I just finished my two hours of Just A Geek rewrites for today, and I am so emotionally drained I think I’m going to fall over.
Because JAG is based entirely on my real life, and the foundation for the book is the WWdN weblog, I have to revisit some very painful times in the retelling.
For those familiar with The Hero’s Journey, I’m somewhere around the Resurrection portion of The Road Back, which took place around the end of April, 2002. The title of the chapter is The Bottom, and it’s all about how the shitty entertainment industry and my repeated failures as an actor threatened to really destroy me as a husband, son, and father. I use a lot of weblog entries to share the story, but the real inner thoughts haven’t ever been vocalized to a large audience, and it’s sort of extremely scary to be so nakedly honest about one of the worst times in my life.
I knew that I’d hit my wall today when I was looking at a paragraph and thought, “I really need to dramatize this, and turn it from dispassionate narration into a scene . . . but I just don’t have the emotional energy do it now.”

I’ve been sitting here at the dining room table, simulating D&D combats (hordes of Kobolds and Goblins are going up against some NPCs: a fighter, a wizard and a rogue) so I can get my head around the mechanics of d20 combat, and also work out the way I think those monsters would fight . . . so far, the kobolds are cowardly, and prefer to run away and use their light crossbows, and the goblins really like to try and flank the good guys. There’s been quite a bit of grappling, too.
It’s so much fun, I just now realized that it’s almost one in the morning, and I feel like it’s eight! It prolly doesn’t help that I drank a mug of Earl Grey around six, and I’ve been listening to The Get Up Kids for the last hour or so.
I would have gone to sleep earlier, too, if it wasn’t for you meddling Get Up Kids and your Four Minute Mile!! Mrrr! Nyaah! Gaa!
Well.
I’m about to drag myself off to bed, and for some reason, Ferris’s extremely loud snoring reminded me that I didn’t mention this earlier today:
I’ve seen a bunch of fake Wil Wheaton autographs on eBay in the last week or so. (Well, not really a bunch. More like four. But still, one fake is one too many, you know?) While I’m flattered that someone thinks I’m worth faking, that sort of sucks for collectors.
And hey, if someone’s gonna buy some CDs for selling my signature, it may as well be me, right? Who’s with me?!
*chirp*
*chirp*
Oh, I see how it is. Whatever, man. You used to be cool.
Anyway, here’s the link to my pictures, if anyone’s interested. If not . . . well, crap. eBay just made a few bucks off of me. Dang!
And as a general rule, if you’re a WWdN reader, and you’re thinking of buying something allegedly signed by me on eBay, you’re always welcome (and encouraged) to send me a note so I can verify the authenticity, or lack thereof.

I had a nice long conversation with my editor at O’Reilly this morning. We talked about many things, but the conversation was very exciting for three reasons:

1. It was the first time we’ve spoken since I signed my contracts and became an Official O’Reilly Author™.
2. We talked about the upcoming release of Dancing Barefoot, and I got a firsthand taste of how excited O’Reilly & Associates is about my book. It’s one thing to hear those thoughts during contract talks . . . it’s something else entirely to hear them after they pwn you.
3. I got a real, full-on, 100% official deadline for Just A Geek! This means that my deadlines are no longer self-imposed. I work very well under pressure, and I already did more today than I have in the last three weeks. Because I have a deadline, I have a pretty good idea when JAG will come out, but I don’t think I can release that information just yet.

I am truly excited about Just A Geek . . . but I’m also terrified of it. I hope that some good blogs dovetail out of the rewrite experience in the next six weeks.
I’m sure I will eat these words sooner or later, but for today at least, I feel like a real writer, and I like that quite a bit.

I have become disenchanted with the license issues over at Text America. I’m sure they’re really good guys and all, but I sort of want to hold on to the commercial rights for my images, so starting today, I’m moving my camera blog (for fuck’s sake, does everything have to be called a “something blog?”) from there over to Buzznet. They have, among other things, a really nifty Creative Commons license generator, and I think that’s just swell.
Thanks to exciting script technology, the space immediately beneath will forever hold the four most recent images in my Buzznet Gallery. You must have Javascript enabled to see the fun.

On the way home from school today, Nolan and I were listening to Ethel on XM 47.
A band that I am not familiar with, called “The Distillers”, did their rock and roll thing. It was pretty cool, so I turned it up, and took advantage of the break in our storm to open all the windows and the sunroof.
“Is that person singing a boy or a girl?” Nolan said.
“I’m not sure. Why?” I said.
“I saw this video, and I can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl.” He said.
“That’s what Rock and Roll is all about, Nolan.”