Category: Books

these points of data make a beautiful line

Posted on 12 November, 2007 By Wil

I got my dates confused in my head, and thought today was Veteran’s Day. I’m embarrassed and a little ashamed that I completely missed it yesterday. So even though it’s one day late: Thank you, veterans, for your service.

And now, some various things, most of which I came across while Propelling today:

Researchers in Russia found what they believe to be the impact crater of the Tunguska Event.

I keep hearing this ridiculous line of bullshit that writers make massively inflated salaries, so nobody should support them and their greedy strike. It’s the same tired line of crap that’s thrown out at any group of skilled workers who have the audacity to expect a fair wage from our employer, and are forced into a work stoppage to get those employers to negotiate with us in good faith.

I hope to be a WGA member one day, but even if I didn’t, I would completely support the writers. John Rogers has written several great posts that lay out, in simple but passionate terms, why the WGA has to strike against the AMPTP. He also linked a video that is quite effective in helping the WGA make their case to a skeptical and misinformed public.

Sean McDevitt reviews The Happiest Days of Our Lives:

The Happiest Days of Our Lives
is all about surrounding yourself with people you care about, interests
you enjoy and finding the passion in the "every day." It’s why people
come in droves to read Wil’s blog and why he has been as successful in
nearly every endeavor he has pursued. The book is a collection of the
happiest parts of his day. I’m glad he put it all together.

Flickr’r *Out of My Mind* took a very cool picture, with a little Geek in it.

Mental Floss is one of the greatest magazines in the history of life. Their website pointed me to The Nerd Handbook, which I think WWdN readers will enjoy (and Propel, maybe?):

Written as sort of a "Nerds are From Mars…" guide for nerds’
Significant Others, The Nerd Handbook explains nerd habits and
motivation. While the article seems focused on computer nerds
specifically, many of the nerd behaviors described are applicable to
the entire nerd spectrum.

Reader B sent me a link to an awesome polyhedral dice desktop image.

John Scalzi’s brilliant and wonderful The Sagan Diary was just made available online, in its entirety, from Subterranean Press. In announcing this news, John says something I’ve believed for a long time, but was never able to articulate in print:

I think the story just lives better in book form. One of the
things you learn when you get published is that a book isn’t just about
the text; there’s a whole aesthetic that goes with the book, and that
esthetic matters. This is one of the reasons I think that printed books are going to be around for a while, in some form or another.

Okay, now I’m going to try: I like to read things online, and I believe that publishing online is part of the future of any writer’s life, but nothing compares to actually holding a book in my hands. Books just feel right, magazines just feel right, and I hope that readers of my blogs and books will agree, so I don’t have to make the difficult business decision to save all the stories people tell me they love from my blog for my books, so I can make a living and support my family by writing.

What They Play seems like it could be a cool and useful resource for parents, if the editors steer clear of Thompsonesque hype and pandering. [via game politics]

If you enjoyed my Geek in Review from last week, and are interested in Interactive Fiction as a result (or if, like me, you got to the end and really wanted to play Lurking Horror again) you may want to stay away from the Interactive Fiction archive. It’s an easy (and awesome) way to lose an entire day.

The cake is a lie, but I’m still alive.

And now I’m going outside. It’s a spectacularly beautiful day here in Los Angeles.

Gamers With Jobs reviews Happiest Days

Posted on 6 November, 2007 By Wil

Julian "Rabbit" Murdoch reviewed The Happiest Days of Our Lives today at Gamers With Jobs:

Wheaton will forever get lumped into a bucket with "geek cred"
painted on the side. Yes, he’s "one of us." You need look no further
than his blow-the-doors-off keynote speech he gave at PAX this year.
Sure, it was funny. I mean hell, he opened with "My name is Wil
Wheaton, and Jack Thompson can suck my balls." But it was also well
written, well delivered, and something of an anthem for us over-30
geekdads. But we should pause for a moment and acknowledge the craft:
the guy knows how to tell a compelling story.

That pause is difficult. It’s hard to separate the work – the book – from the fact that he does
seem so much like everyone I grew up with and to be blunt, so much like
me. His stories of agonizing over Star Wars figures in K-Mart, of
escaping into the safety of Dungeons and Dragons at the age of 12 –
these are my stories. They are the stories of everyone I knew growing up who didn’t think I was a spaz. They are our stories.

Here we sit in the crucible of the internet, invented, maintained,
loved and obsessed over by geeks. Yet why is it we still look for our
muse? I’m not sure I have the answer. I don’t think Wheaton does
either. But I do know that there is an intersection between the
geek-as-consumer and the geek-as-creator that lies like a giant exposed
central nerve, at least in organism in which I live. Sure, there are
plenty of people writing about tech, and many of them write very well.
There are scads of bloggers and pundits and comics and storytellers.
And many of them (myself included, I hope) do a decent job of torturing
words onto the page now and then.

Wheaton’s different, not in an "oh my god he’s so dreamy" way, but
in the sense that blue and green are different. It would be easy to
think that Wheaton has somehow parlayed a child-star gig into a kind of
ambassadorship to planet Nerd. It would also be wrong. Wheaton’s
strength is not his provenance, it’s that he is slowly mastering the
craft of echoing the lives of a certain generation with simplicity,
un-feigned humility and striking clarity.

It was really cool to read a review from someone who took the time to put Happiest Days into context with my other books and online writing. I think I’ve grown a lot as a writer since I sat down and started putting together Just A Geek (and then Dancing Barefoot) and it’s pretty awesome to have that recognized by someone who isn’t married to me.

This is the second review that’s mentioned the length, though, so maybe I need to make it more clear in my marketing materials: this is supposed to be a short book that you can enjoy in little bursts, or read in one sitting. I could have padded it, but Andrew and I made a decision to eliminate stories that had different settings, but ultimately told the same thing (this resulted in cutting about 15000 additional words before we even got to the final rough draft of stories that made the cut.) I’d rather be accused of being short than stuffing the book with filler for the sake of making it longer. I know your time is valuable (hey, I’m writing this week’s GiR about exactly that subject) and I didn’t want to overstay my welcome.

Remember that you can submit your own reviews at Monolith Press, if you’re so inclined.

Bad Astronomy reviews Happiest Days

Posted on 2 November, 2007 By Wil

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.

a different perspective on numb three ers

Posted on 1 November, 2007 By Wil

The art department at Numb3rs created the best fake comic convention I’ve ever seen for last week’s show. The level of detail was phenomenal, including things like a stack of flyers welcoming participants to the con, booths from Wizkids, and WOTC, and appearances by several different real life comic creators.

One of those comic creators, Tony Fleecs (In My Lifetime, POSTCARDS: True Stories that Never Happened) talked to the comic podcast Word Balloon about his experiences on the set. It’s an enjoyable listen for comic readers, and people who just want to know what it’s like to be on the set of a television show from the perspective of someone who doesn’t work in the TV industry every day. He also said some nice things about me, which made my sugar hangover a little more bearable.

(Thanks to reader Ethan J., for the link!)

fastfiction from internet jesus

Posted on 30 October, 2007 By Wil

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.