Category: blog

just another day

Posted on By Wil

I dug through my T-shirt drawer, and realized that I basically have a few dozen variations on a theme: I love Doctor Who, I love gaming, I love Star Trek, I love Game of Thrones, I like black T-shirts.

At the bottom of my drawer was one I haven’t worn in a long time: a green Stone Brewing Company T that I picked up earlier this year. I pulled it out and shook out the wrinkles. As I closed the closet door, I caught a glimpse of Anne, drying her hair in our bathroom.

I don’t know where the thought came from, but it sprung into my brain: I’m 40 years-old, and I met her when I was 23. I’ve known my wife for almost half of my life.

When she shut off the hairdryer, I voiced this thought to her.

“Wow. We’ve known each other for a long time,” she said.

“I’ve been thinking a lot recently about all the shit we endured when we were starting our life together, and how our kids are almost the same age we were when [shitbag ex-husband] put us all through that. I just can’t imagine being their age and having the strength to deal with that.”

She set the hairdryer down on the sink and looked at me. “Maybe if we had to deal with it alone, but we didn’t. We dealt with it together.”

“I love us so much,” I said.

“Me too.”

We finished getting ready, and headed out to our respective days. Hours later, we met up back at our house.

“I have no idea what do to for dinner,” I said. “Want to walk to the store and figure it out?”

“Sure!”

We held hands and walked to the store, catching each other up on the stuff we did during the day. When we got to the store, we decided on steaks with grilled asparagus and Caesar salad, bought the things we needed to make that happen, and took them home. I prepared the steaks and walked out to the patio to start the charcoal and mesquite wood in our barbecue. Marlowe followed me and sniffed around while I put newspaper into the charcoal chimney.

“This is not for dogs,” I said. She looked back at me as if to say, “everything is for dogs, dummy.”

I pet her head and she wagged her tail. Then she saw a squirrel on the wire and bounded across the yard to go bark at it. The squirrel scolded her, shaking its tail and generally being an asshole.

“One of these days she’s going to get you, squirrel,” I said, “and you’ll regret all the time you wasted teasing her from the safety of your telephone wire.”

I lit the charcoal and went back into the house.

“Do you want to watch a movie?” Anne asked me.

“Sure,” I said. “What do you want to watch?”

She got an impish look on her face and said, “Chupacabra vs. The Alamo.”

I’ve been in the mood for gritty 70s movies like French Connection or Marathon Man, so I hesitated a moment.

“Come on,” she said, “movies like this are my guilty pleasure!”

I laughed. “There is absolutely nothing guilty about your enjoyment of the SyFy originals, and I love how much you embrace their particular brand of cheese.”

Strangely, we’ve never watched either of my entries in this genre: Python or Deep Core, mostly because I don’t know if I could bear to watch myself in them.

I put the DVD into the player and pressed play. We sat next to each other on the couch and had a hell of a good time watching a pretty bad movie that was shot in Vancouver pretend it was in San Antonio. Spoiler alert: the Alamo doesn’t exactly fight the Chupacabras as much as Erik Estrada blows it up for some reason.

We ate our dinner, laughed like crazy and talked about it on Twitter (which was apparently as amusing to lots of other people as it was to us, because we were the only people on Twitter not talking about the basketball game).

While we got ready for bed, I looked at her in the bathroom mirror.

“That was really fun,” I said, around my toothbrush.

“Yeah, that was great,” she said.

“I love us.”

“Me too.”

 

Thank you, Cory Doctorow.

Posted on By Wil

I went to the website I Write Like, and pasted in some text from The Happiest Days Of Our Lives. It did its analyzing thing, and told me…

I Write Like Cory Doctorow

I sat back in my chair, and smiled.

My life is very different now than it was when I started writing in public. When I started my blog in 2000, it was, uh … like this:

But check this out: There is this big thing called “The Television Critic’s Association”. I think there are TV critics in it, or something. Anyway, they get together every year to run up huge tabs on their corporate credit accounts, and see what’s coming up on TV in the next quarter. That’s where I come in. TNN asked me to go to the “TCA” (when you’re a hip, edgy, media-savvy person, you use lots of acronyms, FYI) and be part of this TNG launch-thing. So I went, and it was sooo cool! I got to see some of the old TNG kids, who I don’t ever see anymore since they’re millionaires and I’m living in a refrigerator box, and, the coolest thing of all…I got to take a pee right next to BILLY FREAKIN IDOL!!!

Yes, you read that right. Here’s how it happened: I went into the bathroom, and I’m doing my business, and I notice the guy next to mee is rather dressed up, like in serious rocker clothes. So I try to just glance at him, without getting all gay and weird, and he looks right at me, sneer and all. That’s when I realize that it’s HIM! HOLY CRAP! So I say, “My wife and I just saw you on “Storytellers”. You really rocked, man!” (tap, tap). And he looks at me, and from behind his cool-guy sunglasses says, “Cheers, mate.” And he’s gone.

YES! How cool was that?

So after that, I’m off to New York to do a cool show called “Lifegame” which will be on TNN in a month or so. It’s an improv show where they asked me to tell stories about my life, and then they have improvisers act out scenes based on my so called life, in different styles. Like the time my parents cornered me in the bathroom and gave me “The Talk”—when I was 20, done as a reggae musical. Very funny. And I got to play the Devil in a scene. YES!

While I was there, I got a tour of MTV networks, met Carson Daly (!), and was given a CHIA MISTER T! That’s right. Let me tell you, everything after that was just Jibba Jabba.

We all have to start somewhere, right? So if you’re starting out as a writer, and you’re worried that your voice isn’t quite as developed as you want it to be, don’t worry. As Ira Glass says:

“Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it’s just not that good. It’s trying to be good, it has potential, but it’s not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit. Most people I know who do interesting, creative work went through years of this. We know our work doesn’t have this special thing that we want it to have. We all go through this. And if you are just starting out or you are still in this phase, you gotta know its normal and the most important thing you can do is do a lot of work. Put yourself on a deadline so that every week you will finish one story. It is only by going through a volume of work that you will close that gap, and your work will be as good as your ambitions. And I took longer to figure out how to do this than anyone I’ve ever met. It’s gonna take awhile. It’s normal to take awhile. You’ve just gotta fight your way through.”

One of the people who helped me fight my way through, way back in the early months of this century, was Cory Doctorow. I met Cory at an EFF event where I boxed against Barney the Stupid Dinosaur (and I wore the Infamous Clown Sweater). We hit it off immediately, and he gave me a copy of his then-unpublished book, Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom. I devoured that manuscript as fast as I could turn the pages, and when I was thinking about publishing some of my own writing, I emailed Cory for advice.

I’d been working on what became Just A Geek for a couple of months. I’d written probably twelve or fifteen thousand words, and I felt like something wasn’t quite right with the work I’d been doing. I was so close to it, though, I couldn’t see for myself what it was. I reached out to Cory because he was a writer who I knew and respected, and I hoped he could help me close the gap between what I wanted to write, and was I was able to write.

He offered to take a look at the manuscript I was working on, and — wow. I am sitting in my office in my house in 2013, in a different physical and emotional place than I was on the day I sent him my manuscript in 2001 or 2002, and I just got the visceral memory of that moment like a flashback in a movie. I’m sitting at my desk, typing away on my Linux machine (which was a gift from the members of the Soapbox), waiting for OpenOffice.org to load because it was so slow back then. I’m tabbing between Cory’s e-mail in KMail, and Fark in Konqueror. My dog, Ferris, is running around the backyard, and I’m listening to Oingo Boingo’s Dark At The End Of The Tunnel on whatever MP3 player was in the version of Debian I was using at the time. (It’s funny, isn’t it, how some details are crystal clear and others of equal importance or non-importance are completely obscured). OpenOffice finally loads, I confirm that I’m sending the latest version of the manuscript (untitled at the time), and I attach a zipfile to a hastily-written reply.

It was a few days before Cory replied, and during the wait, I convinced myself that he would tell me I was brilliant and amazing, and to stop doubting myself. Just finish the book, he would tell me, because the world can not live a moment longer without knowing the story you want to tell them.

It didn’t work out that way. Cory replied to me, and was brutally honest about the quality of my writing. He was never unkind, but he made it clear to me that my writing was amateurish. I didn’t told when I should have shown, rambled about things that didn’t matter to the narrative, glossed over things that did, and generally had a lot of work to do if I was going to take this story to the public. And it was a good story, he told me, but it needed a lot of work.

I was devastated. I sat in my chair at that desk, alone in my house on a hot afternoon, and felt like I’d been kicked in the stomach, then punched in the face, and then kicked in the stomach again. I’d spent months working on something that was pretty much crap and my burgeoning career as a writer was done before it had started. At that moment, I felt like I would never be more than that nearly thirty year-old failure who used to be an actor when he was a kid.

I walked my dog, as I so often did in those days, to clear my head. While we were out, I let the emotional punch fade, and considered the underlying message in Cory’s email: I had a good story to tell, but I needed to develop my skills as a storyteller. He had included examples from his own life and writing, and encouraged me to keep working at it.

So that’s what I did. I rewrote everything I had, cut out thousands of words — entire chapters in some cases — and kept at it. Months later, I finally had something that I genuinely thought was better because of the advice Cory had given me, so I emailed him again and asked if I could send it. He told me he would look at it again, and when he did, he told me that it was much better. He enjoyed it, and he commented on my growth as a writer.

I finished the manuscript, pulled an entire book out of it that became Dancing Barefoot, and eventually had Just A Geek published. Since then, I’ve written for dozens of magazines and websites, self-published a bunch of other books, written comics and manga, and tens of thousands of words on my blog.

I owe a significant debt of gratitude to Cory Doctorow for taking the time all those years ago to read my work, critique my work, and give me guidance and advice. Cory could have said no when I asked him, but he didn’t. He could have said “this is crap and don’t waste your time” but he didn’t. Cory didn’t need to help me, but he did, and he did it more than once. I remember more than one time when I had a crisis of confidence, or felt like I just couldn’t get words to come out of my head, and every time I bugged him about it, he listened and gave me advice that kept me writing.

So today, when I saw that this writing analysis tool thinks I write like Cory Doctorow, I couldn’t help but feel honored and grateful, and I wanted to say this in public: Thank you, Cory, for giving me a hand up when I needed it most. I love my life, and I don’t know if I’d be where I am right now if you hadn’t given me the gift of your time and wisdom so long ago.

The new Tabletop is a real Smash Up.

Posted on By Wil

We wrapped production on season two of Tabletop on Tuesday night. When I got home from the set, Anne asked me how I was feeling.

“Do you feel sad that it’s over, or relieved that you get to catch your breath?”

I grabbed a glass out of the kitchen and walked across our living room.

“I’m tired, so I’m looking forward to a couple days of being a fat piece of shit on the couch, but I’m going to miss playing games all day for my job.”

I poured an Arrogant Bastard Ale out of my kegerator — a gift to myself — that’s been in the living room since it arrived a little over a month ago.

“That makes sense,” Anne said.

“Yeah, and I’m really proud of what we did this season, so I feel sort of sad to say goodbye to my crew for another year.”

I filled my glass and took a sip. “Ahhh that’s good beer.”

“This thing is the Leg Lamp,” she said, pointing to my kegerator.

“You mean it’s a thing of indescribable beauty that should be in the front window?”

“No, I mean that it’s a thing that really needs to be in your office and not the living room.”

I took a drink of my beer. “But if it was in my office, we’d have to walk all the way down the hall to get beer.”

She hesitated and I pounced. “See? That’s science. I win.”

I sat on the couch and she looked at me. “I’m going to move it as soon as I clean up the disaster that is where my office used to be*. Thank you for being patient.” I hoped she would not use up all the glue on purpose, as we settled down to watch the season finale of Game of Thrones.

Today, I’m starting to get back to normal. I’ve slept a lot the last two nights, so I only feel a little fuzzy in my brain. Also today, the newest episode of Tabletop was released! It’s Smash Up, with Rich Sommer, Cara Santa Maria, and Jen Timms.

Watching this today, I am once again blown away by the magnificent work of our editors. This game has a lot going on, and they worked very hard to make it understandable and entertaining. Tabletop is a show that is made in editing, and I realized while watching Smash Up today that the last five days of production, while very long and intense, represent only the beginning of the process that makes Tabletop possible. So, Yasu and Steve, if you’re reading this: thank you for your incredible work. I’m grateful to have you on my team.

*During production, my office becomes a huge pile of boxes and games and all kinds of stuff that just gets set aside until production wraps. It’s currently the worst it’s ever been, because in addition to the usual cruft from production, there are several boxes of things I brought home from conventions last month, as well as a whole lot of homebrew that’s bottle conditioning. It’s a hot mess.

Phoenix Comic Con 2013

Posted on By Wil

This year’s PHXCC had everything from a brand new Awesome Hour to shenanigans with John Barrowman to a convention-center-clearing fire alarm.

It was certainly memorable, and a whole lot of fun for me and Anne.

We got to Phoenix Thursday evening, and prowled the con floor during preview night. I picked up some really great art and some Team Hawkeye stuff (Hawkguy is my favourite comic this year), and caught up with some friends who I only see at cons, but never have time to talk to when we’re there.

Friday was pretty quiet during the day, giving me tons of time to vist with the people who came to meet me and get my autograph on stuff. I never felt rushed, which made me really happy. The photo-ops at Phoenix CC were really brilliantly run, too. I never felt like a single person was rushed, I got to talk to everyone, I had all sorts of fun posing for silly pictures, and I think everyone left happy.

Friday night, I did my awesome hour, which ended up being an awesome hour and twenty minutes, almost 40 minutes of which was me doing a stand up set I’ve been working on since January. It ended up being way more dirty than I intended, but the audience (just over 1100 people!) didn’t seem to mind, and actually seemed to find it pretty funny. It was tremendously fun for me, and allowed me to introduce the concept of the cum-slick Zamboni to our mutual horror and delight.

Uh, you should probably not read the end of that previous paragraph if you’re easily offended.

Saturday was incredibly busy from the moment we walked into the convention center until we left about 9 hours later. The cosplay at the show was just amazing, as you’ll see in the photos I’m attaching at the end of this post.

Sunday was … eventful. After a morning of meeting people, signing things, an incredibly fun panel with John Scalzi that I hope ends up online, and picking up the last few purchases I wanted from the vendors, I was in my final photo-op of the convention, when the fire alarm went off.

Fire alarms go off at cons all the time (the fire alarm in my hotel went off on Saturday night, because teenagers think that sort of thing is awesome and hilarious. Memo to teenagers: you are wrong. It is not either of those things. It is childish and annoying and can end up actually hurting people if there’s a panic. Also, walking up 14 flights of stairs because the elevators were shut off makes me want to kick you in the face nine times) so I looked up, when “huh, some jackass pulled the fire alarm,” and prepared to keep taking pictures. But that’s when the staff of the con came into the photo area and made it clear that this wasn’t a joke, it was a real thing, and everyone needed to get out of the building. Right now.

Yeah. 40,000 people needed to get out of the building. What could possibly go wrong?

Well, a lot, as it turns out … but nothing did. It further turns out that nerds are great at following directions, not panicking, and leaving the safe confines of our preferred gathering — the convention — for the deadly exposure of the outdoors and our natural enemy, the Sun.

We were outside for about 15 minutes before the fire department sounded the all clear and let us all back inside. I wasn’t ever able to get a completely official report, but I understand that there was smoke in a meeting room that had nothing to do with our convention.

I will share one observation: I’m 40, and I’ve been dealing with this sort of thing my whole life. Fire alarms go off, and most of the time it’s a false alarm. No big deal. But when I looked around at the younger people, the teenagers and the twentysomethings, I saw a real fear in their eyes as they waited to find out what was going on. I heard lots of them talking about the bombing in Boston, and how they were genuinely afraid that there was some kind of bomb or something inside the building.  It says something about the different worlds we’ve grown up in, that my first reaction was “not this again” and theirs was “oh shit I hope it’s not a bomb.”

After the all-clear was given, we moved back into the building, and I went back to resume photos. It took a bit of time, but the attendees came back in, and I stayed for about another hour to get as many photos taken for as many people as possible, before I had to go to the airport.

A funny thing happened at Phoenix Comicon this year: I never got exhausted. I never felt completely drained or burned out. Sure, I got tired (it’s a lot of work and requires a lot of emotional energy), but I never felt … used up. I also felt this way leaving Ottawa Comicon, and I’m hoping to get a hat trick at Denver Comicon this weekend, because a week from today I start production on season 2.5 of Tabletop and it would be great to go into that energized, instead of wiped out.

I’ll explore why I’m feeling this way instead of the other way on a future episode of Radio Free Burrito. Now, it’s time for pictures from the convention, which I’m putting behind a jump, because there are a lot of them:

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