Author: Wil

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

this is the heavy heavy monster sound

Posted on By Wil

I’m still in head down mode until I finish Scalzi’s intro, which is due today, but I had that magical moment yesterday when I moved some things around, added a few paragraphs, then sat back in my chair and said to the empty room, “There it is! I can finally say ‘it’s coming together.'”

Once I get to this point in a project, it’s like I’ve been flailing around in a twisty maze of passages, all alike, and I’ve finally been handed a torch and a map. I never know when it’s going to happen on a particular job, but I’m always relieved when it finally does. One day before the deadline isn’t the best time for it to happen, but it’s not the blurst time, either.

This is one of the reliable steps in my writing process, like the “this sucks, I suck, everything I do sucks, I’m the suckiest bunch of sucks who ever sucked” step*. There are other, less-amusingly-named-but-equally-reliable steps in my writing process, and even the frustrating ones give me reassurance, because I know that I’m on track. There’s being stuck, and then there’s being stuck, you know?

These steps come in random order, and the ones where I feel stuck usually last from a few hours to a few days. There isn’t a reliable trick to get through them, but knowing that there are these mile markers along the road has given me a lot more confidence as a writer.

Currently, I’m in a step I call “I really need to finish the thing, but I think I’ll write something else instead.”

Yep. Right on schedule.

*This is the step where I constantly repeat my own advice to myself: Don’t be afraid to suck. It’s easier to fix something that’s broken than it is to fill up an empty page.

calling all geeks

Posted on By Wil

I’m in Head Down mode while I race to the finishdeadline for the introduction to Your Hate Mail Will be Graded, which collects ten years (!) of John Scalzi’s blog, Whatever. I care about this particular project more than I do the average project (which is already a lot, mind you) because John is my friend, and letting him down is not an option.

So there’s not going to be a whole lot of stuff here (well, stuff with any deep commentary or extended content) until the deadline passes.

However, in this hour’s (hours’? hours? stupid grammar is almost as hard as math) 12 minutes of “do whatever I want” time, I wanted to share a new group I created at Propeller 2.0, called the Geek Group:

This group is for me and my fellow geeks. There will be overlap with Science, I’m sure, but we can watch and share stories about comics, science fiction (books and movies), hobby games like D, geeky television shows like Heroes and LOST, and events like Comic-Con, GenCon, Dragon*Con and PAX.

This, I think, is the coolest part of Propeller 2.0: users can create and join groups that are tailored to our various interests, so we can find stories, information, and other people who have those interests in common. It dramatically improves the signal to noise ratio, and creates a more “social” social news experience. We’ve got 67 members, and some cool stories are starting to fill up our “stories this group is watching” thing, so come on down and get your geek on!

I can tell by watching this that he used to be cool.

Posted on By Wil

This was shot by my friend Rich, presumably while I was driving home from Comic-Con. This video is awesome, but it makes me sad because it reminds me of one of the best things ever about working on TNG (Jonathan Frakes breaking into show tunes at random intervals) and it reminds me that I saw Jonathan at Comic-Con, but I couldn’t get close enough to him to say hello.


You know, the worst part of being excluded from the Vegas con is that I’m missing the once-a-year opportunity to see some people I really like (and miss) who live very, very far away.

part three of my interview with comicmix

Posted on By Wil

The final part of my three part interview with Comicmix is online.

COMICMIX: Okay, Wil, as a writer and reader of comics, what makes a good story to you?

WIL WHEATON: Comics are a visual medium, so the artwork is extremely important to me. There are tremendously talented writers who occasionally get paired up with artists whose art I don’t like. And I won’t read those books.

There are artists and writers who collaborate together. Matt [Fraction] gives Casanova artist Gabriel Ba as much credit for Casanova being awesome as people give Matt for making Casanova awesome. Ed [Brubaker] does the same thing with Criminal. And I think that says a lot about the importance of a good team-up. I’m lucky.

I’ve gotten to work with some great artists when I’ve done manga for TokyoPop.I don’t know if the stories I’ve written would have the same emotional impact with the reader with different art. That really, really important combination of peanut butter and chocolate is really important to making comic books great.

Um. Wil? How about you answer the goddamn question?

What makes a book — just a standard book — very good, is the story and the dialogue and the interaction of the characters. So what makes a comic book great is those ingredients all put together, matched up with good pacing and really good artwork. A lot of the Alan Moore comics have all these wonderful elements that make reading comics fun, too. Top Ten is like playing “Where’s Waldo,” because after you’ve read the story you can go back through and read it again. Or if you read Watchmen and see the issues, there’s the Rorschach issue that’s in the middle where it mirrors itself — that kind of stuff. A book like Sin City that uses positive and negative space really creatively, that’s a great book, too.

Of course, I should disclaim all this stuff. I recently wrote that I was worried about the new Star Trek movie being good, and I was vilified by Star Trek fans for having the temerity for expressing an opinion about this. Like I don’t deserve to have an opinion about this.

This is the end of about 2 hours of me and Chris talking, and this final part feels rambling to me, which is probably how I felt when we’d talked for about 2 hours. I got to talk about technology a little bit, though, which was kind of cool:

CMix: What about the one piece of technology you can’t live without?

WW: The technology I can’t live without? Does encryption count as technology? It would have to be encryption. Think about the Internet without encryption. Absolutely no shopping online at all. None. Ever.

Not a single financial transaction would be possible without encryption.

Sure, there are things that I like that are fun. But can’t live without? I could not live without encryption — and to make it clear, I’m talking about open source public encryption. R.S.A. standards.

Yay standards! Yay for stating the obvious! Yay for Neil Gaiman writing Batman next year!

Oh, my favorite part of the interview is when I go on and on about my creative process. It’s really too long to excerpt, but I promise it’s worth the effort to go read the whole interview at Comicmix.

See what I did there?