Category: blog

blog

this is how i know i’m a writer

Posted on By Wil

I wrote this at 1am local time last night:

I’m in New York.

I’m jetlagged. I have to get up in six hours for an important meeting and then an important shoot.

I’m trying to fall asleep, and I’m thinking about how I can rewrite the first few paragraphs of my novel, because while I was proofing it today, I kept feeling like it could be better. Like, it’s fine, but I can be better, you know?

So I’m finally starting to drift off to sleep, and my brain goes HEY HERE IS THE WAY TO CHANGE THE BEGINNING OF THE STORY, SO YOU ARE HAPPY WITH IT.

And I go, “Fuck, brain, I have to get up in seven hours and I’m finally starting to fall asleep. Can you remember this for me and we’ll do it in the morning?”

And my brain is all, “I can’t make any promises, bro.”

So I am all, “Don’t call me bro. Ever.”

And my brain says, “Sorry. That was a joke that didn’t land.”

And I say, “Okay, so you’ll remember this for me in the morning?”

And my brain is all, “I’m going to have to wake you up a whole bunch so we can keep this particular idea alive until you write it down.”

So I sigh, reach over to the table next to my bed in this hotel, and pick up my laptop. I open it up, turn the brightness all the way down, and write the idea that I had.

And it’s good. It’s really good. It’s *better* than what was there before.

I’m glad I dragged myself out of near-sleep to write it down, but now I am wide awake and I still have to start a long day in six hours, and I’m kind of fucked.

But I don’t care, because I wrote down this thing that’s really good, and I feel good about it.

And this is how I know that I am a writer, and that being a writer is what I want to do with the rest of my life.

blog

2458 words cut (77348 remain) on the revisions of All We Ever Wanted Was Everything

Posted on By Wil

I usually put these updates on my Tumblr thingy, but this one is of particular significance, so I’m putting it front and center on my blog.

I’m pretty sure I just finished the final draft, including revisions, of the novel I’ve been working on for a little over a year. As a matter of fact, I’m going to send this final draft to my editor right now. I’ll be right back.

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blog

The world is a terrible place right now, and that’s largely because it is what we make it.

Posted on By Wil
Marlowe Wheaton is adorable.
Here’s a picture of Marlowe to make this post suck less.

As most of you know, I deactivated my Twitter account earlier this month. It had been a long time coming, for a whole host of reasons, but Twitter’s decision to be the only social network that gives Alex Jones a platform to spew hate, hurt innocent people, and incite violence was the final straw for me. But I haven’t regretted leaving for even one second. Having that endless stream of hate and anger and negativity in my pocket wasn’t good for me (and I don’t think it’s good for anyone, to be honest).

I was on Twitter from just about the very beginning. I think I’m in the first couple thousand accounts. I remember when it was a smallish group of people who wanted to have fun, make jokes, share information and tips on stuff that was interesting, and oh so many pictures of our pets. It was awesome.

It started to get toxic slowly at first, then all at once, starting with the misogynist dipshits who were behing the gate-which-shall-not-be-named. That was clearly a turning point for Twitter, and it never really recovered from it. I watched, in real time, as the site I loved turned into a right wing talk radio shouting match that made YouTube comments and CSPAN call-ins seem scholarly. We tried for a couple of years to fight back, to encourage Twitter to take a stand against bad actors (HA HA LIKE ME BECAUSE I AM A BAD ACTOR RIGHT YOU GOT ME HA HA HA). Twitter doesn’t care about how its users are affected by themselves, though. Twitter cares about growth and staying on the good side of President Shitler’s tantrums.

I mean, honestly, the most lucid and concise indictment I can give Twitter is: it’s the service that Donald Trump uses to communicate with and incite his cultists.

Anyway, enough about how terrible Twitter is. We all know how terrible it is. That’s never going to change, by the way.I know some very good people who are working on making Twitter better, but I honestly don’t think they can overcome the institutional inertia that has allowed it to get to the point its at now. It may get incrementally better, but the fundamental problem of random, mostly-anonymous people being terrible isn’t going to change, because that’s not a Twitter problem. That’s a humanity — and specifically a social media — problem.

I thought that if I left Twitter, I could find a new social network that would give it some competition (Twitter’s monopoly on the social space is a big reason it can ignore people who are abused and harassed, while punishing people for reporting their attackers), so I fired up this account I made at Mastodon a long time ago.

I thought I’d find something different. I thought I’d find a smaller community that was more like Twitter was way back in 2008 or 2009. Cat pictures! Jokes! Links to interesting things that we found in the backwaters of the internet! Interaction with friends we just haven’t met, yet! What I found was … not that.

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blog

regarding the kindness of strangers.

Posted on By Wil
Over the last few days, I’ve encountered a lot of people who have been kind to me. I’ve seen people in random places, like the grocery store and the pet store, who have told me that they read my stuff online, and they appreciate me. I ran into a bunch of people at my friend’s show last night, who told me how much they value — not just like, but value — Tabletop, and more than a few people there told me that they thought I was a good person who does good things.
 
If you’re one of these people, I know I said “thank you” in person, but I want to say it again, in public, in a way that my anxiety doesn’t allow when we’re face to face.
Thank you! I needed that, so much.
 
You see, I *really* needed to be reminded that the stuff I do matters to people, and is worth my time and effort. I’m dealing with a few really terrible things in my real life that I’m not talking about in public, and won’t talk about in public, and at the same time, I’ve been struggling with anxiety. I can feel a capital-D Depressive episode lurking around pretty much every corner, and I’m doing my best to practice my CBT and take my meds and talk to the people who are close to me, who care about me and help me when my brain decides to turn on me. For far too long, my brain has been going out of its way to remind me that I suck at everything, the book I’ve worked so hard on for so long is going to fail (it won’t; I’m super proud of it and believe in it), and nobody cares about me or what I do. The world has moved on, I’m drifting into “trivia answer” territory, and if I just disappeared from public life tomorrow, nobody would care or notice.
 
I know that none of that is real, but … well, I’ve written about Depression before and how it is such a giant dick about stuff like this. It’s challenging to tune out that insistent voice of doubt and despair, even when I know that it’s just a bunch of noise.
 
I shouldn’t give trolls and harassers any space in my head, too, but I gotta be honest: that last week on Twitter was horrible. Every day was a flood of people putting in considerable time and effort to make me miserable, and even though I was able to ignore most of it, some of it still got through. I mean, I’m just human and I have a wonky brain, so…
 
Maybe I’m just more *aware* of the kindness of people in the last few days, or maybe there really has been some kind of uptick in kindness for some reason that normal people can probably see, but remains hidden to me. But the end result is: I’m doing everything I can to practice gratitude, kindness, empathy, and patience. I’m not always successful, but the affirmation I’ve gotten from people who don’t know me and have no reason to reach out with kindness and appreciation has made a HUGE difference.
 
I’m so grateful for the love and support and patience that my wife and children give me every day, but I’ve been dealing with so much negativity and cruelty, I haven’t been able to see and feel it. The people who have been kind and gentle to me recently sort of helped push back the weasels of despair that have been threatening to overwhelm me, which has created the space in my life that I couldn’t make myself to accept and embrace the love of my wife and kids.
 
So thank you, people who don’t know me and have nothing to gain by being kind to me, for your kindness, whether you are offline or online.
 
And please consider this: you have choices all day long about how you treat people. Every interaction can be kind, or it can be cruel, and the choice you make will have an effect on people you’ll never meet. Make a choice that you’ll feel good about.
 
Thanks for listening.
blog

the summer of mild inconveniences

Posted on By Wil

About three months ago, we discovered toxic black mold underneath our kitchen sink. Two weeks after that, Anne and I packed up some bags and moved ourselves and our dogs out of our house, while a team of hazardous materials removal dudes tore apart our kitchen and made our house look like Breaking Bad.

A month after we moved out, we were able to come back into our house, because the mold (which originally appeared to be a few square feet, and ended up being much, much worse) had been successfully removed. The only problem with getting back into our house was our kitchen remained (and remains) torn up. Our refrigerator is in the middle of our living room. Our dishwasher is on our patio. We have no sink, so there’s no running water, so we can’t cook.

It’s all a real pain in the ass, and it’s made this entire summer feel like something we are enduring, rather than living.

But.

It’s important to me that I keep and maintain perspective. Starting at the very beginning of this, with the toxic black mold: nobody got sick, and we discovered it just before it spread into the walls in a way that would force us to literally tear our house down.

Insurance denied our claim for reasons that I think are bullshit. We tried and failed to fight their denial, and while it’s infuriating that they got away with it, we’re very grateful and very lucky that the whole thing didn’t cost as much as we feared, and we’re grateful and lucky that we can afford to pay for it out of pocket.

We had to be out of our house for over a month, but our friends let us stay in their home (they were out of the country), so we didn’t have to endure the cost and weirdness of living in a hotel for thirty days. We got to take our dogs with us, and we were in such a quiet and unfamiliar location, it gave me the solitude I needed to focus and finish the manuscript of the novel I was writing.

Did I bury the lede on that? My novel is currently with my editor, and even though I still need to do some work on it, it’s that much closer to being finished and published. That’s kind of a big deal for me.

Our same friends offered us their house in Hana if we wanted to get out of town for a little bit, and Anne used points and miles to get us an unexpected vacation in Hawaii for less than the cost of a single plane ticket. I’m grateful for that.

After we got back from Hana, we were able to move back into our house, even though the kitchen was (and is) all torn apart. We’ve had to eat out for every meal, which has not been awesome, but I’m grateful that we can afford that, and that we live in a place that has lots of healthy and affordable options to feed ourselves. I’ve been joking that we’re sort of like college students who eat out of take away containers, but with a fancy budget.

When we got back into our house about a month ago, we expected to live in the chaos for about five days, before everything was finished and restored to the way it was before … but everything takes longer than expected, and as of this morning, my refrigerator is still in the middle of my living room.

But.

I’m grateful that this summer has been, in perspective, a series of mild inconveniences that haven’t wrecked our lives. I’m grateful that Anne found someone who could replace our hardwood floor with an exact match, even though the boards in our house haven’t been made since the 1940s. I’m grateful that they matched the floors perfectly. I’m grateful that they were able to rebuild our cabinets and save our countertops so perfectly, you can’t even tell that they’re new. I’m grateful that the people who have done all this work on our home have been kind, honest, hard workers (who my dogs love, which is important. If your dogs don’t like someone, respect that, because dogs seem to have good instincts about people for some reason.) I’m grateful that, when this is all finished, I don’t think we’ll be able to tell that anything ever happened, because everything is matching close to perfectly.

I haven’t spent this summer making things, like I wanted to. I haven’t started writing anything new. I haven’t spent any time on my blog since June, and though it feels weird, I haven’t really missed it. I feel like I am in this part of my creative cycle where I absorb and consume and get inspired by other people’s creations, so I am nourished and ready for the output part of my creative cycle, whenever it decides to arrive.

I’ve spent this summer reading lots of books, and watching almost one movie a day. I know that sounds like goofing off and fucking around, but for me, it’s a fundamental part of my creative life and my creative self. I get inspired by good things and bad things, and I’ve consumed a lot of both this summer. I have found the same kind of comfort and familiarity in a book that I had when I was a kid: no matter where I am or what’s going on, I can open a book and lose myself in it. I’ve found so much happiness and comfort in the books I’ve read this summer, it’s inspired me to dedicate myself to finishing my novel asap, so I can maybe give people who read it the same escape and happiness I’m getting.

For my novel, I needed to find a slasher movie from pre-83 that wasn’t Friday the 13th or Halloween. It needed to be something that the kids in my story would have rented at the video store, and even though I could have gotten away with using one of those popular and well-known films, I wanted to find something different for reasons I’ll get into when I start writing my “here’s how I did it” posts about the novel, in the run up to its release. The upshot of this is that I’ve watched a TON of early 80s slasher movies this year, and holy shit am I primed to write and make one of my own, because I understand them at a granular level I didn’t think was possible, and I want to see what happens when I make my version of that kind of thing, even if it’s just a short script.

I’m grateful for the time I’ve had to do that level of research (some of them have been fun to watch, others are just terrible, but it’s always been worth it), and I wouldn’t have made the time if my house hadn’t been torn apart. Maybe I’ll even work an unfinished kitchen into the story, as an homage to this whole shitshow.

So. It’s been a summer of mild inconveniences, and I’m grateful and lucky that it isn’t so much worse. I’m grateful for the life I have, and for the people I get to share it with, especially my best friend and wife, Anne. I  hope that, wherever you are and whatever your personal circumstances are, you get to share your life with someone who is as special to you as Anne is to me. I hope that you have the privilege (like I do) of looking at bummer things that happen, and finding some perspective that makes them feel less frustrating and annoying than they could be.

This is the first post I’ve written since I deactivated my Twitter. I wonder if anyone will see it? I wonder if I’m wrong about Twitter not making any difference in blog traffic or book sales. I’m going to feel really silly if I am. Anyway, I hope you’re having a good summer, and I hope that any inconveniences you have encountered have been mild.

Thanks for listening.