All posts by Wil

Author, actor, producer. On a good day, I am charming as fuck.

Short Fiction: 239 Sycamore St.

While walking through my neighborhood yesterday, I wondered what actually went on behind those manicured lawns and drawn curtains. I wondered how much I really knew my neighbors.

This is what my brain spat out:

Ian missed living in a city that didn’t keep any secrets from him, where everything was out in the open: junkies, hookers, pan handlers, rich snobs and bad cops. You knew where you stood with everyone in the city, and everyone in the city knew where they stood with you.

In the suburbs, though, everyone had a secret. Two houses up, the Doyles were overdue on three months’ of bills, but they kept paying the gardener to come and keep up appearances. Across the street, Mrs. Canton practically begged every delivery boy who came to the door to fuck her, except on Sunday when she went door to door, passing out bible tracts. Next door, Doctor and Mrs. Thompson argued quietly and intensely almost every night about their son, who they’d put into a group home for troubled youth.

Day after day, Ian smiled and waved to his neighbors, while recording all of their secrets in journals and photo albums.

When the police finally found the bodies buried in the loose dirt of his basement, his neighbors were shocked: “He was quiet,” Doctor Thompson said. “He kept to himself,” Mrs. Thompson added.

“He never left his garbage cans out. He kept a lovely lawn,” The Doyles told investigators.

When the handsome young reporter from Channel 6 came to her door, Mrs. Canton smiled carefully and said, “Would you like to come inside and talk about it over a cup of coffee?” 

I worked on it a little bit yesterday, and again this morning, mostly focusing it on the beats I wanted to put together. I'll be honest: I'm nervous to release fiction, even short fiction like this (just 239 words) to the world without even showing it to an editor, first … but the point of this isn't to be perfect, it's to be creative. So, writers who are afraid to show their work to readers: if I can do this, so can you.

NB: My neighbors are actually quite lovely … as far as I know.

i got a new t-shirt today …

I did a bunch of writing this morning, but I still don't have a monster to unleash on the villagers. I'm not going to lie to you, Marge, it's kind of frustrating, and my goddamn inner critic is screaming at me that I'm terrible and it's stupid and they're all going to laugh at me, which doesn't help even a tiny bit. Don't worry, I'll get over it.

Still, it was enough that I felt like I'd earned the right to make an X on the calendar in the "Creative" box, which is kind of the whole point right now. To continue the running comparison, I'm still just trying to make it around the track without throwing up, which is fine. 

I also got a stupid idea for a stupid cell phone video, and made this:

Context, for the seven of you who don't know what the Alot is.

I also customized my band in Rock Band 3 (I bet you didn't know that a large part of writing is not actually writing, but doing all sorts of other things when you should be writing and calling it "letting my mind wander" or something like that), which could also be considered creative. We're three hot girls and me, and we're called Abby Nermal. Our logo is a cute cat who has swallowed a fish that glows inside its tummy.

 

a whole lot of good exercise

Today's effort to do something creative didn't result in anything I can actually publish (yet), but was still enjoyable and worthwhile, and I wanted to share something about the experience that I hope some of you find useful.

I'm disappointed that I don't have anything to point to and say, "hey, I made this", because even though I think it's an unreasonable expectation, I still hoped that I'd be able to pull together a 100-300 word story, like some of my friends do. 

Yeah, it turns out that making something up and giving it life, as opposed to remembering it and recreating it, is hard enough without trying to cram it all into a very small space. Being seriously out of practice after spending months focused on acting didn't help, and the ideas I had just couldn't be assembled into a monster from their individual parts. (They looked lovely, though, spread out all over the lab, and the thrumming of all my mad scientist electrical equipment was … energizing, to say the least.)

But this doesn't mean that it wasn't worthwhile. I don't have something to show off today, but one or both of them may be available soon … and even if they aren't, I still spent a considerable amount of time today working at it. I spent a lot of time and energy today being a writer, being a creator, and that goes down as a good day in my log book.

I guess this could be compared to a runner working really hard and logging a lot of miles trying to get a faster time, or greater distance than before: even if that specific goal isn't met, she still got a whole lot of good exercise.

knock me your lobes

I have begun a new project, which until I come up with a better name is called Project Do Something Creative Every Day For The Rest Of The Year (Yes, This Includes Holidays).

The first entry in PDSCEDFTROTY (YTIH) is a new episode of my neglected and long-overdue-for-updating podcast, Radio Free Burrito.

On this RFB, I deliver a bunch of weird audio collected from the internets, a whole lot of thank yous, and a reading from the special edition of The Happiest Days of Our Lives.

I don't usually promote RFB on my blog, but I had a lot of fun putting this episode together, so there you go.

Speaking of things I don't promote enough, did you know I partnered with Jinx to make some spiffy T-shirts? The costume department at Big Bang Theory even chose one of them for Evil Wil Wheaton to wear in The 21-second Excitation. I thought it was a pretty clever bit of meta meta. As it happens, that shirt is my favorite of all the shirts we did together, so hooray for that, too.

 

 

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