It’s been a long time since I made a mixtape, but I remember making them all the time when I was a kid. I rarely had the opportunity to make them for another person, but that didn’t stop me from making endless awesome mixes to block out the world on my Walkman.
I’ve made a ton of public playlists over the years, but every last one of them is meant to be shuffled. They don’t have a cohesive theme, tell a story, or do anything that particular flavor of mixtape did for us back in the 80s. They are more like radio stations, I suppose. I’ve received lots of compliments for my Generic New Wave, and my KROQ Flashback playlists from people who experience them that way.
But I haven’t made a playlist with intention, to be listened to in a particular order, in well over a decade, probably two, until I got it into my head recently that it was time.
So I made two sides of a 60 minute cassette. The first side is Boys Drool, featuring a lot of the women in rock who I can’t stop listening to right now, with a focus on punk and hardcore. Due to the time limit, it’s far from complete, and it kind of insists on a second volume with a different focus.
The second side is Wax and Wane. This is classic goth, dark and moody, meant to listen to while you come down from dancing your face off with the ladies on side one. Did you know that Bela Lugosi’s Dead was recorded and mixed live, done in a single take? So when we listen to the album version, we are hearing exactly what someone sitting in the session heard, as if our headphones have been plugged into the past. I fucking love that.
While I assembled both sides of this tape, I was reminded how fun it is when I impose limits on myself and commit to working within them. Having just thirty minutes to work with forced me to get really clear with myself on what I wanted to do. Ever since I started writing, I have embraced the concept of choosing arbitrary limitations to work within, so that when actual limitations arrive, I already have some experience finding the stuff that needs to be cut or changed. Also, it’s fun and creates space for me to appreciate when I don’t have limitations.
This week’s It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton is The Loneliness of Former Constellations, by P.H. Low, originally published in Strange Horizons.
The war is long over and as the memory of it fades, it has taken with it the sacrifices and horrors endured by those who fought and won the conflict.
One of those warriors, perhaps the most consequential warrior, you’ll have to decide if that’s accurate for yourself, has quietly made a home for herself, far away from the blood-soaked front lines, where she has safely grown old, in quiet solitude.
Our story begins when she receives a visitor, a young warrior who brings with her a familiar something halfway between an echo and a reflection that stirs something deep within the veteran who welcomes her. The war is over, but there are still battles to be fought, tyrants to be defeated, a young warrior to be mentored.
She is tired, but it has been a very long time since she received a visitor, let alone a young warrior who may remind her of herself, so long ago, so she will embrace her visitor, embrace the responsibility of caring for her, and, perhaps, she will find a way to soften her embrace of The Loneliness of Former Constellations.
I interviewed Phoebe yesterday. We had a lovely conversation about her process, how this story came together, and combining sci-fi with fantasy. I think we are dropping it next week.
I have two live shows happening in Los Angeles, both with limited tickets, so if you’re local and want to come out, I suggest you grab them today.
Anne and I have known J.Keith vanStratten forever. Over 25 years, at least. I was his sidekick on his eponymous talk show in a theater at ACME for a long time, and loved every second of it. Keith hosts Go Fact Yourself on public radio (YAY PUBLIC RADIO!), and he invited Anne and me to be guests on this year’s holiday show. Tickets are on sale now.
On October 25, I’m going to be at Geeky Teas in Burbank for It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton, Live. Last year, I did a live reading of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow for our Patreon subscribers, from my office. (Where I’m sitting right now, actually.) It wasn’t directed, or mastered, or anything like that. It was just me, the story, and a mic (Love you, LeVar). I had a great time doing it, and I got good feedback, so I’m doing another live reading this year, with an eye toward establishing a yearly tradition. This year’s classic tale of terror is The Body Snatcher, by Robert Louis Stevenson.
Here’s a little bit I grabbed from a summary, to entice you:
Every night, four men regularly meet in the small parlour of the George Inn at Debenham: the landlord, an undertaker, the narrator, and an old Scotsman named Fettes. Once educated and comfortably off, Fettes is now a “crapulous, disreputable” drunkard. The townspeople call him “the Doctor” because he occasionally sets a bone or treats an injury, though little is known about his past.
One winter evening, news arrives that a wealthy local landowner has been struck with apoplexy and that his famous London physician has been telegraphed to come. When the landlord mentions the doctor’s name—“Dr. Wolfe Macfarlane”—Fettes, half drunk moments before, becomes instantly sober. He repeats the name “Macfarlane” in shock, then insists, “I must see him face to face.” The other men watch as the once-listless drunk becomes alert and deadly serious.
The rest of the story is uncovering why Fettes is now a drunk, and what (or maybe who) he is running from. It’s creepy and even scary at times, and the prose is delicious.
Because this is Stevenson’s most famous horror work after Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde, there is a ton of scholarly writing and analysis of it online. Because I am that kind of nerd, of course I dove in and drank deeply from the wells of knowledge I found within. This is a story that, like Sleepy Hollow, was written in response to contemporary events that have been mostly lost to history. When we know the context in which it was written, and the events that inspired it, it gives us (or gave me, at least) an elevated experience and additional appreciation of the material, in addition to a great story. Without turning it into a college lecture, I am thinking about including some of that in the show, the way I record codas after each story for Patreon.
It won’t be fancy, it won’t be staged. It’s literally just me, in a chair, telling you a story for about an hour. There are a couple lighting cues, and that’s it. I’m keeping this as simple as possible, because I don’t have time to rehearse and prepare any staging. I’d rather keep it simple, and feel prepared, than make it complicated and risk feeling like I got in over my head.
Also, I’m giving serious consideration to taking myself on the road, and playing some smaller theaters with live readings that we’ll record for the podcast. This will help me find out if there is any audience for that, if I even feel good reading in front of a live audience, and give me a safe place to stumble a bit, if I need to.
The last time I did anything like this, it was so long ago, we made our own flyers to promote it. So I reached out to my friend, Sean, who hooked me up with a couple of classic punk-style flyers:
Aren’t they great? Honestly, if the show is half as fun as the flyers, I’m good!
The performance will be streamed live, and archived, for Patreon subscribers, so if you want to watch it but aren’t local, you can join us there for five bucks, which will also give you access to the entire show’s archive, and all our BTS materials, for a month.
Operation Read All The Books continues. I just finished Joseph Fink’s The Nudge, a fun and creepy novella that I tore through in about an hour. I’m deeply in love with The Republic of Memory, which plays with language in a deeply saitsfying way. I just picked up Ode To The Half-Broken, though, and my quick glance at the beginning of it to see where in the queue I wanted to put it came to an end when I noticed I was coming up on page 100, and I may as well go ahead and just put at at the top. This is the first story I have ever read where a robot protagonist felt like a robot, rather than a robot-as-imagined-by-a-human. And it’s just delightful, too.
Speaking of Read All The Books, my collection at Black Stone awaits! I’m such a fan of Black Stone; they don’t use any DRM, ever, in their audio and ebooks, they support indie artists, and they publish some truly outstanding genre work. This month, I wanted to spotlight Hard Reset, by Jonathan Yanez. This is a Lit RPG novel that does all the fun tropes we expect, but is so much more than that. Like Acts of God, which is also in the collection, it goes into the virtual world, and spends most of its time there, but that world is given context and higher stakes when we go outside, into the “real” (as far as any of us know) reality that contains it. It’s a lot of fun, and I connected to the characters very early in the narrative.
Last thing before I go: A study concluded that people who start their day with at least 30 minutes of literally anything that is not online reported significantly improved everything in their day. I’ve been trying this for about two weeks, and my non-scientific contribution is: fuck yeah, it does.
Just something to think about, maybe try out for yourself.
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I am just impressed you still have a cassette player. I haven’t had one since the mid 90’s. I don’t even have a cd player anymore.
Curated playlists (mixtapes!) and reading lists (audio and visual). Thanks!
Reminds me of back in the day when I used to go to dance clubs, when the DJ’s warmup set (when almost nobody was there) was a song story that either focused on the moods of the day (personally or in the news), or on a musical theme (often through history). For me, it was a masterclass on breaking the view of songs being separate, isolated things, and that when we’re open enough, we can find the stories connecting a sequence of songs without the DJ needing to say a word.
Of course, the rest of the night was a series of dance bangers seemingly organized to wear us out and drive business to the bar! Which also reminds me of how Red Bull & Vodka helped as I grew older…
I miss mixtapes. Very cool you actually have a cassette player. My daughter teases me because I like to listen to albums first song to last. I feel like the artist is telling a story with their song order and for the most part I like to get a feel for what that story is before I move to shuffling them.
I was given a mix tape twice…not realizing the significance, i broke someone’s heart in one. She thought I was gay, too, and I didnt take her feelings seriously. It was a fatal stab in a great friendship. My young mind learned the brutal lesson.
It is great seeing you and Anne are performance art-ing together. Witty, fun, smart…your bride is on the “cool peeps of earth” list
I haven’t made a mix tape, let alone a playlist, in what feels like forever. What a great idea!
I remember getting a playlist link from you years ago, in one of the Quarterly boxes, and I have some of your randomized ones saved on Spotify as well since they are pretty great for work. They’ve all been fantastic. When I clicked through to these to save them, I can’t tell you how excited I was to see that someone else still remembers Babes in Toyland. Fontanelle was in high rotation for me in my teen years.
If you do decide to take the show on the road, I hope I can catch you somewhere on the east coast!
I must watch Hi Fidelity again.
I would absolutely offer green paper (or more likely the electronic equivalent thereof) to attend a live “It’s Storytime”.