Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer, reviewed The Happiest Days of Our Lives!

This book is really good. Are you a geek? Grew up playing video
games? Go to cons? Watch Trek? Have your own set of d10s, d12, and d20s
(and if you even know what that means, then yes, you count)? Yeah, you
know who you are. You are already one of us, whether you admit it or
not. Come. Join us. Be with Wil and Phil and countless others who enjoy
— nay, revel — in nerddom.

Wil’s writing makes this way of life less of the fringe it was when
I was a kid and more of a real thing, a legitimate lifestyle choice.
Sure, you get razzed by others, but this is really how we are.
You get a taste of it through Wil’s eyes, through his reminiscing.
There’s a nice mix of real-guy-with-a-life-and-family mixed in with
fanboy mixed in with being an actual TV and movie actor. Also, I play
poker, so his story about a Hollywood poker speakeasy made me laugh.

To mark this occasion, I am happy to announce that within the next 24 hours I’ll begin accepting orders from everywhere in the world. In addition to the US, we’ll ship to The Canada, The UK, The The European Union, The Australia, and The Everywhere Else. International customers: please understand that the shipping costs are insane, and because I have to fill out each custom form by hand, shipping times will take at least two weeks, but I’ll do my best to make it shorter.

I’m still working on a solution to sell the hardbacks. I’m getting closer, and I don’t think I’ll be able to use PayPal as a shopping cart and storefront, because the problem I’m currently having, item numbers aren’t showing up in multiorder shiping, has existed and remained untouched by PayPal since April.

We’re currently looking at lots of different cart and backend options, and we may have found something that is going to work for us, and is Open Source as a bonus! We looked at Yahoo shopping, Z Shops at Amazon, and Google Checkout, but they all had various deal-killing issues.

Warren Ellis wrote a pretty fantastic short short story called Jack Baby that I saw yesterday:

I dipped the old jar down into the creeping slurry and scooped a pint
of shit-water out of the Thames, down where the sewers meet the river.
It’s come to this, I said to no-one: making jenkem rather than seeing
the Jack Baby.

Seal up the jar, watch it ferment for long
sleepless days, and then inhale the gas off the top. Jenkem: ghetto
drugs. An hour of laying like a corpse and seeing dead things instead
of the orgasm-jerking and spacewalk day of a Jack high. But I couldn’t
afford Jack, and I didn’t want to think about the Jack Baby.

There’s a lot of atmosphere, character, and story wrapped up in the 200 words or so that make up the entire thing, and I had to read it twice to fully absorb it. It was totally worth it.

When I manage to wring fiction out of my brain, it will be because I am inspired by stories like this. I mean, how in the hell can Warren come up with stuff like — well, just go read it, and see if you don’t have the same reaction. 

Ken Denmead, who edits the Geekdad blog at Wired, wrote a review of The Happiest Days of Our Lives this weekend:

This is a wonderful little book.  I hate to use a diminutive like
"little," for fear of implying that THDOOL is less-than significant in
some literary way; it isn’t.  It is a charming, heart-warming,
laugh-inducing, tear-jerking, and even envy-inducing read.  It is not,
however, long.  I’d like to argue that this is a plus.  Indeed, I think
THDOOL is enjoyable in part because of its length (or lack thereof).
It is, after all, a collection of short-form writing (blog-posts),
collected, expanded, massaged, and served with a steaming side of
post-modern nostalgic recollection.  This is the face of contemporary
introspective non-fiction, and it is exactly what we all like to read
and write nowadays.  Reading THDOOL is all about getting the quick-fix
of checking your RSS feeds in the morning and skimming the new posts,
but then getting to take a little longer to sit down and savor
something just a bit more significant.

Have I pointed out that everything in this book, though it started online in one form or another, was completely rewritten, updated, expanded upon, and "de-bloggified’? The Happiest Days isn’t just a cut and paste, and maybe I should have made that more clear before? Anyway, I’m very happy that Ken noticed that, and mentioned it.

There will be good reviews and bad reviews, and not everyone will like what I write, or how I write it. I’ve learned over the years to make a conscious effort not to give too much importance to any of them, but I have to admit that getting such a positive review from someone who I respect and enjoy reading every day made me squee just a little bit.

Okay, a lot.

I was helping a friend troubleshoot and .opml issue a few days ago, and ended up building the mother of all vanity searches with this thing called monitor.

I was going to delete it last night, but I’m glad I didn’t, because I found this great review of The Happiest Days of Our Lives with it this morning:

The book is a compilation of stories from Wil’s earlier years. The
stories make for a great read. Some will make you laugh, while others
will sadden you. And more than one is very easy to relate to. I really
enjoyed the book. Reading it caused me to recall some great memories
from my past as well.

Yesterday at work, I loaned one of my books to this guy Robert, who is a makeup artist I worked with a million years ago on Star Trek. They’d hired him to do special effects makeup on the background actors playing fans, but wouldn’t let him use real pieces, because it would look too good. He ended up using the stuff you can buy  at Cinema Secrets, and it still looked great. I’m telling you guys, the authenticity is so great, you’ll swear we were at a real convention.

Anyway, Robert sat down with it and started reading between setups. After about an hour, he came over to touch me up and make me look awesome for a closeup. While he put powder on my shiny face, he told me how much he liked the stories in my book, especially Blue Light Special, which he could relate to, and I am the Modren Man, which he said cracked him up.

I told him how happy that made me, and asked him to tell people about the book, because word of mouth is what sells books, not advertising. Think about this: when is the last time you bought a book, DVD, or game because of the advertising? I don’t think I’ve done that since I realized advertising was bullshit about twenty-five years ago. I have, however, bought lots of books, games, DVDs, and CDs because my friends told me how much they loved it, and thought I’d like it.

Reviews are important for books, because they can convince people who are on the fence to take a chance on a book, but even more important is word of mouth, especially from your friends, family, and other people you trust to give you good, honest advice.

I’m not going to be reviewed by Booklist or any of the major newspapers, and it’s unlikely that I’ll get a chance to go on television and radio to let people know about The Happiest Days of Our Lives who don’t know about it already. I’m counting on readers who feel my book was worth their time and money to tell their friends, and help me reach people who I haven’t reached already.

If you’ve read The Happiest Days of Our Lives, and you felt it was
worth your time and money, please tell your friends and family about it. It makes me so happy (and relieved) that it’s already happening a little bit, right here on the Internets.