anywhere she lays her head

I’m going to make a not-so-shocking confession: I love Scarlett Johansson.

I realize that it’s a tremendously controversial position to stake out, especially when you’ve read my blog for all of one post and have firmly affixed yourself to the idea that I hate women, but there it is. I admire the hell out of her acting, she’s painfully beautiful, and in all her interviews she comes across as carefully sculpted out of pure awesome. In my dreams, I see the two of us alone in my golden submarine, while up above the waves my doomsday squad ignites the atmosphere.

Anyway, she’s done an album of Tom Waits covers that I like an awful lot.

Sayeth Listening Post:

Combine Esquire’s "sexiest woman alive," the much-loved music of Tom
Waits and producer Dave Sitek of TV on the Radio fame with guests like
David Bowie and members of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Celebration, and you
have pretty much the perfect recipe for a much-anticipated release.

Her label, Warner Music, has partnered up with imeem to let all of us unwashed masses listen to the album in its entirety before it is released later this month. Bully on WMG for embracing all of us onliney listening types, instead of treating us like criminals:

This album isn’t for everyone, and comments at Listening Post are 100% hating on it. Eliot says, "I can’t get behind every track on the album
(‘Fannin Street,’ for instance, is a bit of a dirge)". I’m not crazy about "I wish I was in New Orleans," but I like a lot more of the album than not. It feels haunting and lush, with Big Sonic Heaven candidates throughout. If you enjoy Cocteau Twins, This Mortal Coil, Massive Attack, My Bloody Valentine or Portishead, I think it’s worth a listen.

Even if you don’t like it and want your five minutes back after a couple of tracks, I hope you’ll join me in applauding a major label for embracing this model. I hope this represents a step toward sanity from the recording industry mafia.

itchy feet and fading smiles

So apparently Jerry O’Connell was on the Howard Stern Show this morning, and claimed that I bullied him when we made Stand By Me.

I haven’t heard the interview, so I don’t have
context beyond, "Hey, Jerry says you bullied him when you made that
movie," and normally, I’d just laugh this sort of thing off because it’s entirely untrue, but I’m a little sensitive to being misrepresented, especially on a show like Stern where there are eleventy million listeners.

So.

This isn’t true, and you’ll shortly see why it’s so important to me to set the record straight.

Keep in mind that Jerry was 10 or 11 when we shot Stand By Me, and I was 12, so neither one of us is the most reliable narrator in the world about events that are nearly 25 years in the past, but my memory on this particular issue is crystal clear: River and Corey really picked on Jerry and me, because I was the nerd and he was the fat kid. It wasn’t constant — River and I were pretty good friends for most of the production and remained that way for years after — and I’m sure there were moments when all of us formed temporary alliances because that’s what pre-teen boys do when they’re in any social situation like we were, but I never bullied Jerry or anyone else.

I know this to be an unimpeachable fact because I’ve only been a serious bully once in my entire life. I was 10, and my brother was 6. We were spending the weekend at my Aunt Val’s house with our older cousins. My brother and I were pretty sweet little kids, because that’s how our parents raised us. Our cousins, however, were not. They were really cruel teenagers who delighted in tormenting us whenever they could, so on this particular weekend, in the interest of self-preservation, I made a cowardly decision to gang up on my brother with them, so they’d leave me alone.

Jeremy had a little parakeet at Aunt Val’s, called Mister Feathers. Jeremy adored this little guy, and I thought he was pretty neat, too, but when our cousins thought it was real funny to run their fingers across his cage and scare the shit out of him so Jeremy would cry, I went along with it. Eventually, Aunt Val heard all the commotion and came to Jeremy’s rescue. I only saw Aunt Val angry one time in my life, and that was it.

I felt terrible that I made Jeremy cry, because I knew that big brothers were supposed to protect their little brothers, but our cousins were relentless and ruthless in their bullying of us, and on this particular day I wasn’t strong enough to stand up for us both. I don’t recall why, and I’ve spent a lot of time over the years unsuccessfully searching for a satisfactory answer, but the best I can do is "I was a kid, I was scared, and I didn’t know any better."

The thing is, I learned from that experience. I felt so sick about it, and so guilty (still do) that by the time I was 12 and we shot Stand By Me, it is absolutely impossible that I would have bullied anyone, especially Jerry, who I really liked.

12:12pm: In comments, casbar says:

It wasn’t that bad. When asked if any of the other kids were assholes to him, O’Connell said he got along with Phoenix but Feldman and Wil Wheaton would bully him a bit cause it was his first job and he was the youngest. He clarified that it was because you guys were all Hollywood kids so it was some kind of "professionalism" bullying.. if that makes any sense.

Man, that’s actually worse than what I thought he said. Corey was an absolute nightmare the entire shoot: totally unprofessional, always looking to be the center of attention, and excessively cruel to me (when we shot the "dog pile" thing right before we discover the leeches, he delighted in jamming his knee into the back of my knee, and that wasn’t even the worst thing he pulled during production) so to be lumped in with him in Jerry’s memory makes me really, really sad.

NB: I understand that Corey’s finally gotten his shit together. If so, good for him, and I don’t hold a grudge. It’s just that when we made the movie, he was pretty terrible to be around.

did i mention that i’ll be in seattle this weekend?

Wil Wheaton’s Geek Tour 2008 rolls into Seattle this weekend for the Emerald City ComiCon!

From my original announcement:

I am so excited to announce that I’ll be going to Seattle next month for the Emerald City ComiCon!

This is an awesome show, with a focus fucos on indie
books and publishers. I think I’ll feel right at home, if I can keep
myself from totally geeking out too much. (Yeah, who am I kidding?)

The schedule hasn’t been finalized, but I’ll be doing a performance from Happiest Days and maybe Just a Geek
on Saturday, and I’ll be doing a more general Q&A about blogging,
writing manga, being a geek, the burdens of being awesome, and writing
humorous panel descriptions on Sunday.

I will have a booth to hang out in when I’m not empaneled, so I’m
bringing copies of all my books, pictures to sign, and my glasses and
my shoes, so I have them.

Details:
May 10-11
Emerald City ComiCon
Washington State Convention and Trade Center
Seattle, Washington.

Since then, my schedule has been finalized, and it looks something like this:

Saturday
2:00pm – 3:00pm WIL WHEATON PERFORMS THE HAPPIEST DAYS OF OUR LIVES
   
Before Wil Wheaton was a writer, he was an actor. He combines the two disciplines in this hilarious performance from his latest book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives. The Happiest Days
contains the stories Wil loves to tell, because they are the closest to
his heart: stories about being a huge geek, passing his geeky hobbies
and values along to his own children, and vividly painting what it
meant to grow up in the ’70s and come of age in the ’80s as part of the
video game/D&D/BBS/Star Wars figures generation.

Sunday
1:00pm – 2:00pm GET YOUR GEEK ON WITH WIL WHEATON
   
Wil Wheaton
(Author, Actor, Gamer, Geek, Blogger, Raconteur) invites you to get
your geek on during this hour-long Q&A. There may or may not be
punch and pie (most likely not).

The rest of the time, I’ll be hanging out in my booth, blasting my quads and blowing out my lats.

Slight little bit of not-so-great news: I am nearly sold out of Happiest Days. I have, like, 40 paperbacks because the second printing hasn’t arrived yet. My experience so far is that I tend to sell between 80 and 100 books at cons, depending on their size, and since ECCC has huge tracts of land, it’s unlikely that I’ll have enough for everyone who wants them. (Wow, don’t I sound like a douche there? "Hey, look how popular I am!" Sigh. I hope you know what I mean.)

However! I have some hardbacks, and I’ve planned all along to bring 50 copies to each con I attend this summer, as a sort of This Convention Only kind of deal, so I’ll have those. I will also have copies of the Star Trek manga. As always, I’m happy to sign whatever you bring me (within reason; keep your pants on, guys) and I will have a few other trinkets and whatnot. Like this cool Aqualad thing. Plus, as I said in my original announcement, all my glasses and my shoes, so I have them. Sadly, uncle Freddie will not be coming with me, because he’s dead.

OH! OH! OH! And you know what rules? Jeph Jaques from Questionable Content and Scott Kurtz from PvP will be at ECCC! I am so totally going to slime them.

Next week is Super-Con in San Jose, for those of you keeping score at home. Hopefully the new printing will arrive in time, or I may arrive with stone tablets and a mule. (Not The Mule, mind you. That would cause a Seldon Crisis for sure.)

yet another post about writing . . . and stuff

If you play poker long enough, you will eventually hear the phrase, "I’d rather be lucky than good." Usually this phrase is delivered by a good player who has just gotten unlucky.

While dumb luck is certainly desirable when you’re playing cards, good, skilled players will always triumph over unskilled but lucky ones in the long run.

This makes me think of something I once heard about working hard and staying focused, so when you have those inevitable encounters with good luck, it’s like a collision of two peaks, rather than a peak and a trough. It went something like, "Work hard, and you’ll be in a position to benefit from good luck." or "Hard workers make their own luck."

(For those of you keeping score, that would be poker and physics in the same post, and I’m just getting started. Go me.)

I’ve been doing more interviews than usual lately, and with all the talking about how I got where I am today, how I feel about it, and what’s next, I’ve spent a lot of time thinking — I mean really, seriously examining — those questions, long after the interview is over.

"Who am I? Why am I here?"

(Oh, Admiral Stockdale. We are so glad that we hardly knew ye.)

I keep coming back to feeling lucky, and how grateful I am that I was in the right place at the right time with so many things, starting with the first post on my blog, all the way back in the middle ages. A lot of success is timing, and I started doing this at a time when not a lot of other people were, so I got to load up my wagons and hope I didn’t die of dysentery while a bunch of us made permanent the trail that was originally laid out by guys like Dave Winer and Doc Searls. If I’d started blogging at any other time, I’m not sure I’d be writing this post right now.

I was also lucky to have my blog and my love of poker converge at a time when it made sense for PokerStars to hire me and take me on some of the most outrageously fun adventures of my life. If either event had peaked at a different time, I wouldn’t have been a proud member of Team Blog in 2006, and made some of the greatest friends I’ve ever known.

When I realized I had Dancing Barefoot sitting within the manuscript of Just A Geek, I was lucky to realize that the rules for publishing were changing, that bloggers could be authors and authors could be bloggers. I know this seems obvious now, but at the time it was a pretty controversial idea. When it came time to publish it, I had this crazy idea of doing it entirely on my own, and my predictions about how it would work out were correct. Luckily for me, I was willing to take a very big and very scary chance. (Unluckily, when O’Reilly was mismarketing Just a Geek, my predictions also came true. Maybe I should change my name to Zoltan and sit in a box at the fair.)

Most of all, though, I’ve been blessed by the incredible generosity of people who had no reason to help and guide me, but did anyway: John Scalzi and Warren Ellis are two who you’d recognize, and the rest of the list could fill a 2 gig flash drive in a single-spaced text file. That I wrote in vi because I couldn’t find the text editor in emacs. God, that joke never gets old.

There are countless other moments where I got lucky, and an equal number where I’ve gotten unlucky, but  — and this is where I get to my point, such as it is — through it all, I’ve never relied solely on luck, and neither should you. Through it all, I always kept working as hard as I could to not suck, to never be satisfied, to not get complacent, to appreciate my successes and learn from my mistakes.

I guess what I’m saying is that luck sort of just shows up, I guess, whether you need it or not, while only you can decide to work hard, or not.

Right.

Now, all of that is prelude to what I really wanted to share with this post: some resources that I’ve come across recently that I think are quite useful for writers, especially noobs like me.

Oh! Jeebus, this is harder to put together than I thought it would be, so bear with me, okay? There’s one other thing: don’t ever take for granted the kindness and generosity of experienced people who are willing to help you, and when you’re finally in a position to do the same for other people, do it.

Still with me? Here ya go:

From mental_floss, a collection of books that aspiring writers should read, and some totally useful grammar rules (including my personal nemesis, the correct usage of that and which.)   

If you’re considering self publishing like I did, you should look at all of SFWA’s resources for writers, but especially Writer Beware, which identifies many of the scams and dangers that are out there for those of us who don’t know any better.

Books that I read when I was building Monolith Press that made all the difference:

One book that everyone should read, whether you’re a writer or not, but especially if you’re working essentially on your own: Upgrade Your Life (aka The Lifehacker Book) by Gina Trapani.

Finally, an important note to all artists: nobody in the world will work as hard as you will to promote your work, nobody will care about promoting it as much as you do, and your work will be as successful as you work to make it. Hopefully, you’ll get lucky like I did and get some good word of mouth and connect with a passionate group of people who will tell their friends about you, but that’s never going to happen if you don’t work hard — really, really hard — to make it happen.

Okay. That is all. Now, I am going to go for a jog with my wife.

Updated to add: VT makes a massively awesome point: get out of your own way. Or, as I put it, don’t be afraid to suck. It’s easier to fix something you don’t like than it is to fill up a blank page. Trust me, I hung on that cross so you don’t have to.