenthetical statements (except for this one), let's begin:

I recalled The Great Wheaton Hockey Scandal of 1991:

My friends at CliqueClack did an interview with Dean Devlin, creator of the sensational new series Leverage. Dean and I played hockey on the same team (with, I've just now remembered, Adam Baldwin, also) from around 1989-1991. He was a forward and I was a goalie. One night in Burbank, our team gave up a breakaway near the redline. I saw it happening when the puck was still in the offensive zone, so I was ready.

When the other guy crossed our blue line, I was already way out of the net, near the bottom of the faceoff circle on my left side. I skated backward with him to force him to shoot on my terms. I guess I was near the crease when I saw him pull his stick back way over his head."Oh good," I thought, "he's just going to try to blast it past me. Those shots almost always go wide, or right into my glove."

The next thing I knew, there was an explosion in the rink, and a bright flash of light before everything went dark. When the lights came back on, I was on my knees, surrounded by a semicircle of skates. I pulled my helmet off, and watched a whole bunch of blood pour down onto the ice.

"Oh, the way it beads up is really neat," I thought. Then, "Wait. That's my blood." 

I bought my first Fark headline T-shirt and semi-coherently formulated a vigorous defense of myself as an actor living in the shadow of Wesley Crusher:

I am not Wesley Crusher, and when someone says, "Wesley Crusher is playing [Some Character], so, you know, go hate [That Character] without even watching him," it is both unfair and profoundly insulting to me. Imagine having something you've worked so hard to create being dismissed out of hand, because of completely unrelated work you did when you were a teenager – work that you had no control over – and you may understand why this is so upsetting to me. This has happened to me for years, and when I read it tonight – especially related to something like Batman, that I'm so proud of, that I know has a big crossover audience – It infuriated me. I've been subjected to this same tired line for 15 years, and I've really had enough of it. Live in the now, man!

My episode of Batman: The Brave and The Bold aired, and it was awesome. I didn't know it at the time, but I am the first voice actor to play Ted Kord in an animated capacity.

I went to Phoenix for the 2009 Phoenix Comic-Con, where I did a lot of neat stuff, but nothing was better than the epic awesomeness of playing Rock Band 2 with a bunch of my fellow nerds:

After playing Rock Band 2 for 2 straight hours and struggling though some songs I've never played before, I was worried that when the videos started making their way online, I'd look like an asshole who didn't know how to play fake instruments, and that everyone would laugh at me. But when I watch this video of us doing Livin' on a Prayer, all I see is the evening distilled to its essence: a lot of geeks having a lot of fun pretending to be rock stars on a real stage playing for a real audience, which is exactly what I hoped for when I planned it. I mean, we were up there playing 80s anthems, and there were people dancingin front of the stage. When I sang to a girl in the front row, she screamed like we were at an actual concert. For reals! It was so awesome, it was hard not to get caught up in the fantasy of the thing, and I don't think any of us who played the game spent more than 10 seconds fighting it. 

Even though I've been using Twitter since 2007, this was the year it really exploded. For reasons I will never understand, the gang at TwitterHQ put me on some kind of "people you should follow" list, and I watched my follower count double every day for several weeks. It was weird, and I thought it was best to tell everyone how I was going to disappoint them if they followed me:

…if I can make something painfully, embarrassingly clear before I begin: my whole idea here is to manage expectations and explain my own personal limits. I'm not trying to go on and on about how fucking cool I think I am and how you have to follow rules to follow me, or anything like that. I'm saying this now because some of the things down below, you may not want to hear. It's not you, it's me, and I hope you believe that.

I started new categories called From The Vault and Things I Love.

After making several improbable saving throws vs. Layoff at Propeller, AOL finally sent me off to the land of wind and ghosts in February. Initially, this was terrifying. I had a kid in college and one about to graduate high school, very little reliable work, and though I wasn't getting rich from AOL, it was at least something I could count on month to month.

Just like Scalzi, though, getting laid off by AOL ended up being the best thing that ever happened to me. It forced me to get serious about being a full-time writer, and left me no option but to take control of my creative and financial life by writing and publishing more work on my own. I started with Sunken Treasure:

Every year, before the summer convention season gets underway, I pull some excerpts from whatever I plan to release in the fall, take them to my local print shop, and make a deliberately lo-fi, limited edition chapbook to take with me on the obligatory summer convention circuit.

I’ve done previews of Dancing Barefoot, The Happiest Days of Our Lives, and Memories of the Future, but in 2008, I couldn’t excerpt my planned fall release, because it was so top secret, I would have had to print it on self-destructing paper, and while that would have made it a very limited edition, the costs associated were … prohibitive.

The thing about these chapbooks is that you can only get them from me if you come see me at a convention. Since I don't do many conventions, this leaves a lot of you — Europe, Canada, and the East Coast, I'm looking in your direction— without a chance to get your hands on one. Later this week, I will correct this glaring error, by releasing last year's chapbook, Sunken Treasure, via a print on demand system that works like this: you place an order, they print your book, and the service I use ships it to you. A couple of my friends have used the same service I'm using, and they're super happy with the quality of their books, the customer service, and everything about the whole process. Print on demand services used to be kind of sketchy, but they've grown up a lot recently, and I'm willing to give this particular one a try.

If this works the way I think it will, it's going to be super awesome for all of us as I release books in the future: You don't have to worry about me screwing up your order, I don't have to invest in a thousand books at a time, you get your book in a few days instead of a few weeks because I'm not shipping it myself, and I can spend more time creating new stories while remaining independent. Best of all, I'll have the time to write and release more than one or two books a year.

Sunken Treasure was more successful than I ever dreamed, got great reviews, and continues to sell very well in print and digital editions.

I introduced my son to the joy of a game called Button Men, and reintroduced myself to the even greater joy of playing with him:

I walked out into the living room and found Nolan sitting at our iMac, playing Diablo.

"Hey, it's too dark and cold outside to throw the frisbee," I said, "but at the dining room table, it's perfect for throwing dice."

He spun around in his chair. "Two minutes. Then you are going down."

"Awesome."

I walked back into my office, deliberately did not look at my desk, grabbed the bag of Button Men, and a bag of dice. I took them all out to the dining room, and untied the bag. I gleefully watched polyhedra spill out and clatter across the table.

"I hope that the simple act of watching dice fall always makes me this happy," I thought.

I looked up, and saw that Nolan was intently focused on his game. I picked up the bag of Button Men and gently shook it.

The buttons clattered. He did not turn.

I shook the bag harder. Still, he did not turn.

I shook the bag harder still, cleared my throat, and stomped my foot.

I think he's talking to you!

I noticed Nolan's shoulders were twitching just a little bit.

You win this round, kid, but I'll win when it counts.

"Dude! Come on!" I said.

He was smiling as he turned around and walked over to the table.

"I don' t know why you're in such a hurry to get owned," he said.

It's not about the game, it's about playing the game with you.

I told a story about playing T-ball while my dad watched. Well, I told it the way I remember it:

When I was six years old, I set foot onto on a T-ball diamond for the first time.

I was skinny, awkward and unsure of myself – basically a smaller version of the teenager I'd eventually become – and I didn't have very good coordination, but my dad loved baseball, and I knew that if my dad loved it, I loved it too, because that's the way things work when you're six.

It was the spring of 1978, when smog alerts were as common as reality shows are today, and hazy, reddish gold sunlight shone down on the field at Sunland Park. The sounds of other kids playing on the swings and in the giant rocket ship at the playground mingled with the smell of barbecue smoke as I stepped up to the plate to take my first practice swings.

My first swing connected with the middle of the tee. The baseball – in those days of gas lines and national malaise, we didn't have the soft RIF balls my kids got to play with – fell off and landed in the batter's box on the other side of the plate. The other kids giggled while the coach clapped his hands and shouted encouraging words to me as I picked the ball up and put it back on the tee.

I looked up and saw my father's expectant face through the chainlink fence near the dugout. I slowly and deliberately lifted my bat, held it out at arm's length, and aimed at the top of the tee with one eye closed. I stuck out my tongue and furrowed my brow. I tasted sweat on the corners of my mouth, and felt my heart beat in my ears.

The bat touched the ball, and it fell off again. The kids giggled again. The coach clapped again. I replaced the ball on the tee again.

"Come on, Willow," my dad said. "You can do it!"

To be continued in part two…

I spent a couple hours tonight going through my blog for the annual year in review series of posts. I thought I'd make two or three posts, but so much awesome stuff happened, I ended up with six – yeah, six – posts worth of stuff to pull out and comment on. That lead me to write this, which will come at the end of part six. (Exactly why I'm posting spoilers for my own blog posts that will publish in two days remains a mystery. I guess I'm just so happy and grateful for the good stuff that happened this year, I wanted to share that joy and gratitude right now.)

You know, it's really easy to look back on the year and only see the things I didn't do, the things I didn't finish, the stuff I missed out on, and the things that I failed to accomplish. In fact, it's really hard not to do that. But when I put this whole series of posts together, a pretty clear picture emerged: 2009 was an awesome year for me professionally, easily the best year I've had as an actor this decade. As a writer, I didn't do the fiction I wanted to do (again) but I released two books that people seem to like a whole lot, and began work on another. For the first time since I started this stuff, I finally feel – for real – like I can really make a living doing this stuff. I'm not getting rich (and it's not like I'm not trying, guys) but I'm not starving or struggling, either.

Over all, I'm grateful for my friends, my family, my health, my success, and that I get to share all of those things with millions of people (wow, that's weird) who I'll probably never get to meet, but who seem to genuinely care about all that stuff, and give me the wonderful gift of listening to me when I tell them stories about it. You're reading this, so you're probably one of those people, right? Well, thank you. I sincerely mean that.

Yeah, 2009 was a pretty good year, so I'm putting 2010 on notice: you've got some big shoes to fill, buddy. I think you should get on the phone with some people and get to work.

The 2009 year in review starts tomorrow morning, right here on this station. Now, stay tuned for your local news.

I ended up watching Evolution on WGN late last night. I hadn't seen it since it first aired, so I'd forgotten that it was more commonly known to me as "the one with the Nanites."

When I see TNG on the guide, I usually click over and watch for a second before I go back to watching NHL on the Fly, but when I the picture resolved itself, and the first thing I saw and thought was, "Oh God. The Helmet Hair," (I even joked about it on Twitter), I didn't change the station; I just set the remote down and watched … and I felt incredibly happy while I did. I don't know how I did it, but I was able to mentally flip between watching my teenage self acting on a TV show, and just watching Star Trek like a regular person who loves it.

Evolution is actually quite good, and we're all quite good in it. During the commercials, I tried to recall specific memories about filming it, but all I could get were some very vague, dreamlike recollections that were so faint, I'm not even sure they were real and not just my brain making things up so I'd stop entering search queries and taxing its server.

Some memories (of the Future, durr) were crystal clear: how great it was to have Gates back, how excited I was to have an episode where Wesley wasn't a weenie, and how cool it was to finally have scenes together where we interacted as mother and son in a believable way.

The strongest memories, though, were off-set, and more tied to that time in my life then they were to that actual episode: painting 40K minis in my dressing room between scenes, going to game cons with my friends to play with those minis, and driving down to the Forum after work to watch the Kings, listening to Depeche Mode, The Smiths, and The Cure the whole way. When the episode was over, I felt this weird combination of joy and sadness that I can't quite find the words to accurately describe. I guess "wistful nostalgia" probably comes closest to how I felt, but even that feels inadequate.

You know, I really hated the Helmet Hair (to this day, if I even smell Shaper hairspray I feel like I'm going to gag) and the grey spacesuit wasn't the coolest thing in the world, especially when everyone else got to wear those awesome two-piece spacesuits, but if wearing The Helmet Hair and The Iron Maiden were the price of admission to working with people I love on a show that I love, I'm glad I got to pay it.