Category: blog

blog

It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton Returns October 29

Posted on By Wil

Good news, everyone! My podcast’s test season earlier this year was received with such enthusiasm, we immediately got to work on building the machinery that would power a full series. It took all summer, as I and my team applied what we learned we could do differently or better going forward. I only wanted to do all that work once, because I want to do this podcast for years to come. I think we nailed it, and I think I get to hand off everything but the narration to the rest of the team.

So I can so happily shout from the top of a mountain that It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton Returns October 29th with a spooky story for the spooky season! And that will kick off at least FORTY new episodes.

FORTY!

I am so excited, I made a video about it.

I’ve been reading submissions from Michael, our content editor, and reaching out to authors for permission to narrate their stories. Can I tell you how warm it makes me feel when they tell me they enjoy my work? How happy and grateful I feel when an author tells me they already listen to my audiobooks?1 Every single story I have read has been incredible for a different reason. I can’t hardly wait, as the Replacements said, to narrate them. I’m so grateful that I am getting to do what I love for my job. If you’re already subscribed to the podcast, please accept my warmest thanks; I wouldn’t get to do this without you.

One of the unexpected delights has been the Patreon. I did a couple of live AMA things there that were surprisingly fun, so we’re going to do that again, and more often. I’m hopeful that I can even do some author chats, where we can get to know the people who created these stories I’m reading to you. Last time I looked, there were 485 paid subscribers, and like 300 others who are checking us out. That blows me away and I’m so grateful for the support, I’m going to do a special, live, narration of a spooky story, chosen by Patreon, next week. If you’re interested in seeing that, there’s plenty of time to sign up.

A statistically significant number of people asked me if I would ever be on YouTube, but I never wanted this to be a video thing. For me as a performer, I can’t serve the words on the page and play to the audience on the other side of the camera. Imagine going to see someone do a reading in a theater, and they never once look up from the page. It’s weird, right?

But so many people wanted us to be on YouTube, we figured out a way that I think will solve that problem. I’ll introduce the episode on camera, and then the story will be an audiogram. Done and done. There’s no content at the channel right now, but as soon as there is, I’ll share the link.

Okay, one last thing: Yesterday, I remembered that I had done a narration of Ur Fascism for Radio Free Burrito about five years ago. I felt like it was a good time to resurface it, so I did. And if you want to listen to my favorite episode I have done of RFB so far, with a full production and music and the whole thing that I did entirely by myself, I’m so proud of The Cecil Hotel.

I’m supposed to say that you can subscribe to It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton wherever you get your podcasts, even if that particular link goes to Apple for stupid SEO reasons.

That’s all for now. Thanks for listening. Take care of yourselves, and take care of each other.

  1. And my EMDR therapy is really working, because I can finally find space to fully feel all the joy without being afraid that it isn’t real, or that I’m stupid for letting myself get my hopes up ↩︎
blog

please, practice kindness.

Posted on By Wil

Next Thursday, October 23, I am speaking at the San Fernando Valley Community Mental Health Center’s 55th Anniversary Gala. We hope to raise some money to help them help our neighbors, and I’m going to share my story, which I hope inspires someone to take the first step on their own recovery journey.

We’re doing this at the magnificent Valley Relics Museum, and the event is open to the public. If you’re able to come to Van Nuys next week, I hope you’ll join us.

I’ve been reviewing some of my existing speeches, while I prepare this one, and I came across this part, near the closing of a speech I gave to the Southern Kentucky Book Festival in 2023. It’s one of those things that I say in some form every time I have the privilege of speaking to people who are trusting me with their time and attention, especially when there are younger generations in the audience.

One last thing, before I finish. I want to speak directly to any young people who are here:  This is your world, we’re just borrowing it for a little bit while you decide what to do with it. We’ve left you a real big mess to clean up, and I’m sorry about that. Believe me, a lot of us tried — and are trying — to make it easier for you, but we haven’t done enough.

I talked a bit about how afraid I was as a kid, how I felt like I was constantly on the verge of getting in trouble. One of the things I got yelled at about was doing something “on purpose,” so that’s a pair of words that have always kind of rubbed me the wrong way. For a few years now, I have taken the concept of “on purpose” and made it literal. I want to share with you some things I do “on purpose”, to literally give my life purpose and meaning, to help guide me when the path is unclear.

I’m a reasonably successful person. I don’t mean in my work, or only in my work. I mean in my life. I have great friends, I am so close to my adult children. I am married to my best friend. I get to do cool things, and I’m happy a lot more often than not. A real big part of that is committing to these choices:

  • Establish and protect your boundaries. You do not owe anyone anything. If someone does not respect your boundaries, it’s all the red flags.
  • Choose to be honest. I’m 50, and I’ve learned that the only currency that really matters in this world is the truth.
  • Choose to be honorable. This dovetails with number one. You attract to yourself what you put into the world. Dishonorable people will take everything from you and leave you with nothing. Do your best to be a person they aren’t attracted to.
  • Choose to work hard. Everything worth doing is hard. Do the hard work that sustains and nourishes relationships, that gets you the most out of your education, that gets you closer to your goals. Sooner or later, you’re going to run into something in your life that’s really hard, and you’ll want to give up, but it’s something you care so much about, you’ll do whatever you can to achieve it. It’s going to be hard, but it’s going to be less hard for someone who has practiced doing the hard things all along, than it is for someone who doesn’t know how to do the hard work because they’ve always chosen the easy path.
  • Always do your best, and know that your best will vary. Monday’s best may not be close to Tuesday’s best, and Wednesdays best may eclipse them both. Even if you don’t get the result you wanted, doing your best is really all you can ever do. We tell athletes to leave it all on the field. Whatever your version of that is, do it. And if you notice later that maybe you kinda phoned some of it in? Do your best to be gentle with yourself. We’re constantly learning and growing.
  • The last one is the most important one. If only one thing sticks, I hope this is it. This is the one I hope you’ll share with your peers: Always choose to be kind.

And just to be clear: Nice and Kind are not the same thing. Nice is about manners, and it comes from here. [I point to my head] Kind is about empathy, and it comes from here [I point to my heart]. Cruel people can be nice, but they will never be kind. Please, practice kindness.

I always come back to these choices, because they are the ones that always make a difference for me. I’m working on adding a reminder that courage is not the absence of fear; it’s when you something you know is right, even though you are afraid.

We’re going to see a lot of courage tomorrow, that’s for sure … and it’s making the right people very, very uncomfortable.

I appreciate you. Thanks for reading. If you’d like to get my posts in your e-mail, you can use this thing:

blog

ain’t it fun

Posted on By Wil

Grace Helbig is returning to YouTube. She made a video about it, and said something that resonated with me: we start out doing something because it is fun, and we keep doing it because we enjoy how fun it is. If we’re lucky, the thing we are doing for fun also helps us earn a living.

And then, when we aren’t paying attention, the thing that was fun is now work, and we are stressed as fuck about views and likes and reshares and oh my god this isn’t fun at all. Now, we are burned out.

Go watch Grace talk about this, if what I just told you seems interesting to you; she says a lot of insightful things that are worth hearing. I’m inspired, and want to make videos just like she does, if I can figure out some linux video editing software tools. But even if I can’t do video, I just want to get back to what it felt like when it was only fun, and I didn’t let all the other stuff get in the way.

I mention this because I only write in my blog for fun, and when I make it more important than just having fun, I really get in my own way. Yeah, I announce the cool things that I get to do, the cons I’m attending, I share my work and my podcast, and things that are work-adjacent, but if it isn’t fun to sit here and write about something, I just don’t do it. I won’t even go into how frustrating it is when I feel like I have to force it.

And I forget, every single time, how much I enjoy posting in my blog, how much I enjoy interacting with anyone who reads it in comments, how good it feels to make the human connections that, ironically, don’t seem to happen on social media, on account of all the bots and trolls and endless efforts to disrupt our peace.

So, hi. I’m glad you’re here. I hope we can interact in the comments and feel a sense of shared humanity and community.

If you’d like to get these posts in your email, you can sign up here:

And now, a few things that have been on my mind, but not enough to fill up their own posts. I’m putting it behind a jump, because this got kind of long.

(more…)

On October 23rd, you can come hear me speak about mental health care and trauma recovery

Posted on By Wil

One of the privileges I enjoy in my life is the opportunity to speak openly and honestly about my mental health struggles, challenges, and successes. I get to be the person I need in the world, and I get to pay forward the kindness and support so many people gave me while I was in the early years of recovery and scared to death that I would suffer night terrors, panic attacks, and uncontrollable anxiety for the rest of my life.

A combination of medication, EMDR and IFS therapy, and the love and support of my close friends and family all came together to save my life (literally) and help me find a way into a life that is fulfilling and joyful more often than it is not.

I am not suggesting that there’s nothing tricky about it, it’s just a little trick1. What I am saying is, access to medical care — physical and mental — is a human right, and in the richest country in the world, it should be freely accessible to everyone.

Until then, I am honored and grateful to lend my voice and my support to the organizations who work tirelessly to provide that care at low or no cost, organizations that are so important and always underfunded.

One of those organizations is right here in my backyard, and on October 23, I am speaking at the San Fernando Valley Community Mental Health Center’s 55th Anniversary Gala. We hope to raise some money to help them help our neighbors, and I’m going to share my story, which I hope inspires someone to take the first step on their own recovery journey.

We’re doing this at the magnificent Valley Relics Museum, and the event is open to the public. If you’re able to come to Van Nuys later this month, I hope you’ll join us.

  1. That would be the Brad Jacobs … something or other. ↩︎

in the mirror hypnotized I’m haunted

Posted on By Wil

Yesterday, I mentioned on Bluesky that I’d heard this guy suggest a way to break the doomscrolling Ouroboros we all seem to be stuck in right now: when the urge to resume doomscrolling hits (our brains asking for dopamine), make a choice to be creative instead. Satisfy the brain’s desire for dopamine by making something, instead of chasing that hit from the Internet. It takes a little bit of time, and requires mindfulness, but he says it worked for him.

So I’ve been doing that for a few days, and I have noticed a measurable decrease in my stress and agitation. Instead of looking at the news and hoping for The Headline, I’ve been writing down story ideas, working on this thing I needed to turn in at the end of last year, and playing around with the design of my website.1 And that’s been surprisingly fun and satisfying2! It’s amusing to me, how difficult it was to find a simple theme that just recreated what I was able to do in the Before Times, and I’m not 100% satisfied with it, but the sense memory associated with “tinkering with my blog” has taken me back to a time that wasn’t necessarily happier, or better, or anything like that — I remember how hard it was for me and my family in those day — but it does take me back to moments when I felt like I was making something that mattered3. There was so much fun to be had back then, when we all generally agreed that Nazis were bad and behaved accordingly.

While I was under the hood of my blog, I came across a rather large drafts folder, with a few dozen incomplete posts that I abandoned for one reason or another. One of them, which I posted yesterday, was actually a repost from earlier this year (I’d forgotten that I put the unpublished part of my post into a different post, and now I’ve created a timeloop paradox. Sorry about that), which some of you helpfully pointed out to me.

When I was looking at the unpublished stuff, I found things that were last edited 12 years ago, and almost every year, since. I saw a clear picture of who and where I was in my life then (not always great), and I understood why I didn’t post them. But there were some others that I thought were kinda nice, and I must have talked myself out of posting them for some reason.

I am going to be the person I needed then, and supportively tell my past self that it’s absolutely good enough, he’s good enough, and here is a lovely thing he wrote a long time ago:

Pushing myself through this heavy membrane that separates me from the rest of the world, feeling it stretch and stretch and refuse to break long after it should have.

Then, all of a sudden, it snaps and I’m through it and I’m breathing again and I can feel the air and the world.

And I’m not as tired. Or maybe I’m tired, but I’m tired like a person is tired, because just moving forward is like one of those dreams where you go as hard as you can just taking one step and then another and it feels like you aren’t getting anywhere.

I’m trying my best. I’m doing my best. I know it’s all I can do, and I tell people that when you do your best you should feel proud of yourself no matter what the result but motherfucker that’s hard to do when gravity feels stronger wherever I am than where I’m not.

So I make myself do stuff. I make myself get out and run, and I hurt my leg again and it’s so unfair and I cry and I feel stupid and I just want to give up but I’m not going to. I’m not going to let it win.

I walk a little bit and my leg starts to work that cramp out on its own and pretty soon I can run again. I can’t run as fast as I want to but at least I can run. It’s a bigger victory than it should be but it’s also very small. But it’s something and I need it so I take it.

I’m tired and I don’t want to go anywhere but I press against that goddamn membrane as hard as I can and I go to my friend’s house and I play games and I try real hard not to let them know how bad I feel because we should all just have fun.

And we have fun, and it feels good to be around my friends, and for a little while I forget to feel bad.

I get home and make myself write a story. It isn’t the story I want to write, but it’s a story that I need to write, and it helps me get out some stuff and I remember why I’m a writer.

Me from the past, that’s really sweet and I’m happy for you to embrace the part of you that is a capital-W Writer. I don’t know why you thought you shouldn’t post that — maybe you wanted to say more, or felt too vulnerable — but it’s enough, and so are you. I am standing on your shoulders, doing my best, just like you were. It gets better, buddy, and I need you to know that.

I love you.

  1. I think I’ve settled on Structure Lite, from Organic Themes. ↩︎
  2. In the old days, I had to make any changes to my blog by hand. I had to open up a text editor and do it all in html. I still haven’t wrapped my head around CSS, how styles are inherited, and how to use a stylesheet. I never learned how to use scripting or anything, because I would absolutely break things if I did. ↩︎
  3. I had no idea. ↩︎