Category: Books

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a terrifying tale, beautifully told

Posted on By Wil

I woke up yesterday morning to a couple dozen emails from Bandcamp, informing me that my novelette audiobook, Dead Trees Give No Shelter, is suddenly selling like crazy.

I figured someone must have shared a link somewhere, but I didn’t know it was Cory Doctorow at boingboing until I was looking at the Internet during lunch. Cory had incredibly kind things to say, and he praised my work pretty effusively. As someone who is a writer in large part because Cory supported me and gave me guidance when I was just starting out, getting this kind of recognition from a peer means more to me than I thought possible.

This is so awesome, and it makes me so happy! I have sold more copies in twenty-four hours than I have in the last twelve months! And the eBook is screaming up the charts in the Kindle store, too! Right now, it’s #2 90-minute fiction & literature short reads, #23 in horror, and #44 in horror literature & fiction. WOW!

I guess I’ll remind y’all that there is a limited edition, collectible hardcover coming out in about a month (it just depends on how long it takes the printer to get them to me), and I guess I’ll quote Cory’s incredibly kind comment on my writing, and narrating:

“Wil Wheaton’s 2017 standalone novelette Dead Trees Give No Shelter is a beautiful, spooky horror story in the vein of Stranger Things. A terrifying tale, beautifully told.”

and

“It literally made the hair on the back of my neck stand up.”

I have a hard time feeling good about myself, and I struggle to not dismiss the kind things people say about me and my work, so today I am making a choice to feel proud and accomplished, and to be so so so so happy that so many new people are going to be exposed to my writing and narrating, today.

Here are handy links, copypasted from boingboing:

Books

coming soon: a limited edition hardcover novella

Posted on By Wil

In 2017, I wrote and published a novella called Dead Trees Give No Shelter. It’s a supernatural horror story about a man who is haunted by the memory of his younger brother’s death when they were children. In my story, he returns to the town he grew up in, looking for some closure and resolution to his brother’s senseless death, and he finds much, much more than he was expecting.

It gets really wonderful reviews on Goodreads (3.99/5.0), which is pretty cool, and a nice surprise for me, because I never looked until just now.

If you’re intrigued (and I hope you are), you can get it on Kindle, as an audiobook that I narrated, from Overdrive, or from me directly in multiple formats with no DRM.

It hasn’t been available in print, because I didn’t think it was a big enough piece of work to justify the expense and time involved in putting together a print run, but that’s about to change.

Earlier this year, I read this novella from Stephen King called ELEVATION. It didn’t feel too small to be in print, and I didn’t feel like I’d spent too much money on it, so I decided to take a chance, and hired my pal Will Hindmarch to do a hardback book design for me. He put together something beautiful and special, that I just love.

It’s going to be a very short print run, of just 250 books. I just uploaded the files for the printer, so it should be available in a few weeks. Normally, I wouldn’t say anything until it was ready, but I’m super excited to share this, and I hope 250 of you will be as excited to have a copy of your own.

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It’s Friday afternoon, so I narrated another pulp story.

Posted on By Wil

Yesterday, I finally turned in the manuscript of my novel. I’d been revising it for seven months, and by “revising” I mean, “trying to fit a scene in that I wanted to put into it, but which doesn’t seem to fit anywhere and also staring at page after page wondering why I ever thought I should tell this story in the first place.”

Yeah, it was fun. Thanks, depression brain!

Anyway, doing that narration last week did the thing I hoped it would do, and it opened up the door to the place in my brain where the creativity lives. With access to that room, I was able to step out of the room where Everything Sucks And It’s All My Fault And I’m Terrible At Everything So I Should Just Stop Trying and look at my creative work without fear or judgment.

I could be wrong (my agent and eventual editor will tell me if I am), but I feel like I spent all this time trying to make something better for the sake of making it better, when I had gotten it as good as I was going to get it on my own already. There’s a lesson in here about knowing when your desire to work hard becomes a self-defeating exercise in impossible expectations.

So anyway, it’s Friday, and I wanted to be creative and to feel productive, but I’m giving my writing brain a few days off because it’s been working really hard for a long time and it needs to recharge. Luckily for me, my performer brain was inspired to do another pulp fiction magazine audiobook narration, because it was so much fun the last time I did it, and the feedback was so positive and effusive.

Therefore, I am happy to present to you, Please Help Me To Die! from 1938, written by Leon Byrne, and found at the Pulp Magazines Project.

As before, you can stream or download from my SoundCloud. BUT FIRST YOU HAVE TO KNOW that the mic was hot, and I really needed a pop filter. The audio quality is not particularly great on this one, which is a shame because the story is awesome. But, I promise to give you a full refund for your purchase price if the audio quality does not meet your expectations.

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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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