guess who likes you?

When I was a child actor and my mom was forcing me to do all of the child actor things, she was obsessed with my reviews. She made me feel like they were a test that I had to pass. I had to make the reviewers happy, so the audience (“your fans”) would remain happy. She relentlessly drilled into me that nothing was more important than what other people thought about me and my work, that I should be terrified of this audience that simultaneously hung on my every word (“your fans”) but was also so fickle they’d abandon me the instant I upset them.

That wasn’t how anything worked. It did not reflect reality at all, but it was an extremely effective method of control. After Roger Ebert gave The Buddy System (a bad movie) a fair review (It’s a bad movie), I was distraught. He said something about how I played a brat in the film (I did) but what I heard was “Wil Wheaton is a brat”. All the fear and anxiety my mom had poured into me threatened to drown me — did I mention I was ELEVEN? — so the only way I could manage to fight back was to just completely reject the whole notion of reviews. I remember telling people that I just wanted to let the work speak for itself, and I didn’t want to be out there talking about it. I didn’t have the awareness I have now to understand I was crying out for my family to notice me as a person, instead of the thing that paid for their stuff and made my mom feel important. I knew in my heart the next review would be the bad one that my dad would shove in my face as evidence that I deserved his rejection, that I wasn’t good enough to be worthy of his love and attention. Over the decades, I decided it was better to just ignore all the good ones, because I knew in my heart I’d only listen to the bad ones. And it’s all subjective, anyway. It can’t be about an artist’s inherent worth or value as a person and creator.

(It breaks my heart that younger Wil carried that burden as long as he did, and as a parent, I can’t comprehend doing anything that would make my children feel about themselves the way my parents made me feel about myself. It’s why, when someone in my Reddit AMA asked me what’s one thing in your personal life that you’re proud of?, I said “I am the dad I didn’t have.”)

In about 1986, my mom realized that teen magazines were always thirsty for me. Before too long, their editors realized that she was thirsty for their approval. Thus began several years of me being forced into endless photo shoots and choreographed encounters with other teeny bopper magazine kids. It all felt like I was just being used by everyone involved, and I couldn’t say no to it.

For the longest time, I didn’t grok that all press isn’t the same, that some press can actually work against my career goals (like being in every teen magazine in the world when you’re trying to be taken seriously as an actor), and that there is press that can make all the difference. My experience was warped because the press my mother prioritized wasn’t the kind of press I learned how to do when I was promoting my book, and now my podcast. It wasn’t press that was coordinated and targeted to give the work the best chance to find its audience. It was almost always attention for its own sake, another way for my mom to put me in a place where I was on display while she gorged herself on the attention I didn’t want. I hated it. I hated that it was more important than literally anything about me as a person or a son. So I frequently chose to give bad interviews, rarely took them seriously, and was pretty crap at the whole thing. If you’re one of the people who had to interview that kid, I’m sorry. He’s struggling like you wouldn’t believe and doesn’t have any support.

I always felt like it was speeding up the countdown clock on my fifteen minutes. After Stand By Me, it sent this message that I was the teeny bopper flavor of the month, and River was the serious actor*. When I was put in front of the photographers and stuff, I felt like a piece of dry bread, being pecked to death by birds who didn’t care who they were eating, as long as they were fed.

Starting with Tabletop, my attitude about press and promotion began to change. I began to see it as a necessary part of the whole thing, that didn’t have to be gross. In fact, I learned that it wasn’t inherently gross — that was my mom — unless I chose to talk to a gross outlet, which I haven’t done since I was in charge of my life. Doing interviews with Felicia, I began to see press as something that could be fun while it was helpful. I realized that nearly all the people I’m talking to are also just people who are doing their jobs. I’m sure there are countless entertainers who treat press the way I did when I was a kid, and I’m sure working with them (or that version of me) isn’t great. So I choose to be as close to great as possible when I have the chance. I’m going to honor their time and their audience’s attention, and I’m only going to say yes to people I actually want to talk to.

I took all of that energy into the promotion of Still Just A Geek, and I think it’s a big part of my book becoming a New York Times bestseller. So OBVIOUSLY I’m going to continue down that road as I promote It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton.

This is where I stop to make sure you know that I don’t hate any of what I’m doing now. I love all of it, and I’m grateful as fuck for everything that’s in front of me right now. This is where I think for a long time that I’m going to delete everything I just wrote and get to the thing I sat down here to write about in the first place.

…but I feel like that context is going to make the thing I wanted to write about in the first place a little more poignant. So. Thanks for your indulgence.

This is where I get to the actual post, and you realize that everything you’ve read to this point isn’t really the post, for some reason.

Before I walked Marlowe this morning, I was doing some administrative podcast work with my team. Our launch last week was met with enthusiasm that vastly exceeded my expectations, and we have way more media requests in five days than I thought we’d get in the whole first season. Yay! Go us! More people will get to find out we exist!

I’ve always planned for this podcast to start small and grow slowly. If this is going to find a large audience, it’s going to be because people who listened to it told their friends about it, who told their friends about it, and so on. It’s the only way I can compete for time and attention in a crowded marketplace.

This is a very important distinction I want to make about that phrase: I’m not personally competing with anyone in any kind of zero sum contest that will define our worth. I don’t feel like I need to prove to anyone that this is good enough (or that I am good enough) to justify their time; I just want to ensure that any person who will enjoy what we are doing knows we exist. And I hope those folks will choose to give me some of their time, once a week, until the heat death of the universe or I retire, whichever comes first.

As part of this discussion, my producer asked me if I’d looked at any reviews. I most certainly had not, for the reasons I wrote about (and nearly deleted) above. Well, I may want to, she told me, because they were entirely positive. Not mostly positive, mind you, but entirely positive**. I did not believe that was possible, so I went ahead and peeked through my fingers at the Apple Podcasts page for my show.

And, uh, well … yeah. The audience that listened to episode one and left reviews seems to have loved listening to it the way I loved narrating it.

Holy crap that’s incredible. It looks like what I worked to put into the world and what these people heard ended up being the same thing. That’s wonderful and so exciting!

We have a new episode dropping on Wednesday, and some other extremely cool stuff that’s sort of rendering into our reality as I type this. I’ll have more on that later this week or early next week. Also, I wanted to shout out Caroline M Yoachim, who wrote Rock Paper Scissors Love Death, for her Nebula nomination for We Will Teach You How To Read | We Will Teach You How To Read.

Oh, also, I was going to put this into its own blog, but it can go here: I don’t watch myself often, but when I do, I’m always looking for what I did wrong, where I fumbled my words, what I forgot to say, all the ways I sucked, etc. Because I am the executive producer and primary force behind this whole thing, I felt like I needed to watch myself on KTLA, the way an athlete looks at tape from the game, in case I am invited to be on other broadcasts or whatever.

I pressed play, and after about one minute, I became aware of tears flowing down my cheeks, because I was watching someone who looked and sounded just like me, only he was so happy and so comfortable in his own skin, so effortlessly proud of what he did without being Prideful, totally engaged with the hosts and genuinely grateful to be there. That guy takes nothing for granted and chooses gratitude. I want to be more like him.

Crying, yawning, laughing, are all ways our body reregulates our nervous system from an activated, fight or flight state, into a resting, parasympathetic state. My body had a lot to release, it turns out. Tears poured down my face and I felt all this tension in my chest and shoulders soften and release. I noticed that so much of the worry and weight of the possibility and hope I’m afraid to embrace wasn’t as heavy.

I was so happy to see that guy be happy. I was so happy to see that guy genuinely enjoying the opportunity in front of him, and I was so happy that he could receive the sincere interest and kindness of the hosts.

And that guy was me! I’m that guy!

There’s a version of me who doesn’t do The Work I have done and continue to do, and I don’t know that he even tries to make It’s Storytime. He doesn’t believe in himself, and he’s terrified to take chances. He is convinced that his dad is right about him. I want to gently hug that guy and show him what’s possible when he does The Work. I want him to know — I need him to know — that he can do it, because if I can, anyone can. Everything worth doing is hard, including The Work. That version of me — all versions of me — are worth it. I’m so grateful to be a version of me who never gave up when it was hard. I’m so grateful that I could see and feel and BE that version of myself.

To bring this back around (I love a good bookend***): I rarely read reviews, and when I do, I’ve always struggled to take anything away from them other than “well, 500 people say you’re awesome, but this one dude who can’t spell says you suck so he obviously sees through your facade and you should quit because you’ll never be good enough.”

I’ve done so much work, healed so much trauma, grown into something that looks an awful lot like what I hope my best self looks like, and that means I’m in a place where I can accept that the audience I hoped to reach is finding the thing I made, they are enjoying the thing, and telling other people about the thing. And not because they feel sorry for me or want something from me, but because they liked the thing I made and want to share how it made them feel with other people. That means everything to me.

It’s my understanding that the reviews and ratings y’all are leaving on the show are all very helpful for our discovery and growth. So I appreciate you all so much. I think we’ll have a good sense of the size and retention of the audience in about two weeks, and we’ll know if we can start ramping up for another season.

Thanks for being part of this, and coming on this journey with me. As I will continue saying, I’m so grateful you are here, and offering me a chance to entertain you.

Here’s my subscribe to the blog thingy:

And here are the obligatory collection of links to subscribe to (and rate and review) It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton:

*That’s not entirely inaccurate, but not because of any choices I made, or anything inherent to me.

**I realize that this is begging for a review bombing.

***I need it to have been a true Oner, don’t you? Either way, it’s amazing, and they even told us where they could have cheated, but she said it was a true Oner with no cheats so … I choose to believe that it was, even though I know how unlikely that is.

It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton episode one – Rock Paper Scissors Love Death by Caroline M Yoachim

I suck at mornings, so it was kind of rough to get up earlier than usual so I could make it to KTLA to be on the morning news. But I was so excited to be there, and so excited my new podcast was finally out in the world, I practically jumped out of bed when the alarm went off.

Two cups of coffee and one surprisingly smooth commute into Hollywood later, I made a post on Instagram while I was in the Sam Rubin green room:

I’ve been on national and international broadcasts. Once, I was the guy BBC World Service went to for the governor election when Schwarzenegger ran the first time. True story!

But I’m one of those kids who loved the local news when I was growing up. It felt like something everyone watched and talked about. I don’t know if that persists in the current media landscape, but being invited to KTLA to talk about It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton is a very big deal for me, easily as exciting and meaningful (maybe a little moreso) than all of that other stuff. While I wait to go on my inner child is doing zoomies while I do my best to maintain decorum in the green room.

It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton dropped today, and you can find it wherever you get your podcasts.

I had a fantastic time while I was there. I felt more comfortable, more focused, more present than I expected. I always get nervous and I always feel like I’m a beat behind the action because a big part of my attention is burned on tracking reactions — how much am I fucking up? — than it is on just enjoying the moment.

I did this thing where I reminded myself that I was invited, that I deserved to be there, and the thing I was there to promote is genuinely a good thing that I worked hard to make, so it’s totally cool to feel proud and enjoy talking about it. I even mostly listened to myself!

They were so wonderful to me. I have had interviews with people who are obviously just doing their jobs, who aren’t interested in me or what I’m talking about beyond whatever their producer prepped for them. This wasn’t that, at all. All of the anchors at the desk were just lovely! They were genuinely interested in me before the segment started (crazy, since they have so much on their minds and so much pressure being live) and stayed that way until I was finished. I was totally floored by how welcomed and celebrated I felt.

Can anyone else see how the news team is like YO THIS IS GREAT while my posture is just DONT FUCK UP WIL BE COOL AND STAND THERE LIKE A NORMAL PERSON MAKE SURE YOUR POSTURE IS GOOD SO NOBODY LAUGHS AT YOU ugh. I will eventually be able to pose like a human in one of these pictures, I promise.

Anyway, I had a blast. The producer who took these pictures (I lost her name; sorry she was lovely) told me my segment would be online, and when it is, I’ll link to it. EDIT: Here it is! https://ktla.com/video/wil-wheaton-describes-recording-his-own-podcast/10573518/

Late yesterday afternoon, one of my friends told me they loved the episode, and asked me how I was feeling. I tried to nail down and describe all the complex emotions (many of them conflicting) roiling around inside of me, and I settled on something like this: You don’t celebrate winning the game because you got a single in the first inning that didn’t even get a run across, but you absolutely celebrate your first single of the season, and hope that it’s one of the many things you need to do to eventually win the game. All the while, you try to find a way to enjoy the game, because playing the game is so much fun (and it’s what you’ve dreamed about doing forever), while also taking the job of playing the game seriously. There’s a LOT of game left, but our starter is looking great and the bat just feels very comfortable in my hands today, and I’m doing my best to stay out of my own head and just see the ball. I’m not even thinking about the stuff that’s out of my control. Yet.

It’s incomplete and imperfect, but so am I, so that’s what you get.

But for now, I just wanted everyone to know that my first episode, an absolutely magnificent story by the wonderful Caroline M Yoachim, is just a podcast, standing in front of an audience, asking them to listen to it.

Enormous thanks and gratitude to all of you who have listened, rated and reviewed, and told your friends. I wouldn’t have gotten on base without you, and you’re going to be a huge part of why I score any runs.

Two bits of business before I elbow and send.

First, the subscribe to my blog emails thingy:

And finally, the obligatory collection of links to subscribe to It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton:

Subscribe now at

Thanks for reading, everyone. I’m grateful for the opportunity to entertain you. It is a privilege that I do not take for granted.

I made a thing!

Hi friends! I am so excited to announce It’s Storytime with Wil Wheaton, my new podcast. Our first episode drops on March 26th.

This idea emerged from my creative self the same way that Tabletop did. It spung, fully-formed, into my face when my friend who has been writing since we were in high school told me that he had finally been published.

I was so excited for him, and I loved his story so much, I thought it would be cool to narrate it for him, one friend to another, in celebration of something that’s been such a long time coming. As I pulled my mic out of the closet, and opened up Audacity to do one of my signature DIY, lo-fi thingies, a voice in my head said, “Hey, man. I think this could be the basis of a podcast. Hear me out: you’re a respected and acclaimed narrator. What if you looked for new works from great authors who haven’t yet found their audience, and narrated them? What if you used the privilege you have earned to help boost other people’s creative voices and careers?”

This was a good idea, I thought. But I didn’t know that anyone else would agree, so I attempted to tackle it entirely on my own.

Two miserable, frustrating months later, I concluded that I am not cut out to be a slush reader, or a content editor, and if I was going to move this from idea to thing, I needed help. So I asked some friends who had relevant experience, and built an all-star creative and technical team to do all the things I couldn’t, which allowed me to focus on narrating the stories, which is the part of this I know how to do.

I’m going to yadda yadda over the next year, which was marked by starts and stops, enormous technical challenges, and lots of very good work that kept me going through all of it, and jump ahead to last summer, at the Burbank airport departure terminal A.

I was there with LeVar Burton, waiting to board our flight to a convention.

LeVar had just finished his podcast, which I loved and listened to regularly. When I went looking for a similar podcast to replace it, I couldn’t find one that checked all the boxes that his did … and that’s when I realized I was making the podcast I wanted to hear, profoundly inspired by him and all of his work. I absolutely wasn’t going to move forward without his blessing; he’s family and I’m not going to step on his toes.

So I told him all about it, and asked him if he was cool with it.

To my utter delight, he was as excited about it as I am, and he encouraged me the way a loving parent or family member encourages their kid to follow their dream. Even if this podcast doesn’t find its audience, and only lasts one season, that moment will stay with me for the rest of my life.

I’ve been doing lots of press, and I’ll share those links when they are released. For now, I’d love for you to see the video I made of myself recording the trailer that dropped today:

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A post shared by Wil Wheaton (he/him) (@itswilwheaton)

Here’s everything you need to know, copied from my official podcast page:

You may recognize Wil Wheaton’s name from his acting work in television shows like The Big Bang Theory, Leverage, and Star Trek: The Next Generation, or 1985’s timeless classic, Stand By Me. You may recognize his voice from one of the many audio books he’s narrated, including number one New York Times bestseller, Ready Player One, John Scalzi’s award-winning Collapsing Empire Trilogy, or even his own bestselling memoir, Still Just A Geek.

Now, Wil brings you It’s Storytime, with Wil Wheaton, a weekly audiobook podcast, featuring stories that Wil loves, pulled from the pages of Uncanny, Lightspeed, On Spec, and others. You’re going to meet authors you don’t yet know you love, including some who are being narrated for the very first time. Listeners will travel through time, meet some gods, watch people fall in and out of love, and more, brought to life by Wil’s remarkable narrative voice.

It’s Story Time With Wil Wheaton is available wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes drop every Wednesday, beginning March 26.

Subscribe now at

I hope you’re as excited about this as I am, and I hope you’ll help me let other people who would enjoy this, know that it exists. The easy part was narrating all these stories and writing all the stuff that went with it; the hard part is helping it reach its audience.

I’ll be checking comments for the next few hours, if you have any questions.

“I just want to be a kid. Please let me be a kid.”

It’s like … 1980, probably. Maybe late 1979. It’s the summer in Los Angeles, and it is as hot as I can remember. The smog is so thick, you can taste an oily sheen in air that looks overcast, all the time.

I’m in the back seat of my godmother’s car. My little sister and little brother are on either side of me. We didn’t wear seatbelts in those days, which is nuts but it’s how it was.

My mother has enlisted my godmother (who is my aunt, my father’s sister) to drive me on a commercial audition that I don’t want to go to. I presume my father was at work and my mother had some audition of her own, so my godmother ended up with three kids, plus my cousin, in her VW.

I can see this like it just happened. I’m sitting up on my heels, on that sort of plastic seat that 1970s Volkswagens had, with the waffle pattern. I look into her eyes in the rearview mirror, and I decide that it’s time to ask for help.

“Aunt Dorothy, will you tell my mom that I don’t want to do this anymore? Will you tell my mom that I just want to be a kid?”

What 8 year-old has to beg their mother to “let” them be a kid? What kind of mother doesn’t hear that? What kind of father doesn’t care?

You know the answers — well, my answers — to those questions.

She looks back at me, and she says, as kindly and gently as ever, “You have to tell your mom that, but I’ll go with you if you want.”

And that’s when I knew that I was never going to just be a kid, because my mother refused to listen to me, refused to hear me, refused to see me as a person. I was her property, a tool to be used that would get her closer to her dreams, dreams she was focused on so singularly, she stole my childhood from me (before she and my dad stole all my money from me) and then lied to me about it.

I can’t count the number of times I begged her, “please let me just be a kid. I just want to be a kid.” I said those words through tears so many times, I can still feel how my throat burned with grief and fear and desperation. I can feel how much I was suffering, how unhappy I was, how I just wanted to be a kid, and how awful it was to be dismissed and gaslighted about it.

“You made a commitment,” was something she would say to me all the time, as if a seven year-old can understand what that means. “I gave up my career so you can have yours,” she told me, throughout my entire childhood, every time I wanted to quit, which was pretty much all the time.

It hurt, so much, to feel unheard, unseen, unsupported, and unloved. It was shameful to lie about it, to protect my abusers, for 46 years of my life. I know that it is the root cause of my CPTSD, my Depression, and my Anxiety.

Which brings me to the whole reason I told this story today.

My friend, Mayim, has a mental health podcast, and she asked me if I’d come on to talk about living with Depression. I said yes, and in the course of our conversation, we ended up talking quite a lot about my experience with selfish, narcissist, emotionally abusive, parents.

It’s intense. In fact, it’s so intense, this is the second podcast we did. With Mayim’s blessing, I spiked the first time we talked, because I felt like it was just way too raw and made me uncomfortable. So we had a second conversation, and it’s going to come out tomorrow.

Here’s a preview. What you don’t hear, just before this clip starts, is that my mother made me go to her commercial agency when I was just seven years-old, and coached me to tell the kid’s agent, “I want to do what mommy does.”

Mayim Bialik’s Breakdown is at Spotify, Apple, and all the usual places.

By request, an HP Lovecraft short story.

Since I started Radio Free Burrito Presents several weeks ago, lots of you have asked me if I would narrate something by HP Lovecraft.

I love the Cthulhu mythos, but I’m not crazy about Lovecraft’s storytelling. I feel like he spends a lot of time in the high concept and the world building, without ever really going more than skin deep on his protagonists and narrative characters. NB: I haven’t read a ton of Lovecraft, probably six or so short stories, so maybe he has a novel or novella with rich characters and narratives, but I haven’t found it.

None of this is to suggest that he wasn’t brilliantly creative and imaginative, just that his stories aren’t the most satisfying use of my time.

However, hundreds of you have reached out in comments and emails, asking me to narrate something from the Cthulhu Mythos, so today’s RFB Presents is a short, weird, lurid story called Dagon.

This wasn’t published until 1919, and was published again in 1923, so I take that as a reminder not to get discouraged when things take time in publishing.

The text I read is here: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Dagon