Category: Books

good news, everyone!

Posted on By Wil

Well, good news to everyone who is going to Phoenix Comicon, anyway (which is in just five days, demonstrating how effectively a convention can sneak up on me when I’m doing other things.)

UPS just dropped off 25 copies of Just A Geek and Dancing Barefoot, which I purchased from O’Reilly at great expense to myself and my heirs. So if you’re hoping to get your hands on The Collected Works of Me, Wil Wheaton, we’ll probably be able to exchange shiny gold rocks for bound collections of dead trees and words.

announcement 5 of 4 (math is hard!)

Posted on By Wil

According to Eventful, 84 people have joined a demand for me to come to San Diego. I usually come down for Comic-con, but with the eleventy billion people down there every year, it’s not exactly the most intimate environment for a reading and signing. So I’ve been looking for a more reasonable venue, where I won’t have to compete for attention with half-naked cosplaying MILFs.

So I talked to the Awesome Patrol at my favorite indie bookstore in San Diego, and I’m coming to Mysterious Galaxy Books on May 3 for a reading, signing, and geekfest.

I had a whole bunch of fun the last time I came to Mysterious Galaxy with Just a Geek. There was a great crowd, and it’s a fantastic store. I’m really looking forward to doing this, and I think it’s appropriate that Mysterious Galaxy will be the first official in-store signing on Wil Wheaton’s Happiest Tour of My Life, which I’ve just decided to launch and may cancel due to lack of interest at future date.

Mysterious Galaxy has a page with details and book ordering information, and I’ve also created an event page at Eventful that doesn’t have ordering information, but does have a spiffy picture of me, Wil Wheaton.

where is my motivation?

Posted on By Wil

2008 is the year of serious fiction writing for Wil, so it is also
going to be the year of reading like crazy to stay inspired and in the
proper headspace for writing. I’m quite excited for this, actually,
because it means I’ll be working through the stack of books (you’ll
find one in every house, you’ll see) almost as fast as I can add to it.

However, having finished my manga script and Penny Arcade foreword, I find myself massively unmotivated to do much of anything beyond Propelling links every day, burning through the Netflix queue, and catching up on whatever my DVR’s recorded for me in the last few months. And Xbox. And Nintendo DS.

This lack of motivation and focus is disturbing to me, and it’s dangerous, too. I’ve resolved to find my way out of Lazy Bum Town and back onto the Highway of Productivity before the end of the week.

Could it be that my brain wants to take a bit of a vacation? That I subconsciously need to just veg out and do nothing so it can recharge? Am I just undisciplined? Whatever the answer is, I need my brains back soon, because Andrew and I put together a 2008 release schedule for Monolith Press and — wait. That’s not right. I told Andrew about all the things I wanted to do this year and when I wanted to have them done, and he put together a schedule that is tough, but reasonable . . . if I can just get my damn brain into gear and find my motivation. Thank jeebus for Andrew, because he’s a hell of a lot more than just a good friend and a Red Pen of Doom.

I think the best way to get motivated is to give myself deadlines. And by "give myself" I mean "respect the deadlines Andrew set up for me." I think that I need inspiration too, though, and I’m going to get that by reading books I love, listening to audio books I love, and analyzing movies that I love. I got the idea to do what became Just a Geek and Dancing Barefoot because I was inspired by This American Life and David Sedaris. I’m working on some original science fiction because I’ve been inspired by Scalzi, Joe Haldeman, and Phillip K. Dick.

But that inspiration, and the desire to do something with it, is having a tough time achieving escape velocity from video games and movies, so maybe the whole thing comes down to discipline, which I understand is one of the toughest things for freelance writers who work out of their house to maintain.

it’s graphic, and it’s awesome

Posted on By Wil

DailyBits compiled a list of seventeen — seventeen! —  free and dowloadable graphic novels.

DailyBits, calls them "sensational" and I agree. Look at some of them:

Fell #1 from Warren Ellis

Detective Richard Fell is transferred over the bridge from the big city to Snowtown, a feral district whose police roster numbers three-and-a-half people (one detective has no legs). Dumped in this collapsing urban trashzone, Richard Fell is starting all over again.

Y: The Last Man Vol. 1: Unmanned by Brian K. Vaughan

When a plague of unknown origin instantly kills every mammal with a Y chromosome, unemployed and unmotivated slacker Yorick Brown suddenly discovers that he is the only male left in a world inhabited solely by women.

Sandman #1: Preludes and Nocturnes by Neil Gaiman

A wizard attempting to capture Death to bargain for eternal life traps her younger brother Dream instead. Fearful for his safety, the wizard kept him imprisoned in a glass bottle for decades. After his escape, Dream, also known as Morpheus, goes on a quest for his lost objects of power. On the way, Morpheus encounters Lucifer and demons from Hell, the Justice League, and John Constantine, the Hellblazer.

Next time someone asks you to define awesome, you may want to point them to this list (you could also show them this collection of people posing with album covers in a rather clever way.) It’s also a spectacular resource to use if you’ve ever wanted to introduce people to graphic novels.

(via Pulp 2.0)

announcement three of four (collect them all!)

Posted on By Wil

This announcement is probably more exciting to me than to anyone else in the whole universe, but I think it’s cool: I wrote the foreword to the next Penny Arcade collection.

This one is insanely cool for me, because way back when they put together their first book, Gabe and Tycho asked me to write a foreword for it. I was way too busy at the time, so they got Bill Amend (creator of Foxtrot, which sits on a shelf with The Far Side and Calvin and Hobbes in my Library of Awesome) instead. I think they traded up. Way, way up.

Years went by, and they kept putting out books that I kept reading. We crossed paths at Comic-Con, but I never really got to actually know them at all, until I gave the keynote at PAX last year. (You know, I almost chickened out of that, for reasons I’ve gone into excruciating detail about before, and I’m really glad that I didn’t, because I believe it will end up being one of the most significant moments in my life. I can’t quantify those reasons now, but I have a feeling that I’ll hopefully be able to explain one day, Charles Foster Kane style.)

After PAX was over, Robert Khoo asked me if I’d be willing to write the foreword. It went something like this:

Robert: Hey, would you like to write th–

Me: YES! YES! A THOUSAND TIMES, YES!

So I’m pretty excited about it, and I think that what I wrote totally doesn’t suck, which is always a bonus.

I hope I can do more things with Mike and Jerry in the future, because even though I’m the pinky toe on the Voltron we make when we come together, it’s still a pretty bad ass robot.