Category: Podcast

There is a massive winter storm barreling toward us right now, expected to arrive in the next 18 or so hours. Yesterday, it was unseasonably warm and stupidly beautiful. Today, it’s eerily calm, under grey skies. The air is so still, it carries the train whistles from all the way across the valley, and every lawnmower in town sounds like it’s next door. You walk outside, and everything just says, soon.¹ Even the corvids and squirrels seem reluctant to come out of the trees, It never rains in Southern California, man. It pours.

This past weekend, though, it was great, and I was grateful for it.

Last Friday, Anne and I celebrated our 26th wedding anniversary. We have both been so busy and overwhelmed for so long, we planned to skip our usual weekend getaway and just go out for a really fancy dinner, instead. So we went to Mozza in Hollywood, where I think Anne discovered that pasta can actually be wonderful and not what her husband struggles to assemble in our kitchen.

We had such a wonderful meal, and such a nice time out, on a Friday night like PEOPLE WHO GO OUT TO DO THINGS! And that would have been enough, but about two weeks ago, Anne said that she was really missing our usual weekend away, and how did I feel about using points to go somewhere close? I admitted that I, too, was feeling sad we weren’t going to have two days of absolutely nothing but Us. Funny how we both really wanted to do this together, but kept talking ourselves out of it because we’d agreed together that we would.

Anyway, she found a place, cashed in some points, and we spent the weekend up in Santa Barbara. It was nothing but long walks, petting dogs, eating incredible food, and prioritizing each other, our relationship, our friendship, and our marriage. Each of us truly is married to our best friend, and even after 26 years (30+ total), we still have all kinds of fun goofing off together. We have consistently done the hard work of being married and being a family, and that investment pays off at like fifty million percent all the time.

It’s just like … it’s such a blessing and so awesome to spend our lives together, and be mom and dad to our kids. We have worked really hard for a good life, and I’m grateful that I’ve worked so hard to heal my PTSD, so I can actually enjoy living it.

And now…

This week’s story dropped earlier today! It is Dissembling Light, by Kel Coleman. It originally appeared in Beneath Ceaseless Skies issue 385.

This is a magical story (meaning that Magic features prominently in the narrative) about a man who holds tremendous knowledge and skill in his heart, and the hopeful apprentice who comes to learn from him. It also makes me wonder what good is knowledge, if its holder doesn’t freely share it?

You can get It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton wherever you get your podcasts. Here’s some links to the more popular services:

• Apple Podcasts
• PocketCast
• Pandora
• iHeart
• Amazon
• or grab the RSS directly from me right here. (Yo! Old school RSS subscribers, I see you and finger your .plan!)

You can also support the show on Patreon, where you’ll get the show with no ads, as well as some spiffy extras that all the cool kids are into these days.

Today, I recorded two episodes. One of the things we did is the most beautiful, heartbreaking, I-need-a-minute-to-compose-myself story I have read in a long, long time. I’m so excited for you to hear it. It’s also the source of the show’s first official blooper, where you will get to hear me use all my, uh, colorful metaphors in rather creative ways.

I would absolutely love to hear your feedback on the show, if you’re a listener. I feel like we’re doing good work, and putting good art into the world, but I have no idea what the audience thinks if I don’t ask, because we aren’t exactly in a theater together. Although, if I can figure out how to stage one of these stories, I’m into seeing what that would look and sound like. Maybe something cool is there, way off in the mysterious future.

1. Unfortunately, it’s not the soon we are all waiting for ↩︎

I should have posted this yesterday. My bad! I’m working all week on a narration that I have wanted permission to do for years. YEARS. Every night I go to sleep super excited to get back to work, and every morning I wake up excited that I get to do this.

That said, it’s been hard work, and I’m exhausted. You’d never believe it was possible to get exhausted, I bet, sitting in a chair and reading all day. And you’d probably be right, if that’s all I was doing. In fact, I wouldn’t have believed it, myself, if I didn’t have firsthand experience. But it’s performance, if you’re doing it right, and performance takes energy. Four straight hours of performance is a lot of performance, it turns out.

To be clear: I love that I’m exhausted. It feels earned and it’s satisfying. It’s also, uh, exhausting. I am entirely out of mana at the end of the day, and I didn’t think reaching into hit points for my blog was the best idea.¹

I don’t know when I can get into the details of this — I have such a story to tell about today’s work — but I hope it’s soon.

Oh! This is SUCH a good excuse to put in my subscribe thingy. If you don’t want to miss that post, or any other post, you can do that here:

Nice.

If you follow my Instagram, you may recognize that I’m working in the same booth where I record It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton. Allow me to use THAT to now fulfill the promise of the blog title, and tell you that a new episode dropped yesterday.

This week’s story is The Odyssey Problem, by Chris Willrich, originally published in Clarkesworld Magazizne. Ohhhh it is so good. I’d love to hear what you think.

It’s Story Time With Wil Wheaton is available wherever you get your podcasts. Subscribe now at

• Apple Podcasts
• PocketCast
• Spotify
• Pandora
• iHeart
• Amazon
• or grab the RSS directly from me right here.

You can also support the show on Patreon, where you’ll get the show with no ads, as well as some spiffy extras that all the cool kids are into these days.

Oh! Oh! Reminder that Corey, Jerry, and I are coming to a city near you² with a 35mm print of Stand By Me. Tickets are available for three screenings:

December 5 at Count Basie Center for the Arts in Red Bank, New Jersey

December 4 at Capitol Center for the Arts in Concord, New Hampshire.

December 6 at Lynn Memorial Auditorium in Lynn, Massachusetts.

Everything you need to know, including how to buy tickets and VIP packages is at stand by me live dot com

Hey, hasn’t it great to wake up yesterday and finally have the day you voted for? It feels good, doesn’t it?The beginning of his end is upon us, friends.

1. Actually, I can confirm this, as I just realized while proofing this post that I am currently dipping into hit points. ↩︎
2. Offer valid if you live near Red Bank, NJ, Concord, NH, or Lynn, MA. Offer void in Iceland, for some stupid reason. ↩︎

And we’re back! My podcast, It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton, returns today with a spooky story to celebrate the spooky season.

This week, it’s The Dark House, by AC Wise.

A photographer’s obsession with an unsettled subject exposes two friends to a darkness that won’t be contained by frames…

It’s so good! I had a great time narrating it.

If you’re interested, take a look at my Patreon for a feed with no ads and a bunch of cool behind the scenes extras. If you subscribe before 5pm Pacific tomorrow, you can watch me do a live reading of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Oh! And starting today, you can get most of the Patreon stuff through your Apple account with Apple Subscriptions, if you prefer to do it that way.

I love that I get to do this, and it means more to me than you know that so many of y’all tune in and love it with me.

I’m around all day today, and I’ll be checking in here if anyone wants to talk about the show.

Well, here we are in Spain. I feel like I am just getting started, and I wish I had more new episodes yet to come, but we have come to the final episode of what’s turning out to be one of the most wonderful things I’ve ever done. I set out to make ten episodes for the first season of the podcast, and through a series of unfortunate events, lost two of them. That means that this is the final episode of my proof of concept, shakedown cruise, for what I hope will become a weekly series that runs for years.

I have learned so much during this process about myself, as a creator, producer, and host. I’ve learned a lot about promotion and marketing. I don’t know precisely how much XP I farmed through the whole thing, but I’ve gone up a couple of levels. I know how to do this, now.

I honestly don’t know what comes next. I’m going to have an all-hands meeting with the team to look at total downloads other metrics, and they will tell me if it looks like there is enough audience to attract sponsors and Patreon subscribers.

My gut tells me that it isn’t going to happen. I don’t feel it catching and growing the way I did with Tabletop. That’s probably because the podcast space is crowded, and even though I’m not necessarily competing with another audiobook podcast (I think I’m the only one), I am absolutely competing with every other podcast in the universe, because there is only so much time available, and those True Crime podcasts are pretty great. But I’m hopeful that my gut is filled with a lifetime of disappointment and sadness, so it’s not giving me truly useful advice. I’m hoping that I get good news, wihle bracing myself if it doesn’t come.

All of that said, if this is all I ever get to do, I am so happy and proud of this. I do not regret taking this chance, investing my time and money and spirit. From a creative standpoint, this is a huge success. I am so proud of my work, I feel so good about it, and I am so grateful that I am closer to my artistic self now than I was six months ago, entirely because this whole effort demanded that I give it everything I had to give. To get there, I had to really clean up and get rid of a lot of baggage and lingering bits of my former life as an on-camera actor. A wonderful and unexpected benefit of that (other than the genuine emotional healing and trauma recovery) is that I have a much clearer picture of who I am as a person and an artist.

I am supposed to be coy and play it cool, fake it ’till I make it and all that, but I am going to tell you, even though they all tell me I am not supposed to, that I want to do this podcast as my daily job more than anything. I want to feel the satisfaction of putting something good into the world, the joy and the rush and the art that only happens when I’m narrating audiobooks or working in animation. And since animation doesn’t seem interested in giving me feedback on a single audition going on for two decades now, I’m going to lean hard into narrating audiobooks.

If you’re in the audience for It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton, I need you to know how grateful I am that you’re trusting me with your time and attention. The world is on fire, everything is terrible, and we all desperately need to find as many moments of peace as we can. It’s my hope that I can tell you a story once a week, and for an hour or so, you can get a rest from all of *gestures broadly at everything*. I sincerely hope I can keep doing this for you (and for myself), and if I do, you’re the reason why.

And a very very very special thank you to everyone who supported me on Patreon. You are part of a very small group of people (much smaller than I anticipated) and I hope you enjoyed the things I shared specifically with you, as my way of saying thank you.

So enough about me, let’s get to the reason you’re here… this week’s hopefully not final episode of It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton!

Every single story I did is wonderful, and I love each one on its on merits for specific reasons. This week’s, however, is a stand out for me, among other great work. This story is almost a monologue, and I can see myself doing it as a one act play at the theatre where it is set, just down the road from here. Every story I narrate uses at least some of the skill I developed when I was an actor, but this one just demanded that I use all of them.

Actually, let me restate that: it gave me permission to feel the joy that actors must feel when they give a fulsome performance that goes all the way to the marrow of their creative selves. That was rad.

Our editors did some very gentle work on this, too, that fills out a bit of space and makes the whole thing just so much more than I even hoped it would be. I’m so excited to share this with all of you.

Here’s my intro:

This is the part of my introduction where I talk about the story you’re about to hear, where I write what I call “the magazine heading” which will help you press pause on the real world and come with me into Story Time. This part is challenging for me; I need to summarize just enough of the plot to entice you, without giving away anything important.

I’m struggling with this part more than usual today, because this story doesn’t fit neatly into any single category. It’s a ghost story, it’s a love story, it’s a gorgeous monologue that cries out to be staged in the real life theatre where the titular play is set. It is a beautiful way to wrap up our first season. There is nothing I can say about it now that adds anything to it, so I invite you to take your seat, because the house lights have come down, and we have to begin, if we are going to get to the End of Play.

You’re going to love this, I promise.

As always:

• Apple Podcasts
• PocketCast
• Spotify
• Pandora
• iHeart
• Amazon
• or grab the RSS directly from me right here.

You can also support the show on Patreon, where you’ll get the show with no ads, as well as some spiffy extras that all the cool kids are into these days.

Thanks, everyone. I’m so glad you’re here, and so grateful that you’re part of this.