Category: Books

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.

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.