Category: Books

My pal Cory Doctorow says:

I’ve independently produced an audiobook edition of my nonfiction book Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free: Laws for the Internet Age, paying Wil Wheaton to narrate it (he did *such* a great job on the Homeland audiobook, with a mixdown by the wonderful John Taylor Williams, and bed-music from Amanda Palmer and Dresden Dolls.

Both Amanda Palmer and Neil Gaiman contributed forewords to this one, and Wil reads them, too (of course). I could *not* be happier with how it came out. My sincere thanks to Wil, the Skyboat Media people (Cassandra and Gabrielle de Cuir and Stefan Rudnicki), John Taylor Williams, and to Amanda for the music.

The book is $15, is DRM free, and has no EULA — you don’t need to give up any of your rights to buy it. It should be available in Downpour and other DRM-free outlets soon, but, of course, it won’t be in Itunes or Audible, because both companies insist that you use DRM with your works, and I don’t use DRM (for reasons that this book goes to some length to explain).

Audio edition:
http://craphound.com/?p=5387

Homeland audio:
http://craphound.com/?p=5146

I loved reading this book, which is described by the publisher, thusly:

In sharply argued, fast-moving chapters, Cory Doctorow’s Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free takes on the state of copyright and creative success in the digital age. Can small artists still thrive in the Internet era? Can giant record labels avoid alienating their audiences? This is a book about the pitfalls and the opportunities that creative industries (and individuals) are confronting today — about how the old models have failed or found new footing, and about what might soon replace them. An essential read for anyone with a stake in the future of the arts, Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free offers a vivid guide to the ways creativity and the Internet interact today, and to what might be coming next.

Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free takes its place next to The Purple Cow in my library of essential books for independent creators and Makers, and I’m proud and privileged to read the audio version.

I’ve been busy recording audiobooks, including a few of my own. Today, I complete the audio trifecta of Original Wil Wheaton Works Read By Me, Wil Wheaton, with the release of The Happiest Days of Our Lives: The Deluxe Audio Edition.

The text is taken from the special deluxe edition that Subterranean Press published in 2009, and includes several new stories that were not included in the original release, plus introductions to each chapter that provide some additional context and interesting background information.

Here’s how we describe the book, in super-fantastic marketing speak:

Readers of Wil Wheaton’s website know that he is a masterful teller of elegant stories about his life. Building on the critical success of Dancing Barefoot and Just A Geek, he has collected more of his own favorite stories in his third book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives.

These are the stories Wil loves to tell, because they are the closest to his heart: stories about being a huge geek, passing his geeky hobbies and values along to his own children, and vividly painting what it meant to grow up in the ’70s and come of age in the ’80s as part of the video game/D&D/BBS/Star Wars figures generation.

Within the pages of The Happiest Days of Our Lives, you will find:

• “The Butterfly Tree”: how one Back to School night continues to shape Wil’s sense of social justice, thirty years later;
•  “Blue Light Special”: the greatest challenge a ten year-old could face in 1982: save his allowance, or buy Star Wars figures?
• “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Geek”: why fantasy role-playing games are such an important part of Wil’s past – and his present;
• “The Big Goodbye”: a visit to Paramount gives Wheaton a second chance to say farewell to Star Trek . . . properly, this time;
•  “Let Go”: a moving eulogy for a beloved friend.

In all of these tales, Wheaton brings the reader into the raw heart of the story, holding nothing back, and you are invited to join him on a journey through The Happiest Days of Our Lives.

Pretty swell, right? Yeeeaahhh.

As with Dancing Barefoot and Just A Geek, you can stream the entire book from the website.

Okay, so here’s the thing that’s kind of cool, I think: Bandcamp makes it very easy for me to sell merchandise, in addition to audio files, and because I have some copies of the Special Deluxe Edition in my home office, I’m going to offer a very limited number of them for sale.

There are 20 signed and numbered copies available, and 30 signed and not numbered copies available, so if that’s something you or someone you know would like, grab whatever you want while it’s there. If you get your order placed in the next 24 hours, it should get to you in time for Christmas (in the US, I don’t know about the rest of the world — which I’ve just realized is one of the most cliche American things I could ever say.)

Happy listening!

When I was writing my first book, Just A Geek, I ended up with a lot of stories that just didn’t fit within the narrative. I didn’t know what to do with them, until my friend and editor, Andrew, said, “Why don’t you put them in their own book?”

I was hesitant, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was a very good idea, so that’s what I did. I asked my friend Ben to draw some illustrations to keep the stories company, and I published it all on my own, before Just A Geek was even completely finished. The book is called Dancing Barefoot.

After I released the audio versions of Just a Geek and The Happiest Days of Our Lives, a lot of people asked me when I was going to do an audio version of Dancing Barefoot, to round out what I’ve just decided to call a trilogy. The truth is, I never intended to do an audio version of it, because I felt like I’d grown as a writer since it was published, and it would sound and feel strange to revisit that book without wanting to rewrite the whole thing.

But something really changed in me when I turned 40 last year, and I stopped worrying so much about things like that. I accepted that it was the best I could do then, and even if it’s a little rough around the edges, it’s because I made it that way.

So about a month ago, I booked some studio time with my favorite audiobook producers, and finally recorded an audio version of Dancing Barefoot.

It felt a little strange to record something I wrote over a decade ago, as I was entering my thirties, and looking into my past in order to understand my future. It was written during a tumultuous and uncertain time, when I was struggling so much just to make it month to month. Reading it now, knowing what my future actually held, both wonderful and terrible, made it a more emotional experience than I expected.

I had this weird sense of nostalgia as I read it, like nesting dolls: I remembered the stories that I told, I remembered writing them down on my blog for the first time, then editing them into Dancing Barefoot for the first time, and then shipping thousands of books around the world, out of my living room. I remembered how excited I felt when Anne and I opened the first box of books when they were delivered from the printer, and how happy it still makes me feel when someone hands me one of those books to sign for them.

Real quick, before I get to the link for the album, I want to say something to those of you who have been here for a decade, especially those of you who bought Dancing Barefoot so long ago: Thank you. Without your support then, I wouldn’t be here now. There’s a straight line between you buying that book from me, and me working on Eureka, Big Bang Theory, Leverage, and everything else. There’s an even shorter, straighter line between me shipping that book to you from my living room floor, to me writing all my other books, magazine columns, and posts of varying quality on this blog.

F. Scott Fitzgerald is credited with declaring that “there are no second acts in American lives,” and before I began this journey a little over a decade ago, I believed him. But because I people like you kept coming back to read my blog, kept coming to see me perform on stage, and bought my books when I published them, I feel like I may be one of the exceptions to that rule.

I’m incredibly grateful for the life that I have now, the life that I worked so hard to build. Every single day, I’m afraid that I’m going to wake up and discover that it’s just a dream, or a cruel trick in some episode of The Twilight Zone. I worked really hard for what I have now, but I didn’t do it alone. People I’ll never meet took a chance on me and made it possible for me to do what I’m doing now, and I can’t thank you enough.

Okay, I’m rambling, so I’ll just get out of the way. Here’s the product information:

It’s available now on my Bandcamp page, you can listen to the entire thing there for free, or you can buy it for $10 though the weekend, before it goes up to $20 next week. It includes a digital booklet with all the illustrations Ben did, scanned by me from my original author’s copy of the book.

Here’s the description:

Available for the first time in audio, read by the author.

In this wonderful Freshman effort, actor and author Wil Wheaton shares five short-but-true stories about life in the so-called Space Age:

Houses in Motion – Memories fill the emptiness left within a childhood home, and saying goodbye brings them to life.

Ready Or Not Here I Come – A game of hide-n-seek with the kids works as a time machine, taking Wil on a tour of the hiding and seeking of years gone by.

Inferno – Two 15-year-olds pass in the night leaving behind pleasant memories and a perfumed Car Wars Deluxe Edition Box Set.

We Close Our Eyes – A few beautiful moments spent dancing in the rain.

The Saga of SpongeBob VegasPants – A story of love, hate, laughter and the acceptance of all things Trek.