Author: Wil

Author, actor, producer. On a good day, I am charming as fuck.
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“Haunted Bunk Bed Terrifies Family”

Posted on By Wil

I post a lot of stuff on my Tumblr, share a lot of pictures on my Instagram, put videos on my YouTube channel, and do dumb things every day with Twitter. I’m also starting a regular thing on my Twitch channel (more on that later), so I can honestly say that I produce a lot of content or at least share a lot of content online. But it feels like my blog, which is where the whole thing started, is largely neglected, because I feel like I can only post bigger things or deeper things or heavier things here.

So I’m giving myself permission to post whatever the hell I want, so I can just get past the internal gatekeeper slash critic who prevents me from using the one space on the Internet that is entirely mine.

Therefore: I hereby challenge myself to post one thing a day during the month of December, no matter what it is. It can be a picture, a few lines from a work in progress, a video, a collection of links to things, or even just one link to one thing.

So. It is December first, and I am beginning with something dumb that is still interesting to me.

Even though I am writing a short, supernatural story right now, I do not believe in the paranormal. At all. Still, I freaking love it. It isn’t real, even a little bit, but it’s fun to pretend that it is. I love the idea that aliens are real, that ghosts haunt our world, that people make dark pacts with demons, and that Cryptozoological beasts are all real, just incredibly hard to find and photograph. I love the idea of the Denver Airport being some crazy Illuminati thing and the aliens use it as a landing facility. The Face On Mars is horseshit, but it’s fun to pretend that it isn’t. All of this stuff is delightful fan fiction that is set in our own world, and we’re all characters in it, whether we know it or not.

So I’m starting The Daily December with something from a paranormal blog I love.

The Tallmann House

(from Stranger Dimensions)

In the case of the haunted Tallmann House, residents of an ordinary home in Horicon, Wisconsin found themselves the victims of a very strange thing indeed: a haunted bunk bed. According to Cult of Weird, in 1988, this family suffered through nine months of intense paranormal activity after purchasing a used bunk bed, including spectral apparitions. They ultimately fled their home, but not before rumors of even stranger things – including bleeding walls – spread throughout their neighborhood.

I mean, you’re not going to do much better than “Haunted Bunk Bed Terrifies Family”, right?

 

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all the world’s indeed a stage

Posted on By Wil

I’ve been working on this book (a short story that turned into a novella that decided it wants to be a novel) for a few months, now. What I thought would finish up around 5000 words is on pace to end up a ten times that. I still don’t know if it all holds together, and I don’t know how much of it will survive the rewrite, but it’s been the primary creative focus of my life for a long time.

I recently hit a serious emotional beat in the story that affected me as much as it affected the characters, and I needed to get a little bit of distance from it, so I can come back to it and finish it by the end of the year. That was about a month ago, I guess. Maybe more like five or six weeks. Anyway, I had this other idea for a short, supernatural horror story on the board, so I started writing that, with the hope that I would finish it in time to be published before Halloween. That also took off and got a little longer than I had intended, but if I can focus and stay committed, I should finish the first draft by the end of this week.

I’m writing both of these things (and the other book of short stories they came out of) essentially on spec, because I don’t know if I’ll try to sell them to a publisher or self-publish them. Because of that, it feels like I don’t have a real job right now (and I know there are a lot of folks out there who will say that any kind of artist isn’t doing a real job anyway, and I’d like to invite them to fuck off).

choose-your-own-adventure-inside-ufo-54-40There’s a fundamental rule for first drafts that I think I got from Stephen King: write it with the door closed. Don’t let anyone see it until it’s done, because it needs to be raw and broken and rough and even bad in places so that it can just get finished. Go ahead and open the door after the first rewrite. That’s solid and good advice that is one of my unbreakable rules, and it serves me well for staying motivated and giving myself the freedom to just get to work and write without judgement. But it’s also kind of lonely. It’s like performing to an empty theater.

Even though I’ve been productive and I’m making lots of stuff, I haven’t had the opportunity to interact with an audience for a long time, and I’ve missed that. So last night, I had this dumb idea to get onto my Twitch channel, read a Choose Your Own Adventure book, and ask the people who were watching to make the choices. We did Inside UFO 54-40 and The Race Forever. I think about 200 people showed up (not bad, considering the short notice), and holy hell did we have fun. It was this great community experience, and I liked it so much, I’m going to try to make it a regular thing.

So if you showed up last night, thank you. I needed the break from the fucking nightmare we’re all living in right now, and I got it. I hope you got it, too.

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America the plum blossoms are falling

Posted on By Wil

It is five in the morning. After a little over four hours of restless sleep, I got out of bed before my tossing and turning woke up Anne. I’m not sleeping much recently, and what sleep I do get is plagued by nightmares.

It’s been raining all night, which I realize isn’t something worth mentioning for most people, but it hasn’t rained here in Los Angeles since 1856, so it’s kind of a big deal. Back in the old days, when it rained a few times a year, before the myth of climate change tricked us all into believing that we’re having a terrible drought that apparently doesn’t really exist, we would sleep with the window open on rainy nights, so we could hear and smell the rain.

My dogs looked at me with confusion when I got out of bed, then did the dog equivalent of shrugging their shoulders and burying themselves back into the covers. My cat wants me to let him out, stop the rain, dry off the patio, and then let him back in. And then back out. And then back in again because he’s a cat.

So. Let’s get to it: we’re fucked. Nothing matters, everything is terrible, and we’re living in a nightmare that hasn’t even begun to hint at how bad it’s going to get. I’ve been spending a lot of time going through the stages of grief, and though it’s mostly a lot of anger, I’m bargaining: maybe the Electoral College will step in and prevent this fucking catastrophe from happening. Maybe the vote will be audited in some of these states where the devil won by just barely over one percent, which is honestly kind of suspicious. Maybe the Democrats in Congress will be joined by a few principled Republicans (they exist, right? They have to exist, don’t they?) and the white nationalist cabinet this president elect wants to install won’t be confirmed.

Bargaining. I know it isn’t going to happen. I know we’re fucked.

Twenty-five percent of eligible voters elected a racist demagogue who has never held a single elected office in his life, a seventy year-old man who has the temperament of a child. I still can’t believe it. When I hear the news say “President Elect Trump” it turns my stomach. It’s such an affront to the country, to the office of the presidency, it feels like it isn’t real.

Hate crimes are happening all over the country. White supremacists, anti-semites, and the absolute worst of humanity feels validated by this election, and they are boldly and fearlessly attacking people, declaring that this election — votes cast by one in four eligible voters — endorses their hateful, bigoted, regressive world view.

Anger. This never should have happened.

How can so many people, even if they are a statistical minority, have no problem supporting a racist for president? What are these fucking idiots going to do when all the things he promised them don’t happen? They say they were voting against corruption and lobbyists and Establishment Washington, but one look at the men this narcissistic sociopath wants in the highest positions of government reveals that none of those things will be reflected in his administration. They won’t get their jobs, they won’t get their draining of the swamp, but we’re all going to get the racism, bigotry, ignorance, and white supremacy they had no problem voting for.

Denial. Somehow, someone is going to do something to stop this from happening. He’s breaking all sorts of ethical rules. He’s breaking diplomatic norms. He doesn’t even want to live in the fucking White House! He doesn’t want the job, he just wants the attention. This can’t be happening.

And back to Anger. And then more Bargaining.

And Depression. So much Depression.

Paul Ryan is going to destroy Medicare, just because he can. Because he is a selfish, evil, despicable man. For the first time in the history of the nation, the Senate refused to confirm a Supreme Court justice (and apparently even the fucking Democrats who we’re supposed to count on to fight back are fine with it) and now our nation will deal with a regressive, right-wing majority on the court for the rest of my life. The Republicans are going to roll back and undo and destroy as much of the social progress of the last 40 years as they can, and in the richest country in the world, our citizens will suffer needlessly, because people like Paul Ryan subscribe to a selfish, hateful, myopic philosophy created by an asshole who never had to experience the consequences of her bullshit.

All of this, and more, because of twenty-five percent of voters.

Oh, there’s Anger again.

And so it goes, this cycle of grief, for my country, for the freedom and hope and opportunity I’ve always believed is fundamental to the American identity, for my fellow humans who are going to suffer now and in the future.

All because twenty-five percent of voters looked at this despicable, hateful, ignorant liar, and voted for him and everything he represents.

creative writing

pages upon pages

Posted on By Wil

From my Tumblr ask thing:

It’s kind of random, but I just wanted to let you know that you’re helping me not lose my drive for writing. I’m doing nanowrimo and I’m already worried about making the 50k word count, but then I look at your posts about your novella and how even your word count varies and it’s totally normal to not write the same amount of words every day. Anyways, I hope you have a great weekend and thanks for unknowingly helping me de-stress about my writing.

P9270125This ask made some stuff wake up in my brain, and I wanted to repost it here for easy reference in the future, when I need to be reminded. I said:

So first off, I’m really proud of you for doing something you love, even (especially) when it’s hard.

If it makes a difference, I advise you not to worry about making the 50K word count, because the important thing is to be creative, to tell your story, and to push through the challenging parts so you can get to the parts that are fun. I’m relearning this almost daily, while I work on the short story that wanted to be a novella that is trying to be a novel.

It sounds like you’re on your way to enjoying the journey and telling the story, but you inspired me to share some thoughts about my current process and progress:

I have to constantly remind myself that it isn’t about the word count or the number of days in a row that I write (I realize NaNoWriMo is set up to make those things important, but stay with me for a sec). I have to constantly remind myself that this is the first draft! This is the puke draft. This is the draft where all the ideas come out, all the bits fall onto the page, and I just go until it’s finished. We have to remember that this draft is going to have big holes in it. We’re going to come back to it in a month or so and realize that we wrote the same scene twice, or that we had something in our brains that we forgot to tell the reader, so this scene doesn’t make sense. But all of that is okay! We can fix it when we do our second draft, and the second draft is so much easier than the first draft, and almost always more fun.

But! We’re never going to get to the end of our story if we worry about how close to finished the first draft is. We’re never going to get to the end of our story if we judge ourselves the whole time we’re writing the first draft. We’re never going to get to the excitement and satisfaction of doing the rewrites if we don’t let ourselves just WRITE.

So try not to worry – wait, there is no try, only do and do not – DO NOT WORRY about the word count. Some days are going to be epic word dumps (Scalzi does 10K words in a day from time to time, for crap’s sake) and some days are going to be epic struggles to finish with 290 words that we aren’t that crazy about but at least it’s something.

Maybe you’ll get to 50K by the end of the month, and maybe you won’t, but if you focus – wait. WHEN you focus on telling the story and listening to your characters, when you test and challenge and reward them, the total word count is a bonus. But the story, as they say, is the thing.

Keep writing!

If anyone cares, I’m currently at 37970 words on the short story that wanted to become a novella that’s trying to be a novel and still needs a good title. I wrote a thing two days ago that I like. It sounds like this:

“Are you okay? You seem weird today.”
I didn’t seem weird. I was weird. And hormones and pre-teen angst and my general level of constant anxiety were all just wrecking me.

Those two lines capture precisely who I was when I was 12 so perfectly, it’s almost embarrassing and maybe even a little painful to read them.

I’m somewhere in the third act of this thing that refuses to cough up a title. I have two main story things that I need to wrap up, one character thing that I want to put in but don’t need to put in, and then I leave it alone for a day or two before the rewriting begins. It’s equally frustrating and exciting and scary to be this close to finishing the first draft, and that’s okay. It’s a good place to be, practically and emotionally, because it’s what I have to do before I can get into the part where it starts coming together into one whole story, instead of a bunch of things that may or may not hang together.

But, anyway, for everyone out there who is writing a story and feels like they’re never going to get to the end, or that it’s no good, or any of those things our brains tell us to protect us from taking the creative risk of finishing something: you’re not the only one. Hell, I bet even Neil Gaiman feels stuck and frustrated from time to time, and I’m pretty sure that he’s an actual, living god.

So just keep writing until the words pile up around you, because that’s when you take the words and rearrange them into something beautiful.