Author: Wil

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

binary bubbles!

Posted on By Wil

It's the cover of Sunken Treasure!

According to Flickr, about 2500 people have peeked at the cover of Sunken Treasure since I mentioned it on Twitter yesterday. I just love it, and before I release the book at noon Pacific today, I wanted to give everyone who reads my blog a chance to see it (and hopefully get as excited about it as I am) now.

The general consensus is that it's awesome, especially the little binary bubbles. I totally agree, and want to publicly thank and give credit to my pal Matt for designing it.

Edited to add: The release is going to be delayed just a little bit, but when you find out why, I think you'll agree that it was totally worth the wait.

Edited again to add: Yay! It's officially on sale now.

from the vault: the autumn moon lights my way

Posted on By Wil

I reached into the vault and pulled this entry out today because a reader recently commented that it was one of her favorites, and what do you know, it's one of mine, too.

When I wrote this, Ryan and Nolan were barely 16 and 14, in the middle of what Anne and I called "The Pod Person Phenomenon" where our sweet, wonderful little children were taken in the night and replaced by Pod People who suddenly thought we were so lame and wanted to argue about everything, regardless of how insignificant it actually was.

The Pod People eventually departed as rapidly and unexpectedly as they arrived, but the moment I captured in this blog was a joyful island in the middle of a stormy sea of exasperated sighs and rolling eyes:

the autumn moon lights my way

I heard Led Zeppelin coming out of Ryan's room, so I put down my Sudoku book (yeah, I've been hooked for about a month), walked down the hall, and knocked on his door.

"Come in," he said.

I opened, and entered his sanctuary: astronomy posters hung from his walls, and a stack of books (Les Miserables, The Count of Monte Cristo, Macbeth, Divine Comedy and a host of other books that your average AP English student with a 4.0 in the class reads*) sat on his desk. A pile of (clean? dirty?) clothes lay in a heap at the foot of his bed. He sat at his desk, looking at The Internets.

He turned around in his chair. "What's up?" He said.

"Oh, I just heard you listening to Zeppelin II, and I didn't want to miss a chance to share in something we both love, that I happened to introduce to you in the pre-Pod days," I thought.

"I . . . just wondered what you were doing." I said.

He got very excited. "Oh! I found this awesome Family Guy Website, and I was downloading audio clips from it, and putting them on my computer." He clicked a few times, and showed me the website.

"When I was your age, I did the same thing, with The Prisoner and Star Trek," I said, "on my Mac II."

He frowned. "Weren't you on Star Trek?"

"Yeah," I said, "but the sounds were from the original series."

He looked back at me.

"So it was geeky, but it wasn't totally lame," I said. Why did I feel like I our ages and roles were reversed?

"What's The Prisoner?" He said.

"A show that I love, that I don't think you're geeky enough to enjoy."

He clicked his mouse, and iTunes fell silent.

"Wil," he said, "you didn't think I'd like Firefly."

"Touche," I said with a smile. "Any time you want to watch The Prisoner, I am so there."

Actually, any time you want to do anything, I am so there, because I don't want to be a stranger to you for the next five years, and I'll close the gap any way I can.

"Okay," he said. "Maybe after school some day next week."

"When –"

"When my homework's done," he said. "I know, Wil."

He wasn't snotty. He wasn't rude. He wasn't impatient or unpleasant. He just . . . was. I saw a lot of myself in him.

"I need to work my a–" he began, "I need to work very hard this semester."

I nodded my head. "I'm glad you know that, Ryan."

He turned back around to his computer. I stood in his doorway and looked at him for a minute.

He may not have my DNA, but I've given him some of the things that matter in life.

"Ryan?"

He didn't turn around. "Hmm?"

"I love you."

"I love you too, Wil."

"Ramble On, And now's the time, the time is now, to sing my song.
I'm goin' 'round the world, I got to find my girl, on my way.
I've been this way ten years to the day, Ramble On,
Gotta find the queen of all my dreams."

*Yeah, I'm proud of him. Sue me.

We ended up watching a whole lot of The Prisoner together before he went off to college, and we watched a lot of Twin Peaks, The Twilight Zone, and The Outer Limits, too. I meet grown-up kids and their parents all the time these days who tell me that watching Star Trek together was important to them, and after watching these shows with my own kids, I totally understand what they're talking about.

Ryan is in his sophomore year right now. Every day, it seems, he sends me a text message or an e-mail, or calls me and his mom to tell us what's going on at school, or just to tell us he loves us. While I do miss him, I can't be too sad, because my whole goal as his parent was to raise a smart, capable, independent, successful and responsible person.

Every day, it seems, he affirms for me in some way that we were successful.

justice is served, edo-style!

Posted on By Wil

I understand that SciFi Channel has just finished serving up a special kind of Justice.

From our first season on TNG, it’s full of growing pains, but it remains one of the most unintentionally hilarious we ever did, and if ever there was an episode worthy of a Riff Track, well, I think this one should get it. Hell, maybe I’ll do it myself.

Anyway, if you’ve just seen it for the first time in recent years or ever, I think you’ll get a kick out of the review/recap that I did for TV Squad:

After dropping some human colonists off in the Strnad solar system, the Enterprise notices a rather nice Class M planet in the nearby Rubicun system, called Rubicun III. Picard sends an away team down to the surface to find out if it’s a good place for some shore leave, and they return with some very good news: it’s clean, it’s beautiful, it’s populated with friendly humanoids . . . and they really like to do the nasty.

“At the drop of a hat,” according to Geordi.

“Any hat,” Tasha says, knowingly.

Picard sends a second, larger team down to the planet to see exactly how many hats they’re going to need. Because every responsible Starfleet parent would want to send their children down to the galaxy’s longest running planetary orgy, he orders Wesley Crusher to see if the planet is a good place for kids to hang out.

[…]

Down on the planet, Wesley is jogging around with his new friends. Unlike the adults, who are busy getting their freak on in Plato’s Retreat, the kids are busy showing off their gymnastic skills. One of the Edo boys walks on his hands! Oh! Wesley got served! But wait! Wesley serves back with some cartwheels and a roundoff, and IT’S ON!

In fact, it’s so on, the girl (who was played by a really sweet girl named Judith Jones, who played my girlfriend on an after school special called My Dad Can’t Be Crazy, Can He?) gets so hot for Wesley, she asks him if he’ll “teach her” how to “play ball.”

Oh, you bet, baby. Uncle Wesley will teach you how to play ball. Why don’t you just slip into this latex bodysuit and put on this wig first, and then we’ll play all sorts of ball, you dirty little bitch.

Uh. What just happened? Sorry about that.

Wesley tells them to get a bat. When they don’t know what it is, he describes Worf’s penis. It’s not awkward at all.

[…]

After extracting a promise that the Edo won’t kill Wesley before sundown, Picard takes Rivan with him back to the Enterprise. Once there, he shows her “god” (this is, quite honestly, a nice little homage to the original series. Whenever Captain Kirk took a hot babe back to the space ship, he showed her god, too. Sometimes, he showed her an entire pantheon of gods. And he never called her back, baby, because that’s just how he rolled, leaving broken hearts all over the galaxy. Awww yeah.) The problem is, god is pissed, and shakes the ship until Picard beams Rivan back down to the planet. Poor Picard, he brought her all the way home, and he didn’t get to drop a single hat.

This review will be in my forthcoming collection of first season reviews, Memories of the Future.

Bonus! If you want to listen to me perform this review, you can enjoy to this audio from the 2008 Phoenix Comicon. Double bonus: you can also hear me read Blue Light Special, from Happiest Days of Our Lives.

Shameless plug: You totally want the Happiest Days of Our Lives audiobook.

Man, that turned into a shameless plug really quick, didn’t it? I mean, it really got out of hand! Brick killed a guy.

“I stabbed a man in the heart with a trident.”

“I saw that!”

Um. Kids, when you start quoting Anchorman and then talk about it in Bob Saget’s voice, it’s time to end the blog entry and just hit publish.

sunken treasure gets additional material and goes unlimited

Posted on By Wil

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.

I’m proud of Sunken Treasure, and people who read it seemed to really like it. But if you were wondering what you’re getting into, here’s part of the introduction I wrote for this release:

With the help of my editor Andrew, who is a former ninja warrior and recreational time traveler, I pulled together things I liked from all three of my books, my blog, and this groovy collaborative fiction project I played with called Ficlets. I also included, for the first time anywhere, one of the scripts I wrote for a sketch comedy show at the ACME Comedy Theater.

When we printed out the resulting chapbook so we could proof it, Andrew and I both noticed that without really trying, we’d managed to put together something that was a lot cooler than we’d expected.

“This is a great way to introduce people to my writing,” I said.

“Maybe we should consider making it a more substantial release,” Andrew said. “So more than 200 people can have a chance to read it.”

I thought that was an excellent idea. It was such an excellent idea, I completely forgot about it until the beginning of 2009, when I found six unsold copies in my office. I took them with me to a convention in Phoenix, sold them all, and began thinking about putting together the book that you have in your hands right now.

I’ve expanded this version from the original just a little bit, and included the production diary I wrote about my experiences working on Criminal Minds last year, because of everything I wrote in 2008, that was what people seemed to like the most, and I’m all about making the people happy.

I hope you enjoy this little collection, and I hope you’ll share it with your friends.

Unlike the autographed limited edition I took to cons last year, it’s, um, not limited, and not autographed, but it is expanded a little bit, and it’s not deliberately lo-fi. It won’t feel like a ‘zine at all. My friend Matt did a beautiful cover for it, and if enough people ask, I can easily offer a hardcover version with just a few clicks.

I hope it will find its way to all the people who wanted to read it, but couldn’t make it out to any of the very few conventions I attended last year. I’m working out the final details of publishing it right now, and I’ll have all that information available in a day or so.

*Watch how I bury this in the footnote: Memories of the Future is what I’m calling the book of TNG reviews.

**As it turns out, that project self-destructed, so it worked out that I didn’t risk releasing excerpts.

***Nearly all the e-mails I’ve gotten from people who can’t come to my conventions are from these places. Obviously, you will be able to purchase this book from anywhere in the world.


wil’s fundamental rule for successful auditions (or, how not to go crazy in a crazy business)

Posted on By Wil

I’m proofing the edit that Andrew and I have been working on, and something jumped out at me just now that I thought was worth excerpting here, for my fellow actors. I guess you could call it my fundamental rule for successful auditions:

I believe that actors have to find a way to enjoy themselves whether they book the job or not. We have to find ways to enjoy auditions, and as hard as it is, as counter intuitive as it is, we just can’t make success or failure about booking the job. We have to make success or failure about enjoying ourselves. We have to enjoy the process of creating the character, preparing the audition, and then giving the people on the other side of the desk whatever our take on the character is. We absolutely cannot go in there and try to give them what we think they want. The way we stand out, and the way we enjoy it whether we are hired or not, is to take the material, prepare it, and find some way to make it our own. Even if we don’t book the job (and the ratio of auditions to jobs is something like 20 : 1 for successful actors) we’ve been creative. Casting people will recognize that, and even if we’re not right for this particular job, they are more likely to bring us back in for other parts, because they’ve already seen us take a creative risk. I guess it’s kind of twisted to say that I enjoyed myself by being such an evil man, but committing to something completely, and refusing to look back until it was all over, was tremendously satisfying.

This particular excerpt is related to my audition for Criminal Minds last year, but I think it could apply to any job interview where you’re expected to be creative. I’ve been an actor for pretty much my entire life, but I didn’t figure out this really important truth until just a few years ago. Since I figured it out, I’ve had much more satisfying experiences in auditions, whether I’ve booked the job or not. I’m also more relaxed, and the whole process isn’t nearly as soul-crushing as it once was.

There is so much that’s out of our control when we audition, we need to focus on what we can control: how prepared we are, how clear our take on the character is, and how committed we are to that interpretation. I had an audition recently for a network show that everyone wants to be on. I prepared my scenes to the best of my ability, and I had a great time showing the casting people my take on the character. They sent my tape to the producers, and I didn’t get the job. They say that they really liked me, though, and they’d keep me in mind for a different role in the future. I don’t know if that’ll happen, but I know that I did not suck and I made a good impression when I read for them. This is what I set out to do, so the audition was a success, because during the small part of the process I have any control over, I did my job, and that’s all I can do. It’s all any of us can do, and if we think that we can do something more, we’ll drive ourselves crazy. We just have to get in there, do the best we can do, and let it go when we walk out of the room. In fact, I throw my sides into the nearest recycling bin as soon as I’m done, so I symbolically and literally let the whole thing go once it’s out of my hands.

This may seem like a bunch of “yeah, duh,” information, but it took me over 20 years to figure it out, so if I can help anyone else get here a little bit faster than I did, my work here is done.