Category: Books

And we’re back! My podcast, It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton, returns today with a spooky story to celebrate the spooky season.

This week, it’s The Dark House, by AC Wise.

A photographer’s obsession with an unsettled subject exposes two friends to a darkness that won’t be contained by frames…

It’s so good! I had a great time narrating it.

If you’re interested, take a look at my Patreon for a feed with no ads and a bunch of cool behind the scenes extras. If you subscribe before 5pm Pacific tomorrow, you can watch me do a live reading of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Oh! And starting today, you can get most of the Patreon stuff through your Apple account with Apple Subscriptions, if you prefer to do it that way.

I love that I get to do this, and it means more to me than you know that so many of y’all tune in and love it with me.

I’m around all day today, and I’ll be checking in here if anyone wants to talk about the show.

Well, here we are in Spain. I feel like I am just getting started, and I wish I had more new episodes yet to come, but we have come to the final episode of what’s turning out to be one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever done. I set out to make ten episodes for the first season of the podcast, and through a series of unfortunate events, lost two of them. That means that this is the final episode of my proof of concept, shakedown cruise, for what I hope will become a weekly series that runs for years.

I have learned so much during this process about myself, as a creator, producer, and host. I’ve learned a lot about promotion and marketing. I don’t know precisely how much XP I farmed through the whole thing, but I’ve gone up a couple of levels. I know how to do this, now.

I honestly don’t know what comes next. I’m going to have an all-hands meeting with the team to look at total downloads other metrics, and they will tell me if it looks like there is enough audience to attract sponsors and Patreon subscribers.

My gut tells me that it isn’t going to happen. I don’t feel it catching and growing the way I did with Tabletop. That’s probably because the podcast space is crowded, and even though I’m not necessarily competing with another audiobook podcast (I think I’m the only one), I am absolutely competing with every other podcast in the universe, because there is only so much time available, and those True Crime podcasts are pretty great. But I’m hopeful that my gut is filled with a lifetime of disappointment and sadness, so it’s not giving me truly useful advice. I’m hoping that I get good news, wihle bracing myself if it doesn’t come.

All of that said, if this is all I ever get to do, I am so happy and proud of this. I do not regret taking this chance, investing my time and money and spirit. From a creative standpoint, this is a huge success. I am so proud of my work, I feel so good about it, and I am so grateful that I am closer to my artistic self now than I was six months ago, entirely because this whole effort demanded that I give it everything I had to give. To get there, I had to really clean up and get rid of a lot of baggage and lingering bits of my former life as an on-camera actor. A wonderful and unexpected benefit of that (other than the genuine emotional healing and trauma recovery) is that I have a much clearer picture of who I am as a person and an artist.

I am supposed to be coy and play it cool, fake it ’till I make it and all that, but I am going to tell you, even though they all tell me I am not supposed to, that I want to do this podcast as my daily job more than anything. I want to feel the satisfaction of putting something good into the world, the joy and the rush and the art that only happens when I’m narrating audiobooks or working in animation. And since animation doesn’t seem interested in giving me feedback on a single audition going on for two decades now, I’m going to lean hard into narrating audiobooks.

If you’re in the audience for It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton, I need you to know how grateful I am that you’re trusting me with your time and attention. The world is on fire, everything is terrible, and we all desperately need to find as many moments of peace as we can. It’s my hope that I can tell you a story once a week, and for an hour or so, you can get a rest from all of *gestures broadly at everything*. I sincerely hope I can keep doing this for you (and for myself), and if I do, you’re the reason why.

And a very very very special thank you to everyone who supported me on Patreon. You are part of a very small group of people (much smaller than I anticipated) and I hope you enjoyed the things I shared specifically with you, as my way of saying thank you.

So enough about me, let’s get to the reason you’re here… this week’s hopefully not final episode of It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton!

Every single story I did is wonderful, and I love each one on its on merits for specific reasons. This week’s, however, is a stand out for me, among other great work. This story is almost a monologue, and I can see myself doing it as a one act play at the theatre where it is set, just down the road from here. Every story I narrate uses at least some of the skill I developed when I was an actor, but this one just demanded that I use all of them.

Actually, let me restate that: it gave me permission to feel the joy that actors must feel when they give a fulsome performance that goes all the way to the marrow of their creative selves. That was rad.

Our editors did some very gentle work on this, too, that fills out a bit of space and makes the whole thing just so much more than I even hoped it would be. I’m so excited to share this with all of you.

Here’s my intro:

This is the part of my introduction where I talk about the story you’re about to hear, where I write what I call “the magazine heading” which will help you press pause on the real world and come with me into Story Time. This part is challenging for me; I need to summarize just enough of the plot to entice you, without giving away anything important.

I’m struggling with this part more than usual today, because this story doesn’t fit neatly into any single category. It’s a ghost story, it’s a love story, it’s a gorgeous monologue that cries out to be staged in the real life theatre where the titular play is set. It is a beautiful way to wrap up our first season. There is nothing I can say about it now that adds anything to it, so I invite you to take your seat, because the house lights have come down, and we have to begin, if we are going to get to the End of Play.

You’re going to love this, I promise.

As always:

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• or grab the RSS directly from me right here.

You can also support the show on Patreon, where you’ll get the show with no ads, as well as some spiffy extras that all the cool kids are into these days.

Thanks, everyone. I’m so glad you’re here, and so grateful that you’re part of this.

Happy Wednesday, friends! I’m here to remind you that there’s a new episode of It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton, waiting for you wherever you get your podcasts.

This week’s story is called If We Make It Through This Alive, by A.T. Greenblatt, originally published in Slate.

Here’s my intro as written. (The final that you’ll hear is a little different; this is too long, so I edited it on the fly in my head for the episode):

I must confess that dystopian fiction currently doesn’t have the impossible distance from the present for me that it once did. A story about three women navigating crumbling roads and misogyny in equal measure on a dangerous and frequently deadly road race could have come from this morning’s paper; we just happened to pluck it from Slate.

Get ready to meet three women who have come together with everything at stake, to literally drive toward a shared goal, without losing sight of their individual goals — or themselves — along the way.

This is If We Make It Through This Alive.

I’ve been working on an audiobook for six days, that we will finish tomorrow. This book is so much fun, and I have walked out of the booth on two different days, feeling like I did good work¹ that day, like I made some cool art. I am exhausted at the end of each day, and I wake up tired, but I love this so much I can’t wait to get back into the booth to go back to work. What a blessing that is!

1. I’m not sure if this comes across in text, but I know that my fellow actors know what I mean. It’s when we exit a scene and reaffirm to ourselves: “This is why we do it.” There are scenes that we get through because it’s our job, and there are also scenes that offer us the privilege of doing Good Work, of making Good Art in that moment. Scalzi gives me a lot of those gifts, and this author has given me a couple of wonderful surprises to unwrap. ↩︎

And now, on to the post.

I am profoundly scattered and distracted, on the verge of total overwhelm, because I’ve been working my face off on an audiobook that’s been as much fun as I expected, but is leaving me exhausted at the end of every session. It’s been interesting to note how my vocal fatigue starts to creep in right around 4 hours, about half an hour after my mental fatigue begins to do its thing. Somewhere in the world, there are a lot of recordings of me just hilariously messing up words because my brain can’t keep up.

It can sound ludicrous to anyone who works a 9-5 when I say that after 4 hours of work I’m damn close to both physical and mental exhaustion. It sounds ludicrous to me! But that’s a long time to be performing without a break, and I honestly can’t even imagine what going to six hours or more would feel like. I know people do it, and I tip my hat to them.

The work has been satisfying. The story and the characters are such a fun sandbox to play in, and it feels good to walk out of the studio every day feeling happily exhausted, and creatively fulfilled. I presume that most of you reading this know my whole story, so you know how hard it is for me to feel like I’m worst at what I do best, and it isn’t even something I ever wanted to do in the first place. Narrating audiobooks has opened up this whole amazing world to me where I’m pretty good at what I do best, and I love every second of it. I am so grateful that I have been able to take something that was imposed on me (being an actor), and pull something out of that that truly belongs to me (my narrative voice and skill set).

I feel like this is a good moment to pause and promote a little bit of that. I have been told that I have to promote my work so much I feel like it’s the only thing I do, that it’s way too much, that everyone is sick to death of hearing it … and then do a little more. Good lord. I remember when I thought that making the thing was the hard part; turns out that just letting people know the thing exists is so much harder than I remembered or anticipated.

So.

Here’s Still Just A Geek — currently on sale at Audible for $7.99 — which is roughly 24 hours of you and me sitting together on a long car trip while I tell you my life story to this point. My publisher tells me that it continues to outsell the print version, which is nearly sold out all over the place and is apparently becoming something people are collecting.

Uhhhh… okay? That’s not what I expected but thank you? That’s amazing.

Here are two stories I recently did for John Scalzi that I can confidently recommend to literally anyone whether they already like his work or don’t even know about it: Starter Villain and When The Moon Hits Your Eye. Both are a whole lot of fun, a little silly, light and easy without being empty calories, featuring characters who were deeply satisfying to discover and voice. (I mean, the dolphins. IYKYK).

Right now, Cory Doctorow is touring Picks & Shovels, the second novel in what I hope is an ongoing series that never ends, featuring a character named Martin Hench. I did this, and Bill Gates’ memoir, Source Code, and When The Moon Hits Your Eye, while I was doing the first season of It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton and —

Dang. When I put it that way, I sound much more employed and accomplished than I feel. That’s probably a good thing for me to be aware of, so I can recalibrate my internal sensors to be more reliable.

Anyway, this work of the last four or five months is significant to me, and significant in my career. It’s a moment when I massively leveled up without even noticing that it was happening. It’s kind of like in Fallout 76, when I’ll be out in Wes Tek farming Super Mutants with my fun new “make everything explode” perk, and not even realize I’ve leveled up to a new perk pack. I wasn’t paying attention to the XP, because I was having so much fun doing the things that generated it, and now I have all this fun XP, new perks, and a better build than I did before. I can do things now that I didn’t know I would ever be able to do before. (That’s just for whoever is in the me and Fallout 76 Venn Diagram. The rest of you can safely move on, or ask someone who knows).

It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton news and updates.

This week’s episode ends the first season, which is a major bummer because I feel like we’re just getting started, still introducing the show to the audience, still reaching for that tipping point. I originally planned to do ten, but we could only get seven, and I had no idea that three would be such a big and meaningful number. Let this be a lesson: listen to De La Soul, people. They know what they’re talking about.

Here is an obligatory link to the podcast homepage.

Here is a link to the podcast Patreon.

Here is where I tell you that I’m doing an AMA about these stories and everything that we did to bring them to you, a week from tomorrow (that would be Tuesday, May 6) for everyone who is in the Book Hound tier. I’m trying something I’ve heard on other podcasts: you can ask me questions in the voice mail format, that I can listen to and answer. I expect it will be fun to interact this way, and if it goes well, and I do more episodes, I’ll make it a monthly thing, maybe even weekly. The link for that will be posted to the show’s Patreon by the time this post goes live.

Finally, a teaser for this upcoming episode:

“It’s a ghost story, it’s a love story, it’s a gorgeous monologue that cries out to be staged in the real life theatre where the titular play is set … so I invite you to take your seat, because the house lights are coming down and I’m about to begin.”

Thanks for reading, and thanks for listening. I’m glad you’re here.