I asked my pal John Scalzi, author of The Ghost Brigade, The Android’s Dream, The Sagan Diary, and other awesome books, if he’d read The Happiest Days of Our Lives, and give me a pull quote if he liked it.

He says, “Wil gives lie to the idea that there are no second acts in American lives. He’s on his second act now — as a writer — and he’s doing it without a net, because he’s let us watch him start from zero. It’s been hellaciously impressive to witness. I can’t wait to see what he writes next.”

I guess he liked it!

I’ve been in the car a lot more than usual lately, so I’ve been listening to The Minority Report and other Stories by Phillip K. Dick, read by Keir Dullea (best known as Dave Bowman in 2001.) It’s a fantastic collection of unabridged stories, and Mr. Dullea does PKD’s stories more justice than any of their adapted film counterparts.[1]

It’s been captivating and entertaining to hear him bring stories like We Can Remember it for You Wholesale and Paycheck to life, but it’s also been terrifically inspiring to me. One night about three weeks ago, while driving home and listening, one phrase he spoke came out of my speakers, hit me in that part of my brain that makes me want to be a writer, and knocked out a story idea that has refused to let me do anything else until I bring it into the world and make it real.[2]

Stephen King advises writers to read a lot. If you’re not going to make time to read, he says, you’re never going to make time to write.[3] Harlan Ellison once said that writers shouldn’t write what they know as much as they should write what they love and wish there was more of in the world.[4] It’s good advice that’s kept me focused and given me a justification to read as much as I can without feeling as guilty about it as . . . well, as I do.[5]

Since I don’t have as much time as I’d like to actually read a book, I listen to them when I’m driving, when I’m on the train, and occasionally when I’m at home. There’s also something special about listening to a great actor — like Keir Dullea, for example — performing a great work of literature that speaks to me (ha. ha. ha.) on a different level than reading alone.

So now that I’m nearly done with this audiobook, I went looking for something else. I’ve enjoyed PKD so much, I thought I’d stick with the masters and maybe pick up something from Bradbury or Asimov that my friends would be horrified to learn I hadn’t already read.[6]

While I was browsing, I came across a couple of stories from Asimov that were dramatized on something called Dimension X. A bit of research revealed that Dimension X was a Sci-Fi radio program in the 50s. It was a collaboration between Astounding and NBC, featuring dramatized works from some of the greatest SF writers of the 20th century, like Ray Bradbury, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, Kurt Vonnegut, and Jack Williamson.[7]

A bit of further research revealed that Dimension X is in the public domain, and nearly all of its episodes are available at Archive.org. I listened to The Outer Limit and Nightfall today, and plan to work my way through the remaining episodes over the next several weeks while I finish this SF story that desperately wants to enter our world, if I’d just stop talking about it, and actually hold open the goddamn door.

[1] Don’t buy it from Audible, though. The transfer sound quality is terrible and there are no tracks within each disc when you burn it to CD. Lame.
[2] Delusions of grandeur FTW!
[3] He says this and much more in On Writing . . ., which every writer should read at least once a year.
[4] He then ate a baby for breakfast. Allegedly. Score 100 points if you get this reference without using the Internet. Hell, score yourself 1000 points, actually.
[5]I have this "I should be working now" complex that’s taken over my life
lately, and it seriously cockblocks me a lot of the time.
[6] My best friend Darin, it turns out, still hasn’t seen The Godfather. See how horrified you are? It would so much worse if you knew that, for example, I haven’t read — Ha. Like I’m actually going to tell you. But trust me. You’d think so much less of me, it’s probably best that we pretend this note doesn’t exist beyond the point where I point out that Darin hasn’t seen The Godfather. I mean, WTF? He’s seen Lion King a hundred times, but not The Godfather?
[7] If you enjoy pulp science fiction like the stories from Astounding, you will love this collection called Retro Pulp Tales, from Subterranean Press. I sprung for the lettered edition, because I’m becoming that guy with all those books in my old age.

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.