Category: Books

various awesome things

Posted on By Wil

My story The Art of War in the latest Star Trek manga got a really nice mention at Trek Movie dot Com:

Fans of Wil Wheaton’s blog or books know him to be an adroit writer of nonfiction, an almost Mark Twain for the geek crowd if you don’t mind such a comparison. Yet his “Art of War” story shows he is talented with fictional narratives, too. The story involves Kirk and a Klingon named Kring both trapped together in a collapsed mine on the planet Angrena. The “enemies forced to cooperate” situation isn’t unique to science fiction or to Star Trek, be it the film Enemy Mine or “The Enemy” and “Darmok” episodes of TNG. These kinds of narratives succeed if there is something different about how they are told and if they provide the reader with something to think about with the characters or a social lesson. Wheaton does all of these things with his comic.

They gave me 10 out of 10! Dude!

My friend and editor, Luis Reyes, is also getting rave reviews for his story, The Humanitarian, which I still haven’t seen because my damn contributor’s copy hasn’t shown up, yet. Luis is a great guy who took one in the chest when TokyoPop . . . uh . . . popped . . . a few months ago. I remember talking with him about his story while he was working on it, and he was really hopeful that people would like it. Sounds like they did: “Once in a while, a Star Trek story is so incredibly good that it stays with you forever.”

Cheyenne Wright did a pretty awesome drawing of a guy who looks like me, but cooler.

scaled.wil_color.jpg

How much do you want a shirt that says “GE [lightning bolt] EK” right now? I guarantee it’s not as much as I do.

Depeche Mode: The Singles 1986-1998 is available from Amazon MP3 for 3.99 today only. I am not ashamed to admit that I loved Depeche Mode when I was a teenager. Any DM fans out there notice how, depending on your age, your seminal DM album is either Music for the Masses or Violator? Mine is the former, though I still love the latter.

xkcd and Diesel Sweeties made me giggle so hard it hurt my chest. Thanks for nothing, guys.

This isn’t awesome, but it’s important that I share: there’s a current crop of e-mails going around that appear to be from CNN or MSNBC. They’re not. They go to very well-designed pages that can fool people into installing malware. I don’t ask this often, but please share this bit of news with your friends who are . . . vulnerable . . . to this sort of attack.

There’s some really cool new stuff at Propeller 2.0 that I’m excited about, including the growing awesomeness of the Geek group.

Great Showdowns of the 8-bit Era is beautiful. (via reddit)

That reminds me: If I collected some of my favorite Games of Our Lives into a book, would you be interested in buying it? (Note that it was all WFH and as such the AV Club owns all the material; I’d have to convince them to give me permission, but before I bother trying to do that, I wanted to gauge interest here.)

I hate that NBC is delaying their “live” prime time Olympics for West Coast viewers, but their online coverage is incredible. If you’re only watching the Olympics in prime time, you’re really missing out on some great events, like Table Tennis, Archery, Rowing, Soccer, and Handball. I mean, gymnastics and swimming are neat and all, but there’s a lot more to the games than just those events. Durr.

Jefbot hates me, but it’s all in good fun. The next strip in the series is gold, Jerry. GOLD!

Top Shelf is rapidly becoming one of my favorite publishers. Like Vertigo or Blue Note, I can pick up anything from them and know I’m going to love it. I want to do a proper review at some point, but the book Super Spy by Matt Kindt is absolutely magnificent, and proves that graphic storytelling exists as literature. You can see one of the stories in the book here.

Finally:

Me: Ah! I hate this song! Change it! Change it!

Ryan: Hey, when we played the endless setlist, you said –

Me: We were playing for five hours! I don’t think anyone should be held accountable for anything they said, did, or turned off during the endless setlist. Now let’s never speak of this again.

Ryan: But –

Me: NEVER. AGAIN.

Ryan went back to school this morning. My ribs hurt so much, I couldn’t hug him as much as I needed to, making an already-difficult goodbye extra painful. He’s grown up and matured so much in the last six months, I just love having him around. He’s really grown into a fine young man, and is someone I’d like to hang around with even if he wasn’t my son. I’m going to miss him a lot.

eight year-old me has a new best friend

Posted on By Wil

WWdN reader Cherish B. sent me this adorable story about her son and Happiest Days . It made the dad in me go “Awwwww” and the author in me go “Yay!” so I had to share:

He looked at the pictures on the cover and asked, “Who’s that?”

“His name is Wil.”

“Oh! I like Wil. He’s going to come over and play with me.”

“That’s a nice thought, but Wil is a big person.”

“Then he will come and pick me up and we will go to the park.”

I love how four-year-olds think that seeing a nice picture of a person wearing footie pajamas means you’re instantly friends and want to hang together.

I love that I got to write a book that I’m proud of that actually means something to the people who read it. I am truly a lucky guy.

this is the heavy heavy monster sound

Posted on By Wil

I’m still in head down mode until I finish Scalzi’s intro, which is due today, but I had that magical moment yesterday when I moved some things around, added a few paragraphs, then sat back in my chair and said to the empty room, “There it is! I can finally say ‘it’s coming together.'”

Once I get to this point in a project, it’s like I’ve been flailing around in a twisty maze of passages, all alike, and I’ve finally been handed a torch and a map. I never know when it’s going to happen on a particular job, but I’m always relieved when it finally does. One day before the deadline isn’t the best time for it to happen, but it’s not the blurst time, either.

This is one of the reliable steps in my writing process, like the “this sucks, I suck, everything I do sucks, I’m the suckiest bunch of sucks who ever sucked” step*. There are other, less-amusingly-named-but-equally-reliable steps in my writing process, and even the frustrating ones give me reassurance, because I know that I’m on track. There’s being stuck, and then there’s being stuck, you know?

These steps come in random order, and the ones where I feel stuck usually last from a few hours to a few days. There isn’t a reliable trick to get through them, but knowing that there are these mile markers along the road has given me a lot more confidence as a writer.

Currently, I’m in a step I call “I really need to finish the thing, but I think I’ll write something else instead.”

Yep. Right on schedule.

*This is the step where I constantly repeat my own advice to myself: Don’t be afraid to suck. It’s easier to fix something that’s broken than it is to fill up an empty page.

part three of my interview with comicmix

Posted on By Wil

The final part of my three part interview with Comicmix is online.

COMICMIX: Okay, Wil, as a writer and reader of comics, what makes a good story to you?

WIL WHEATON: Comics are a visual medium, so the artwork is extremely important to me. There are tremendously talented writers who occasionally get paired up with artists whose art I don’t like. And I won’t read those books.

There are artists and writers who collaborate together. Matt [Fraction] gives Casanova artist Gabriel Ba as much credit for Casanova being awesome as people give Matt for making Casanova awesome. Ed [Brubaker] does the same thing with Criminal. And I think that says a lot about the importance of a good team-up. I’m lucky.

I’ve gotten to work with some great artists when I’ve done manga for TokyoPop.I don’t know if the stories I’ve written would have the same emotional impact with the reader with different art. That really, really important combination of peanut butter and chocolate is really important to making comic books great.

Um. Wil? How about you answer the goddamn question?

What makes a book — just a standard book — very good, is the story and the dialogue and the interaction of the characters. So what makes a comic book great is those ingredients all put together, matched up with good pacing and really good artwork. A lot of the Alan Moore comics have all these wonderful elements that make reading comics fun, too. Top Ten is like playing “Where’s Waldo,” because after you’ve read the story you can go back through and read it again. Or if you read Watchmen and see the issues, there’s the Rorschach issue that’s in the middle where it mirrors itself — that kind of stuff. A book like Sin City that uses positive and negative space really creatively, that’s a great book, too.

Of course, I should disclaim all this stuff. I recently wrote that I was worried about the new Star Trek movie being good, and I was vilified by Star Trek fans for having the temerity for expressing an opinion about this. Like I don’t deserve to have an opinion about this.

This is the end of about 2 hours of me and Chris talking, and this final part feels rambling to me, which is probably how I felt when we’d talked for about 2 hours. I got to talk about technology a little bit, though, which was kind of cool:

CMix: What about the one piece of technology you can’t live without?

WW: The technology I can’t live without? Does encryption count as technology? It would have to be encryption. Think about the Internet without encryption. Absolutely no shopping online at all. None. Ever.

Not a single financial transaction would be possible without encryption.

Sure, there are things that I like that are fun. But can’t live without? I could not live without encryption — and to make it clear, I’m talking about open source public encryption. R.S.A. standards.

Yay standards! Yay for stating the obvious! Yay for Neil Gaiman writing Batman next year!

Oh, my favorite part of the interview is when I go on and on about my creative process. It’s really too long to excerpt, but I promise it’s worth the effort to go read the whole interview at Comicmix.

See what I did there?