I’m all about the higher education, and I’m also all about the helping people out.
So check it:

A graduate student at the University of Florida is doing a research study on you – the readers of this blog. There is a survey she would like you to complete & it takes less than 10 minutes. The survey asks basic questions about you & your reading of this blog. You can take the survey here until April 30. Please do not trackback to this post or survey since the point of her study is to actually understand you as a reader of my blog rather than people who find the survey through other links. Thanks!

Hey, we all waste spend time taking those silly “Which Fark Cliche Are You? and What Ice Cream Flavor Are Your Boots? surveys, right? (I’m Domo Kun and Mint Chocolate Chip, if you were wondering) so if you’ve got a few minutes to kill today, why not help this grad student out? I hear you can cash the karma in for one green light when you’re running late.

My Los Angeles Dodgers currently have the best record in baseball.
And I’m not talking about some worthless half-game lead over the jints . . . oh no. They’re 9 and 3, baby.
\m/

Last week, I sent what I thought was the completed draft off to my editor. He sent back notes, and asked me, “Why don’t you ever talk about the actual experience of working on Nemesis?”
“Because I never wrote about it on my website,” I said.
“Well, as a reader, I really miss it not being in the book. You lead up to it, then you reflect upon it, but you left out the actual doing it. I think it needs to be there.”
“Okay,” I said, “it’s going to take a couple of days, though. My memory is a little fuzzy on it, and I’ll have to double-check everything.”
“Great. I look forward to reading it.”
When I worked on the movie, I kept some notes; little one line things like, “security,” and “The Mill,” and “Planet Hell.” They would have jarred my memory had I used them within a few days or even weeks of filming . . . but it’s been almost two years, and they just looked like disconnected words to me. So I got out my script, and my call sheets, and talked with Anne, and read my archived weblog entries . . . and most of my memories came back to me. Some of them were just impressions, (good for talking about, but not writing down,) and others were clear enough to be recollected in the book.
There’s a huge difference between telling my friends, “Patrick was cool,” and recreating for a reader exactly what he did that made him so cool, you know? It’s the difference, Cory Doctorow told me, between showing and telling. “Always show if you have a choice,” he said. (And I’m not name-dropping. Cory gave me great advice which made a huge difference to me as a writer, and I want to give him credit for it. So there.)
So, to get to the point of this story: On Wednesday night, I finally finished Just A Geek. On Thursday morning, I got notes from Brett, and on Thursday afternoon, we sent the manuscript off to O’Reilly’s production department.
I can’t believe that it’s done! There’s this conflicted feeling of relief and sadness that I get when I finish working on a movie or doing a run of a play. The feeling never the same for two projects, but it’s the same . . . wait. It’s like this: It’s never the same flavor, but it’s always the same texture. Does that make sense? I think it does, and I’m actually quite happy with that metaphor. 🙂
See, for the last month, I’ve had a pretty set routine: I get up, I make coffee, I read some e-mail and check up on news, then I write for several hours. I go out of hte house for lunch, then come home and write until I’m out of creative steam. I spend the evenings trying to unwind, but I can’t, because I know that the book has to be finished, so I usually find myself back at the computer working on stuff that I know I’m going to end up rewriting in the morning. Futurama, Family Guy, then sleep for about 7 or 8 hours, and the whole thing starts all over again.
Oh, and this great schedule has resulted in me seriously porking out. I’ve been on a steady diet of fast food and beer for about a month, and I think I’ve gained close to ten pounds. I’m a small guy, so that’s a lot. Watch Screen Savers on Wednesday, and marvel at how fat my double chin is. I think they may give it its own show.
When that schedule was over, I found myself really not knowing what to do . . . so I spent most of yesterday on the couch, watching the second season of Futurama. Normally, I don’t waste an entire day like that, but I think I earned it. I think the intensity of the rewriting process (it was more emotional than I had expected, to recall all the ups and downs of the last few years) finally caught up with me, and I needed to let my brain rest. It was like sitting down after being on my feet for most of a day, and realizing just how tired I was.
So now the weekend is here. Anne’s out of town, the kids are with their dad, and I was supposed to be in Michigan for the awesome Penguicon. Of course, the one weekend in the entire freaking year that I want to be out of town, I get a call that I may be working on a movie, so I had to stay home . . . and I’m not working on the movie. This is why I don’t talk about potential projects any more. It’s a little embarrassing when they don’t pan out. Furstrating as all hell for me, and people who were looking forward to meeting me, too.
Luckily I have found some things to do to keep me occupied this weekend: I went to a They Might Be Giants show with my brother last night (that was awesome and worthy of its own post. I’ll get to that RSN), and I’m going to an art show today. Tomorrow, I’m helping my friend Darin paint at his house, so his baby has a nice room to sleep in when she arrives in a couple of weeks.
That’s it. My coffee is done, and I’m all out of things to talk about for today.
Oh, except for it’s raining right now, and it feels like the rain in Hawai’i, but colder. I’ve written this entire entry with the doors and windows open, so I can hear and smell the rain, and Ferris just shook herself off all over my bathrobe. Yuck. Now I smell like a wet dog.

The last two weeks have been incredible trip back across the last three years (and in some places, the last fifteen years) as I’ve worked on my Just A Geek rewrite . . . and I’m down to the final scene in the book, which I will finish today.
I sent the 99% completed manuscript to my editor two days ago, and after reading it, he sent back a note, that he asked I share with WWdN readers.

Hello there, friends, fans, and freaks. This is Wil’s O’Reilly editor,
piping in to let you know where Wil has been lately. As he mentioned a few days ago, I’ve been cracking the proverbial whip (well, let’s just say it’s proverbial, to protect the innocent), and figured I’d write something about “Just a Geek” while I’ve got him slaving over a keyboard. First, let me say a “Thank you” to all of you guys, who made “Dancing Barefoot” nothing short of a phenomenon–I can honestly say that signing Wil as an author was made easier by every one of you who plunked down your cash to pick up a copy. It got my attention, and eventually got Tim O’Reilly’s attention, which is why you’re going to be able to buy “Just a Geek” at every store in the nation, rather than having to order it direct. Wil’s quite happy, I hear, as he and his wife were prone to squabbling over exactly how many stamps 100 pages of nostalgia cost to ship in today’s economy.
In any case, all prelude aside, I wanted to say just a word about “Just A Geek”, as I just finished reading the 99% complete manuscript.
It’s incredible.
You want this book.
You need this book.
All brevity aside, you’re all going to be very, very pleased. Without denigrating (yes, I paid a lot of college tuition to use big words like that, thank you very much) “Dancing Barefoot” at all, “Just a Geek” is a highly polished, well-written, wonderfully crafted novel that goes so much further than any of you can imagine. It’s a lot of fun, and that’s after way too many readings. I’m not trying to get you drooling too much (well, maybe a bit), but suffice it to say that the few days you’ve lost Wil on WWdN have paid off in spades. In fact, it’s as if Wil picked up a Queen of Spades on the river to make a gutshot royal straight flush, which is a pretty big deal where I come from.
I’m confident that you’ll start to see bits and pieces of JAG show up here, on oreilly.com, and of course at Wil’s appearances, but I just thought you all deserved to know that this is going to be a killer book. I’m not a flatterer, so take that as high praise. Wil has literally busted his tail to get this done, respond to hundreds of comments, add lots of new material, and generally become a terrific author. I can honestly and happily say that while JAG is great, I expect it to be only the first full-length book; only the initial offering in a long line. We’re excited here at O’Reilly to help you guys get as much of Wil as we can… to squeeze the very life out of him while his family laments what life used to be like before writing contracts… to ensure his mother knows his voice only by memory…
Oh… sorry… I got a little caught up in being an editor again. In any case, we all love Wil here, and expect to see a lot more from him in the months to come. We’ve also got some great surprises coming along, like a potentially mind-blowing foreword to “Just a Geek”, some opportunities for collectible copies, and much more… so stay tuned, right here.
I’ll go let Wil out of his cage … er … office … in a day or two, and you’ll get to read it all here.

Wow.
Thanks, Brett. I . . . don’t know what to say. I’m really happy with the way this book has turned out . . . but I don’t think I can take credit for the entire thing. A lot of people have given me valuable feedback along the way, including you.
I’m really not supposed to do this, but I’m going to share a tiny glimpse of what I’m finishing up today. Don’t tell anyone, okay?

I had my final costume fitting the next day, and the day after that, I found myself at the Melrose Avenue guard shack, half-an-hour early for my 8:30 am call time.
“ID, please.” The guard said.
I pulled my driver’s license out of my wallet, and gave it to him.
“And where are you going today . . . ” he looked at my license. “Wil?”
“I’m working on Star Trek.” I said.
“Enterprise or Nemesis?”
The Next Generation.
“Nemesis,” I said. “I play Wesley Crusher.”
He looked up at me. “Oh my god. You are Wesley Crusher. You look so . . . ”
Washed up?
“. . . grown up.”
“Yeah,” I said. “It’s been a long time.”
“Do you know where to park?”
“Yeah. But I don’t know where our dressing rooms are.”
But I do! I do know where our dressing rooms are! They’re trailers on the street in front of stages 8 and 9. Mine is filled with Warhammer 40K figures and GURPS books. It’s right next to Brent’s trailer. It’s 1989, and I’m back. I’m back home.
“Okay,” he said, and gave me directions to an area on the lot where I’d never been before.
I parked my car, and picked up my backpack. Inside was my script, a notepad, and a few tapes: Only A Lad, Music For The Masses, and Squeeze: Singles 45 and Under . . . all of them music I listened to when I was working on the series. I remember, when I put them in my backpack, that I thought to myself, “Maybe I can sit in my trailer, listen to ‘Never Let Me Down,’ and imagine that I never left.”
I locked up my car, and walked toward the dressing rooms. Other than the addition of a back lot, Paramount hadn’t changed in any substantial way since I was on the show, and my thoughts drifted as I walked down those familiar streets on auto-pilot.
That’s where I met Eddie Murphy when I was sixteen . . . Hey! I crashed a golf cart there when I was fifteen . . . There’s the mail room . . . There’s stage six, where the bridge set started out . . . I almost got up the courage to kiss that girl at the Christmas party on that stage in . . . there’s the stage where Shatner told me, “I’d never let a kid come onto my bridge” . . . this street feels exactly the way it did when I worked here . . . here’s where my trailer used to be . . .
I stopped, and tears filled my eyes — tears of joy: It’s so good to be here, mingled with tears of sadness and regret: Why didn’t this happen years ago?
Because I wasn’t ready for it to happen. I walked a few more steps, and looked into the foyer that led into stages 8 and 9. Enterprise lives there now. At least they kept the stage in the family.

Okay. Back to work.

This will probably be my last weblog entry this week, because I’m in the final few miles of the Just A Geek rewrite marathon.
I was hoping to have it turned in by April 2, but I lost days while I was at the Grand Slam convention, and when I worked on Teen Titans. My mom, dad, and sister gave me a bouquet of flowers last week that included some lillies (my favorite, for those of you scoring at home, are stargazer lillies), and my plan was to have it all done by the time they opened . . . but now I will finish it before the last petal falls to the table, like in Beauty And The Beast.
My rocking editor at O’Reilly was kind enough to give me a few extra days to work on it, and the last 36 hours have been some of the most productive in my short literary life. I was really stuck on a few sections, like there was a dam across the little river of creativity in my brain, but it exploded sometime on Sunday, and the ensuing flood has been amazing. A few days ago, I was seriously worried about Just A Geek. I was happy with the second and third acts, but I thought the first act was total shite . . . well, all that shite was washed away by the flood, and I’m so happy with what I have, it’s taking all my strength (and respect for my contract) to not share big chunks of it right now.
We’ll all have to wait until June, I guess. I promise that it will be worth it.