I know I am not the only person who experienced this, yet I have struggled for years to find any kind of logical explanation for it, or actionable advice to address it.

Starting around 2016, when the world started going to shit, I woke up one day to discover that I simply could not read a book.

Or a magazine.

Or a short story.

Or more than a news item, blog post, or some intellectual empty calories online.

Don’t get me wrong. I didn’t stop loving books. I didn’t lose my genuine, lifelong love of reading. I just couldn’t find a way to stay focused, to step out of the corporeal world for a little bit, and just enjoy where the words took me.

A friend of mine suspects that it’s an expression of hypervigilance, a consequence of how unimaginably terrible things got, and how fast. (Oh, you sweet Summer 2016 Child, you have no idea how much worse things can and will become). That rings true for me, but it’s incomplete, and I still don’t know what is missing.

“But Wil Wheaton,” you are likely saying at this time, “you are an award-winning audiobook narrator. You read to me almost every day!”

Yes, I can confirm that both of those things are true, and I will gently tap the sign in my house that says “You must go to work, Wil Wheaton.”

So I was able to read, but only when it was for work. See, I wasn’t just dropping into a chair and reading for fun, I was supporting my family. I will crawl over broken glass for my family, so reading a book (which I enjoy!) isn’t a heavy lift. I mean, that’s a huge privilege, and I am grateful for it.

Last year, I think I read … I don’t know, fewer than 10 things of substance — well, maybe that’s not entirely accurate. I’m working on my short story writing skills, so I have read a lot of individual entries in a few Best Of sci-fi collections, and I revisited Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew and Night Shift. But, again, that was in pursuit of developing a skill … using the work excuse again. And I somehow convinced myself that a short story — which is a lot of work to create — somehow didn’t count because it wasn’t a whole book. Well, maybe don’t do that this year, Wil.

But whatever it takes, right? The important thing is, I was making some time to read (and as Stephen King admonishes all of us, gently, but still, if you don’t make time to read, you don’t have time to write.)

This is where I dip off the main spine of this post for a moment to share, without going into specifics, that I made a deliberate choice about two years ago to begin a Season in my life. A Season is, according to whoever suggested it to me a million years ago, a broadly-defined choice to make some changes without the pressure and overwhelm of big and specific goals. The common example comes out of New Year’s Resolutions: “I want to lose X pounds” can be daunting, and when we inevitably stumble, demoralizing, and we give up. Rather than that, choose a Season instead: “This is my Season of Healthy Habits”. What are those healthy habits? Maybe walking more, maybe going to the gym regularly, maybe it’s about food choices. The thing is, I am now doing what I would be doing to lose the weight, but it isn’t about losing the weight. It’s about being focused on these other things that will support losing x pounds all on their own, and I’m not obsessed with the scale. I’m not going to get frustrated and demoralized, and ultimately give up, because it’s about the journey instead of the destination.

So I constantly ask myself, “how does this support my Season?” And I make my choices without judgment, doing my best to choose wisely.

I feel like I’ve oversimplified it, but if that’s intriguing to you, and you want to try it yourself, you have a place to start.

The writing, narrating, and publicity cycle for Still Just A Geek was wonderful, and exciting, and something I will cherish forever. It also uncovered a metric fuckton of trauma that I hadn’t worked through. So I started my Season of Healing, and it’s been ongoing ever since, with truly meaningful results. I still have CPTSD, I still struggle with anxiety and panic from time to time, but it’s getting better. I am in such a better place than I was when I started. The Work continues, and that’s its whole own post.

As 2024 was ending (and the end of the year REALLY crept up on me this time) I began to wonder if I could invite a new Season to overlap with the current one, like those magical days of Winter becoming Spring.

I know it’s only four days into the year, but I did make the deliberate choice — not a Resolution — to begin The Season of Writing More Fiction.

And since you really can’t write if you don’t read, whatever was blocking me from reading since 2016 has simply vanished. Just like that. I know it’s only four days, and I am not getting out ahead of my skis or spiking the ball before I even begin the return. That struggle to stay focused, to find joy in the experience, may come back. If it does, I’ll have to muddle through it, which is something I feel capable of doing, since this is a Season and not a Resolution. This is just a choice, not a test, and there is so much freedom in that. I feel this excitement to devour stories and characters from other creators, to fully experience their worlds while I let them inspire the creation of my own. I feel this desire and excitement in my body in a way I haven’t in so long, I’d forgotten what it felt like. I feel the part of me who identifies as a Reader, the part of me I guarded so closely and protected from all the abuse and exploitation, waking up and getting excited in a way I haven’t felt in at least eight years.

Which brings me to the “tiny little thing” I was “just gonna write real quick in my blog while I have my coffee”:

I started a book yesterday called The Ministry of Time. I’m only 18 pages into it, but I am already captivated by the setting, characters, and the author’s voice (note to self: earn your readers’ attention this way, as quickly as you can, Wil).

This is on the jacket, so it doesn’t spoil anything for you:

In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering “expats” from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.

She is tasked with working as a “bridge”: living with, assisting, and monitoring the expat known as “1847” or Commander Graham Gore. As far as history is concerned, Commander Gore died on Sir John Franklin’s doomed 1845 expedition to the Arctic, so he’s a little disoriented to be living with an unmarried woman who regularly shows her calves, surrounded by outlandish concepts such as “washing machines,” “Spotify,” and “the collapse of the British Empire.” But with an appetite for discovery, a seven-a-day cigarette habit, and the support of a charming and chaotic cast of fellow expats, he soon adjusts.

Over the next year, what the bridge initially thought would be, at best, a horrifically uncomfortable roommate dynamic, evolves into something much deeper. By the time the true shape of the Ministry’s project comes to light, the bridge has fallen haphazardly, fervently in love, with consequences she never could have imagined. Forced to confront the choices that brought them together, the bridge must finally reckon with how—and whether she believes—what she does next can change the future.

Sounds great, right? It is. I am megahyped to get back into it as soon as I publish this post.

I noticed something about the way I read books, yesterday. When I start a book, it’s like I’m sitting in an empty space, completely surrounded by the fog of war. Over some number of pages, that fog is pushed back and the world in the book begins to populate the formerly-empty space. Eventually, that space is on the other side of a portal that I step through as effortlessly as I open the cover of the book. I guess I’ve been doing this my whole life, but I didn’t actually notice and note it until yesterday.

And that’s because, while I was greatly enjoying the world building and meeting the characters, I was really struggling to hear Commander Gore. My brain defaulted to this sort of grandiose, bombastic, entirely wrong voice that seemed to be inspired wholly by Geoffrey Rush in Baron Munchausen.

This was weird, because I have never done this while reading silently. Sure, when I’m narrating I use voices, but never while reading on my own. I have always heard character voices in my own inner voice, or a neutral voice which is really just my inner voice not admitting it isn’t fooling anyone.

I read a few more lines. The author described him as being 37, and even though he’s from 1845, I knew immediately that he sounded like The Guy From The Gentlemen (Theo James, I’m not proud that I had to look him up). It just clicked perfectly.

And I was like, “I just cast an actor to play a role in the book I’m reading. Holy shit. That’s so cool and I can’t believe I have never done that before.”

He’s playing opposite Billie Piper, if you were wondering, and they have fantastic chemistry.

I have never done this before. But now that I stumbled into it, I don’t think I can’t NOT do this with every novel I read.

And now I’m left to wonder if casting actors for character voices when you read silently in your head is a thing that people do, and I’m just late to the party, or if this is some weird thing that only happens in my weird brain.

If it’s just me, that’s a bummer. It’s satisfying and kind of fun to try out different actors in the same role and see who gets the job.

Maybe this is part of the change in my head that’s happening as I begin my season of reading and growing as a short fiction writer?

Maybe it’s best at this time to simply accept the gift with gratitude, and enjoy it.

Yes, that feels like a good Seasonal Choice.