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50,000 Monkeys at 50,000 Typewriters Can't Be Wrong

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WIL WHEATON dot NET
WIL WHEATON dot NET

50,000 Monkeys at 50,000 Typewriters Can't Be Wrong

Category: Books

i’m off to nerd prom

Posted on 23 July, 2008 By Wil

It’s so weird to have this great week working on Criminal Minds that I can’t talk about in any detail until October. I have no mouth, and I must scream, you could say. How about I just give up one little non-spoilery thing, and nobody tells on me, okay?

At the end of the shoot, I was thanking a lot of the people I worked with for making it such a great experience. Every single one of them told me that they wished I worked on the show every day. I guess the feeling was mutual.

So, yeah, that made me feel pretty good. If you get a chance to work on Criminal Minds, I highly recommend it.

Now, to business:

Tomorrow, I’m heading down to San Diego for an abbreviated stay at Comic-Con. Here’s my schedule:

  • On Thursday, I’ll be on a panel called Star Trek Without a Blueprint: How books and comics keep expanding the boundaries of the Star Trek universe. We’ll be talking about the future of Star Trek publishing in room 32AB from 4:00-5:00. I’ll be on the panel with Andy Mangels (moderator and Star Trek author), Margaret Clark (executive editor, Pocket Books), Andy Schmidt (senior editor, IDW) and Star Trek authors Kevin Dilmore, Dave Mack, Scott Tipton, and Dayton Ward.
  • The rest of the time, I’ll be with my friend Rich Stevens at the Dumbrella booth, which is number 1335. MC Frontalot is going to be there, too, so if you’re looking to fill that final square on Nerd Bingo, come and see us.

Oh. I guess it would be useful to know what I’m taking with me to sign and sell, wouldn’t it?

In addition to some 8x10s from Star Trek and Stand By Me, I’ll have copies of The Happiest Days of Our Lives , which I’m kind of hoping will sell out.

I’ll have a few copies of Dancing Barefoot and Just A Geek. I’ll also have a few copies of Volume 2 of the Star Trek Manga. I won’t have any copies of Volume 3 of the Star Trek Manga, but it’s just been released, so I’m sure you’ll be able to pick up a copy somewhere. If you bring it to the booth, I’m happy to sign it for you.

Finally, I will have copies of this year’s Chapbook, which is called Sunken Treasure. What’s that, you say? You don’t know what that is? You don’t have time to click a link, you say? Well, my lazy friend, allow me to show you part of the author’s note:

Every summer, I make one of these limited chapbooks and take them with me on the inevitable summer convention tour. In the past, I’ve pulled material from whatever I’m working on, as sort of a fall preview, but this year the book I’m working on is so top secret, I’d have to print the chapbook on self-destructing paper, and while that would make it a very limited edition, the costs associated are kind of prohibitive.

So for 2008’s limited edition chapbook extravaganza, I’ve put together the first ever Wil Wheaton Sampler. With the help of my editor Andrew, who is a former ninja warrior and recreational time traveler, I’ve pulled together things I like from all three of my books, my blog, and this groovy collaborative fiction project I play with called Ficlets. I’ve also included, for the first time anywhere, one of the scripts I wrote for a sketch comedy show at the ACME Comedy Theater.

I am really proud of Sunken Treasure, and I think Andrew (my friend and editor) and I came up with something really special. I only sold about a dozen of them at San Jose Super-Con (there really weren’t that many people there this year) and since I’m not welcome at the Creation convention in Vegas, the only places you can get copies of it will be Comic-Con and PAX. I’m anxious to get these little books out into the wild, though, so I hope you’ll tell everyone you know, for a grand total of 150 people (you guys can coordinate this, right?) to come by the Dumbrella booth and check it out. It’s so weird to make something I’m so proud of, and only get to share it with a handful of people so far.

I don’t know if I’ll be particularly motivated to post while I’m away. I’ll likely be posting all sorts of things to Twitter, including where I am and when I’ll be signing. There will also be pithy observations about my fellow geeks, so you don’t want to miss that. Erm, provided I can avoid the fail whale, that is. Ahem.

The Internet is quiet as hell lately. I feel like I’m talking into an empty tube, so thanks for reading and commenting; it makes me feel a little less like a crazy old man with no pants standing on the corner ranting about the weather.

part two of my interview with comicmix

Posted on 21 July, 2008 By Wil

The second part of my interview with Comicmix is online, wherein I say things like:

I was one of the earliest Mac adopters. I had a Mac 128K in the first few months of its release. [. . .] I loved that computer. It was portable, which is funny to say now, because it only weighed like, 20-30 pounds. It had a handle on the top, so clearly, it was portable.

And:

I don’t ever want to lose the experience of going to the comic shop on Wednesday and walking around — even if I’m only there to get two books. Spending 40 minutes looking at everything and talking to the other geeks that are there and having the owner of the comic shop say, “I know you normally don’t read this, but based on the years of you coming here I think you’d like it,” I really like that.

And:

CMix: Do you read any of the Star Trek comics at all?

WW: No.

CMix: No desire to or you just don’t care?

WW: It’s not that I have no desire. It’s not that I don’t care. It’s that I have a limited amount of time and I have to choose really carefully where I invest that time. If I’m forced to choose between a Star Trek comic or Criminal, I just enjoy Criminal more, so…

Um. In other words, I have no desire and I don’t care, I guess. That sounds really harsh, but . . . well, I just don’t know how to finish that without feeling like a dick. I guess that I like Star Trek a lot, but not enough to read the novels and comic books.

. . . yep, feeling like a dick right now.

Point of clarification: In the interview, I say “I’ve been reading Batman since Grant Morrison started working on it, because there are a few guys in the world that I’ll read anything by. Grant Morrison does Teletubbies, I’m there.” This makes it sound like I started reading Batman when Grant Morrison’s run began, but I’ve actually been reading Batman since around 1987 or 1988.

You can read the entire interview (part two of three) at Comicmix. You may also want to read part one. Hell, for all I know, you may want to look at a picture of a duck*. Go nuts, I’m not the boss of you.

*I really wanted to link to a SFW picture of Jenna Jameson there, but I was pretty sure I’d get letters if I did.

announcing wheaton’s books in the wild

Posted on 15 July, 2008 By Wil

Based on the positive feedback from yesterday’s sighting of Happiest Days in the wild, I made a flickr group for other people who want to show off their book in its natural habitat:

Do you have Just a Geek, Dancing Barefoot, or The Happiest Days of Our Lives, by me, Wil Wheaton? If you do, this is your chance to show me, Wil Wheaton (and everyone else in the world, now that I, Wil Wheaton, think about it) where you’ve taken them.

So get creative, and show us your books!

From time to time, I crack myself up by calling myself “me, Wil Wheaton.” It’s a joke that J. Keith van Straaten and I came up with when we were doing his show together at ACME. It’s certainly funnier in my head (and on stage) than it is on the screen, but that’s never stopped me before, so . . . yeah, I’m just going to trail off now . . . . mmmpthhptt.

happiest days sighted in the wild, keeping good company

Posted on 14 July, 2008 By Wil

I always tell people who are successful to take a moment and enjoy it, especially if it’s someone I know and respect, and I know how hard they’ve worked to earn their success. (Otis, I’m looking in your direction right now.)

But I’m not so good at taking this particular bit of my own advice. My sense of responsibility to my family, and the uncertain economy we find ourselves living in right now forces me to keep my head down and stay focused on whatever the next thing is. This keeps me motivated, but it doesn’t leave a lot of room to just sit back and enjoy things, which is something I think I need to do a little more often, especially on a day like today where I just feel . . . stabby.

It’s easy for me to lose sight of the thousands of copies of Happiest Days that have made the journey from my office, through my living room, and into the hands of real people all over the world, but in an effort to enjoy the good things a little bit, I present this photo of The Happiest Days of Our Lives, keeping some very good company, on vacation.

Happiest_days_of_our_lives_wil_whea

It made me really happy to see this picture, for a lot of reasons that I can’t detail without feeling like a jerk, so I’ll just say thank you to WWdN and HDoOL reader Amanda C. for sharing a little bit of her vacation with me, and allowing me to share it with you.

in which i’m interviewed by comicmix

Posted on 14 July, 2008 By Wil

About six weeks ago, I met writer Chris Ullrich in Pasadena to be interviewed for ComicMix. We talked for about two hours, and he ended up with a transcript that’s so long, they’re splitting the interview into three parts.

Part one is up today, and rather than excerpt it heavily, I’ll just quote my favorite bit:

[TokyoPop] asked me if I would write a Next Generation Manga, and would I write a Wesley Crusher story, and I didn’t want to do it because it felt to me like there was no way in that equation that I could return a positive result.

Ultimately, I’m just not interested in Wesley Crusher anymore. It’s been a long time and he’s sort of frozen in amber in a certain state. I don’t have anything to add to that. I don’t have anything new to bring to it at all.

CMix: No thoughts about killing him off?

WW: No. I’m way more interested in working on my own original stuff. And there’s a finite number of time/energy/creative units that I can gather on my “collect resources” turn. I would rather put those into building my own story than into repairing the Wesley Crusher building.

There are times in my life when I wonder if I spend a little too much time gaming. I frequently decide that there’s just no such thing as too much gaming . . . then I read something like this, a faithful recreation of my actual thought process, and I think I should just step away from the bag of dice for a few turns.

Wait. Not turns. Days. I meant to say days.

Sigh.

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