Category: Podcast

his name is dinkums. he watches family feud.

Posted on By Wil

Today’s title brought to you by “I have no idea what to call this, so I’ll quote Vacation and hope for the best.”

Back in the old days, when bloggers wanted to post about something, but didn’t have a story to tell, we would do these posts on our blogs that linked to people and stories we thought were interesting. The comments of those particular posts always filled up with cool links of their own, and it’s how we built our communities. “Hey, check this out,” seems to have migrated over to social media, so it feels a little … vestigial? … to do one of those posts, but I want to post something, and the story I’m working on isn’t ready, so. I wanted to share two things I am doing, and then some music and books I’ve been loving.

First off, I had so much fun doing Wil Wheatcon earlier this year, the instant we finished, I asked Momentus and Stands if we could do another one, so I am thrilled to announce the upcoming WIL WHEATCON 2: 2WHEAT 2CON on September 19th. Here’s a video we made to promote and celebrate:

Speaking of me, this weekend I will be appearing for a pair of events at MOPOP in Seattle. On Saturday, I’m joining the museum for its celebration of 60 years of Star Trek. In the afternoon, we’ll be watching an episode of TNG together with a live running commentary from this guy. I’m going to let the audience choose if they want the funny experience of watching Justice, or the more thoughtful, reflective experience of watching Final Mission. Either way, it’s going to be really special for me. Then, Saturday evening, I’ll be part of their Supper Series, featuring a discussion and oral history of my experiences on Next Generation and beyond.

I think there are still some tickets left, if any of that sounds like something you’d enjoy.

Okay, let’s get into the music of it.

A little over a year ago, I stumbled across this phenomenal band from Mexico called The Warning. It’s three sisters from Monterey, who loved playing Rock Band together so much, they formed a real band when they were teenagers. They are so good, their fans crowdfunded their first albums and tours, and I discovered them right as they were breaking out with their incredible album, Keep Me Fed. They are difficult to pin into a single genre; I’ve heard them do punk, metal, hard rock, pop, and collabs with artists I never would have sought out on my own.

I am weirdly invested in their success, same way I am with The Linda Lindas, wanting this group of young women to have everything they ever wanted. I love them so much, I paid way too much for a scalped ticket to see them open for someone I didn’t know about, or stayed to see, when they played at the Greek earlier this year. I love them so much, I will go and pay three scalpers too much to see them three nights in a row when they are back in town later this month.

Their new album, Everything’s Falling, just dropped, and it’s such a gorgeous work of art. If you like the music I like, and you haven’t heard them before now, start with More, from Keep Me Fed, then Kerosene from the new album. If it lands on you, you’re going to have a really good time.

Speaking of The Linda Lindas, they also have a new record out that is blowing me away. GOTTA GET OUT continues the journey they began with No Obligation. I still believe they are The Go-Gos of the 21st century, and I’m waiting for the music industry to notice. If you live in or around Los Angeles, they play local shows all the time for as low as five bucks. Their punk spirit is infectious, and their live show is outstanding.

Oh! And Sincere Engineer, a punk band out of Chicago who are on tour right now, have a new album out called Probable Claws. It’s straight bangers start to finish, but I’m going to direct you to the song LOL, because Deanna invited me to contribute to it in the most Henry Rollins way I could. Can you believe that? I’M ON A PUNK RECORD!

Also: Die Spitz, Amyl and the Sniffers, Lambrini Girls, and Bad Cop/Bad Cop continue to fill my daily playlists with great music.

Books!

I’ve been reading and reading and then reading some more when I’m finished reading. Most of this is reviewing and preparing stories for It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton, which has been leading me to pick up novels and collections from those authors.

Real quick: you may have heard me talk about the North Star for the podcast. Here’s how I put it in my Brief History for Uncanny:

The North Star is a concept I developed during TableTop. When faced with an editorial or content choice, we asked ourselves if we were aiming at the North Star. For TableTop, the North Star was Create More Gamers. For It’s Storytime, the North Star is celebrate art and artists, promote literacy, and create space for people to have a break from the ongoing horrors.

When I was at World Con this past weekend, I met a couple of the authors who I have narrated. These are authors I didn’t know about before I narrated them, who are all now on my list of “I will read anything they write.” I had hoped to put authors onto the radars of their biggest fans, who just don’t yet know about their work … without considering that I, too, would become one of those fans. These authors shared with me that a lot of you have become fans of their work, and it’s positively affecting their careers. It was so reassuring to me, to hear from them that we are perfectly aimed at our North Star.

So after I narrated his short story, A Grey Magic, I’ve become a Ray Nayler superfan, and I am just loving his new novel, Palaces of the Crow. I loved Maria Dong so much, I picked up her newest, Aviary. I grabbed Lavie Tidhar‘s The Circumference of the World when I was at World Con. I could go on and on, but you get it, right?

I decided to do a Summer Reading Program with my library, and I’m proud to be on a 62-day streak. Some of the books I finished and loved on my way to earning a personal pan pizza include Foundling Fathers, from Meg Ellison, Earth 7, from Deb Olin Unferth, The Language of Liars from S. L. Huang, Your Behavior Will Be Monitored, by Justin Feinstein, and The Ship of Death, by Kyle Winkler.

Also, I got to read an advance copy of John Scalzi’s upcoming novel, Monsters of Ohio, which was as John Scalzi as I hoped it would be.

I read more than one thing at a time, and I am currently loving Cleopatra, by Saara El-Arifi, Jane Wiedlin’s memoir, TMI, Memoirs of a Go-Go, and I just started Sublimation by Isabel J. Kim.

I think I’ve talked about this a little bit on the podcast and in promotion, but just in case I haven’t mentioned it here: Around ten years ago, I woke up one day without the ability to relax and focus while I read a book, or a short story, or a magazine article, or anything longer than a few paragraphs. I tried and tried to overcome it, but it always eluded me.

A good friend of mine, who is one of the smartest people I know, observed that I was not alone; this had happened to them and a lot of people we both knew. My friend suggested that it was feeling overwhelmed by the horrors inflicted upon us by that fucking peophile rapist war criminal, the trauma of the pandemic, and the two of those things colliding with absolutely devastating results. My friend said they just felt like their brain was full, all the time.

The horrors have gotten worse, not better, so what happened to help me find the space, the focus, the time, and the motivation to rediscover the kid I used to be, who always had his face in a book? I can’t point to one thing, only, but I know all the EMDR and IFS therapy I’ve done to heal and recover from CPTSD has helped a ton. I know that having the responsibility and accountability of reviewing stories to narrate for my podcast has helped a ton. I know that making a choice to wander into the pages of a story and stay there so I can experience it fully has been a challenge, that has also helped a ton.

I want to share something that made a huge difference for me, in case someone else who loves to read has been struggling like I did. I have this app that was developed by Hank Green, called Focus Friend. Basically, you tell it to set a timer for you, and then you focus on an activity until the timer expires. While the timer is doing its thing, you get a little avatar who knits socks and scarves that you cash in to decorate the little house they live in. It’s low-stress, non-judgmental, extremely satisfying gamifying, and allowed me to create time specifically to read.

Your mileage will vary, but I started with 15 minutes, then 30 minutes, then 60 minutes. I found that 30 minutes is a perfect amount of time. It’s not so long I feel like I’ve overcommitted, but it’s long enough to enjoy a bunch of pages. More often than not, when it tells me my time is up, I add another 10 or 20 minutes, so I can finish the chapter or section I’m reading.

Oh, hey, this is a perfect place to put this! I have a partnership with Blackstone Publishing, who are sponsoring my podcast. I curated a collection of titles they publish, across a wide range of styles, from Lit RPG to Weird Fiction to Epic Fantasy. You can explore the entire Wil Wheaton Recommends collection right here. One of the titles, Acts of God, is in my top ten at the moment. I love the author’s voice so much, I asked them if they had anything that fit the format for It’s Storytime, and they sent me The Council, which I loved so much I bought it from them immediately. If you haven’t heard it, now you know.

I’ve noticed that all this reading has been extremely good for my mental health. I’m choosing to be still, to be quiet, to allow my imagination to paint and hear the words. I’m finding little bursts of artistic inspiration in entirely unexpected places, because my imagination is ravenous at the moment. Creating space and doing the work I needed to do in order to feed it has not been easy. It hasn’t been anything remotely resembling the concept of “easy”. But I remember telling my boys, “everything worth doing is hard, and that’s why is worth doing.” A little tautological, sure, but whenever something gets really hard, I remember that, and it helps me push through it.

I guess what I’m saying in more words than I needed to is that I believe, based on my personal experience, that reading books is extremely important, and if more people read more books, our world would be a measurably better place.

Lastly, I wanted to talk about some of the video games that are giving me joy right now.

I absolutely love Fallout 76. I’ve been playing for almost two years, I’m a level 580 ghoul and I have built the maximum number of CAMPs available. Every night, I spend about an hour doing dailies and wandering the Wasteland, helping players the way I was helped, and enjoying the escape and serenity of fighting Deathclaws and Scorched. It’s one of those things I can talk about for hours, in a level of detail that would make even a casual player’s eyes glaze over. I won’t do that, today. I will exercise restraint and just tell you that after about 50 superb bait over fucking months of failure, I finally caught a local legend. I can solo a nuke silo without glitching in about 15 minutes, and I have probably dumped ten million rounds into Earle. This season didn’t have great rewards, but next season looks like fun.

I don’t remember how I found Ball X Pit, but it’s a supremely fun roguelike that my kids and I are currently trying to 100%. I am also incredibly late to the party on Undertale, which feels and plays like a game Double Fine designed for the NES in 1989. It’s on all platforms.

Okay, I know there’s more I could share today, (I haven’t mentioned any of the tabletop games I’m currently playing) but I have a meeting in fifteen minutes and I’ve been blogging since I woke up, so I need to eat breakfast.

What are you into these days? I’d love to hear what you’re reading or playing.

I’m Wil and I write this blog. I’m so glad you’re here. I host It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton and co-host the official companion podcast for Stuart Fails To Save The Universe. If you’d like to get my posts delivered to you, here’s the thingy:

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Being A Brief History of It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton

Posted on By Wil

I have written for, and been published by, some fancy publications, including the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post, Salon, and … well, at least two more that I can remember turning in, but not who I turned them in to (being middle aged is GREAT! Why did I come in here, again?)

It always felt like a significant accomplishment, even if the editorial hand from the mainstream publications was heavier than it needed to be. For instance, Wall Street Journal. When I wrote about choosing kindness online in a world where that seemed to be less and less common, I included a passage about my fear that Elon Musk would turn Twitter into exactly what he turned it into. The editors cut it because they knew it was true and they know who their audience is. Still, I got to tell the world how important Noah Grey is to all bloggers, so I accepted the compromise.

Each of these essays took time and effort, and with my eyes wide open and a full understanding of the deal, I wrote them without being paid. The point was to put my ideas into the world as widely as possible, and I was willing to do that while I made my living elsewhere.

But I always wanted to be paid the professional rate for something I wrote and delivered for publication, and today that has finally happened!

I have an essay in this month’s Uncanny Magazine, called Being A Brief History of It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton! I requested payment in a paper check, so I can frame it.

Here’s an excerpt:

I have never been S-tier in anything, but I feel as close as I ever have, during this incredible run. People stop me on the street, in stores and restaurants, because they recognize my voice. They all tell me they love my narration. A lot of them tell me they will listen to anything I narrate. For the first time, ever, I feel respected and recognized in my field. I feel worthy and special. I feel confident and creatively satisfied. I feel like I earned it, that it belongs to me in a way my acting career never did. After nearly thirty years of being told by other people what I want to do, and what I am allowed to do, I finally know what I want to do with my artistic and creative life, until I choose to retire. I just have to find a way to do it without asking for permission.

In early 2024, one of my oldest friends, Christopher Scott, who I have known since I was fourteen, tells me that he finally sold his first story, “The Hidden Heart of Brass Attending,” to a magazine called On Spec (which, like too many indie publications, sadly no longer exists). He isn’t a full-time writer, but he has always been a great writer, a storyteller like me, and I had been waiting for this day for almost forty years. I go to the publication’s website and buy his issue. While I wait for it to arrive, I have this thought that maybe it would be cool to commemorate his achievement, and celebrate him, with a small gift. It had come up more than once that he liked my narrations, so I thought it would be cool to narrate this for him. No music, nothing fancy, no director. Just me and a microphone, doing a fun thing for my friend. 

I sat down to narrate, and right before I hit record, a voice in my head said, “Hey! Stop for a second. You know all those people who tell you that they’ll listen to anything you narrate? What if you tested that? What if you started a weekly audiobook podcast where you narrate short stories like this one? You could ask LeVar if it’s okay to step into the space he is leaving!” For the uninitiated, LeVar had a podcast for years called LeVar Burton Reads, that I loved. Coincidentally, he was ending that series around the time I started to think about mine.

This is such a big deal for me, a real level up moment. It’s just a couple hundred bucks, but it feels like one of the biggest and most significant checks I will ever receive.

I would love for you to read this. If you do, I’d love to hear your thoughts. I also recorded it for this month’s Uncanny Podcast, if you would like to hear it in my voice.

As always, thank you for all your support and enthusiasm over the years. I’m so happy you’re here.

Hi. I’m Wil. I write this blog, Sometimes I’m on TV. I host It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton, and co-host the official Stuart Fails to Save the Universe podcast. If you’d like to get my posts delivered to your email, here’s the thingy:

Until next time, take care of yourselves, and take care of each other. Never forget that you are enough, you are worthy, and you matter.

come closer and see

Posted on By Wil

I want to take a moment and say thank you for all the messages of comfort and support that so many of y’all have shared with me since Marlowe passed. I haven’t ever felt this kind of grief, for this long, in my life. When I am feeling the most sad, when I’m sobbing until I can’t breathe, I feel closest to her, so all I can do is go through it, honor it, and embrace her memory.

There’s a dog on Instagram called Wesley the Chicken Nugget. I adore him, and I love it when his person shares photos and video of him being a dog, so I completely understand how we can love animals we’ve never met. I know that lots of you loved Marlowe, and that comforts me every day.

So thank you, from Anne and me, for choosing to be kind.

I had to take a couple weeks off from recording stories for It’s Storytime (I’ve come to believe that four or five weeks of bereavement leave isn’t unreasonable) but we’re back to work and there’s a new story this week that I wanted everyone to know about.

It’s called To Carry You Inside You, by Tia Tashiro. Here’s my intro:

I grew up in the entertainment industry, not by choice, so I had a front row seat to the abuse and exploitation of child actors like myself. I grew up absolutely terrified of upsetting anyone on the set, robotically doing whatever I was told, so I could just get through it and have one of the precious and rare hours of my childhood where I got to just be a kid, before I was ripped out of childhood and thrust back into a place I never wanted to be.

Today, we are going to visit a future where child actors are still exploited, still used up and discarded, facing an adult life without purpose, that they were never prepared for, because nobody cared what happened to them past an arbitrary age.

We will meet a young woman who is doing her best to assemble the pieces of a stolen childhood into a fulfilling adult life. It isn’t what she wanted, or would have chosen for herself, but she’s doing her best, which is all any of us can do.

This is one of those examples of speculative fiction that I point to when I talk about the power of storytelling that lands on different people for different reasons. This story isn’t about me, but holy shit is it about me. In fact, when I reached out to Tia and asked for permission to do the narration, I mentioned that she captured the experience of being a child actor so perfectly and honestly, she must have some firsthand experience … imagine my surprise when she told me that she didn’t, that she used her imagination to create those moments.

Holy shit. That’s incredible. Please let me know what you think, if you listen.

Anyway, I’m doing my best to promote the show and just let people know it exists, but I keep getting crushed by the algorithm. On Threads, the posts before and after I talked about the podcast have thousands of views and hundreds of interactions, but my post about this episode has like 20 interactions and has only been seen by about 2000 of the 5000000 accounts that follow me. That seems … odd. And honestly, it’s kind demoralizing that one of the few direct ways I have to tell people this exists seems to work against supporting that. I’ve tried letting Bluesky know, and the 13 people who tend to notice me there are excited about it, I’m sure, but it just doesn’t seem to get traction there at all. If anyone reading this has experience bringing something to an audience who will probably love it, but just don’t know about it, I’d be grateful to hear anything you have to say about it.

Last thing, that is explicitly in service of promotion: If you listen to the podcast, you can help me out by rating and reviewing it wherever you are subscribed. The show’s audience is growing slowly but steadily, and I know it isn’t because of me; it’s because listeners are recommending it. That means so much to me. Thank you.

Books

It’s Storytime – Magnificent Maurice, or the Flowers of Immortality

Posted on By Wil

It is Wednesday, my dudes, and that means a new Storytime is waiting for you, wherever you get your podcasts.

This week’s story, Magnificent Maurice, or the Flowers of Immortality, was SO MUCH FUN to narrate. Here’s my intro:

About ten thousand years ago, some cats in Mesopotamia looked at a bunch of humans and thought, “I bet we could trick them into giving us food and shelter,” so they domesticated themselves. As a dog owner who is a member of my cat, Watson’s, staff, I’d say that it worked out pretty well for them.

This week, it is a privilege to tell you a story about one of the greatest cats who has ever lived (just ask him, he’ll tell you), a very special cat, with a very special job. I’m going to straighten my collar and make sure my hair is just so, as I tell you the tale of Magnificent Maurice, or the Flowers of Immortality.

You’re going to love this, especially if you are on staff for one or more housecats. In Patreon, we are celebrating our feline bosses, sharing their full names (Watson’s True and Full Name is His Royal Majesty, Sir Waddington Pottybottoms III, Esq.,The First of His Name, Head of The Complaint Department) and the titles of the songs we sing to them, featuring their names. It’s a lot of fun, and I encourage all of my fellow pet owners to jump in, here, if not there, and share.

“I’m not in your way, am I?”

Also, before I hit publish and get ready for work, I want to take a minute to thank all of you who listen to the podcast, who have subscribed to our Patreon, who have taken the time and effort to rate, review, and recommend us so we can grow. You are making it possible for me to do this, week after week, and I am intensely grateful to you. It is such a privilege to entertain you, to tell you these wonderful stories, and introduce you to authors you may not know, but I think you will love. And speaking of that, if you missed this, I wanted you to know that Senaa Ahmad, whose The Skin of a Teenage Boy is not Alive was on the pod a couple weeks ago, has a brand new short story collection out called The Age of Calamities (“Written by an inimitable new voice, The Age of Calamities is a genre-defying, mind-bending collection of absurdist, funny, and speculative short stories.“), that is available wherever you get your books.

It is such a gift to do this, y’all. If I can do this as my regular job for the rest of my career, if I never have to go work on camera again, if all I do is tell you stories and promote the Arts, I will be so happy. It feels like that has a very real chance of happening, and that fills me with such joy, I feel like I’m going to burst.

Okay. NOW I am going to go get ready for work. Stay safe, friends.

blog

It’s Storytime: Wend-Way-Go

Posted on By Wil

It is Wednesday, and that means there’s a new episode of It’s Storytime With Wil Wheaton, waiting for you wherever you get your podcasts.

This week’s story is Wend-Way-Go by Tim Pratt. It was originally published in Uncanny Magazine.

I made a creative choice for this week that I haven’t made before on the podcast, and it was so satisfying, I wanted to talk about it a little bit.

When I was working on Star Trek, one of the adults in the cast — and I can’t remember who, no matter how hard I try — introduced me to the concept of “meeting the demands of the material.” They meant that our job as actors is to serve the writer’s intention, not the other way around. Before we start changing words or rewriting lines, it is our responsibility to do the work of understanding the author’s intent until the scenes work. And if the scene still doesn’t work after all of that, then it is time to talk about making changes. But you don’t go making changes because you’re 15 and don’t yet know what it means to be an actor, beyond following direction.

It took me awhile to process that, and it took me even longer to reliably meet the demands of the material, but I eventually got there and never left.

As a narrator of over 100 titles, my job is easier, more joyful, and more satisfying because I know to listen to what the author wants to say, and then do my best to communicate that through my performance. When it works, the listener doesn’t even know what I did; they just feel the story more completely than they would, otherwise. It’s a pretty great trick.

When we recorded this week’s story, Gabrielle (who directs and produces) and I both felt that the material was making a specific demand, that was also a gift to me: without saying so directly, Tim sets this story in what felt to both of us like South Carolina, for some reason. It was so clear in the text that the narrative character needed to speak in a soft drawl, that supported his fundamental gentleness.

It is a creative risk, to be sure. Accents are tough, and present a unique trap that catches me all the time when I discover I am doing an accent, when I should be performing with an accent.

So it’s exciting and a little scary, but I’m glad I did it. I loved this story, and I hope you do, too.

And now, links!

You can also support the show on Patreon, where $5 a month gets you access to the show with no ads, a growing community of lovely people, live AMAs with me, and weekly insights behind the scenes of the show.

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