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50,000 Monkeys at 50,000 Typewriters Can't Be Wrong

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looking back at the daily december

“Without change something sleeps inside us, and seldom awakens. The sleeper must awaken.”

I had this idea in December to post at least one thing a day in my blog.

I post a lot of stuff on my Tumblr, share a lot of pictures on my Instagram, put videos on my YouTube channel, and do dumb things every day with Twitter. I’m also starting a regular thing on my Twitch channel (more on that later), so I can honestly say that I produce a lot of content or at least share a lot of content online. But it feels like my blog, which is where the whole thing started, is largely neglected, because I feel like I can only post bigger things or deeper things or heavier things here.

So I’m giving myself permission to post whatever the hell I want, so I can just get past the internal gatekeeper slash critic who prevents me from using the one space on the Internet that is entirely mine.

Therefore: I hereby challenge myself to post one thing a day during the month of December, no matter what it is. It can be a picture, a few lines from a work in progress, a video, a collection of links to things, or even just one link to one thing.

I did it, and it was an interesting exercise. It helped me change my routine, shake loose some stuff in my head, and it did get me back into a mindset that I was in over a decade ago, when I would look at everything around me as a potential source of inspiration for a blog post. In that sense, it was helpful. But it didn’t make it easier to post quick dumb stuff, like I thought it would, and having something new here every day did not seem to make a difference in the readership stats in a positive or negative way. In that sense … well, it wasn’t worth the effort. But I think that these obvious things aren’t equal, and the seemingly intangible benefits that came with thinking like a writer every day outweighed the lack of tangibles like increased readership or reach. I’m sure someone has already done the obligatory Medium thinkpiece on this sort of thing, so that’s all I think I have to say about it.

I did experience a fundamental shift in my writing and how I chose to invest my creative energy, and that change was not good. I went from working on one of a couple different writing projects every day, to not working on them at all. I was putting my thought and time and energy into blog posts, and all I have to show for it is a little over a month of stuff that just sort of takes up space, instead of a finished rewrite, and a completed first draft.

I’m not saying that there isn’t anything good in the stuff I wrote here over the last fifty-ish days, just that the good stuff would probably have found its way here, anyway, and the stuff I look at as filler was just a way of avoiding the rest of the work. Maybe I needed a vacation, and wasn’t willing to give it to myself. I don’t know. Feeling like a fraud and a failure takes up a lot of time and energy, and it clouds my judgement and perspective.

Anyway, I’m retroactively giving myself permission, beginning Saturday, to go back to posting in my blog from time to time, when I have something that I feel like I need to say, instead of every day no matter what.

Now I’m going to get back to work on this rewrite, because I did about 1100 words on it yesterday, and I’d forgotten how much I enjoyed living in that world. I’d forgotten how good it feels to make a big pile of words and then carve a story out of them.

 

24 January, 2017 Wil 41 Comments
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black friday

 

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20 January, 2017 Wil 98 Comments
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not all heroes wear capes

Take two minutes, for you, because you deserve it.

19 January, 2017 Wil 14 Comments
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the glint of light on broken glass

This is one of my earliest childhood memories.

It is long before I had any siblings.

I’m probably three years-old. It is the autumn of 1975. 

I live in the northwestern San Fernando Valley, on Topanga Canyon Boulevard, just a couple of miles south of Spahn Ranch. The Valley is largely undeveloped where we live, and what is developed is mostly farmland. In the 90s, I will be that guy who says  “When I lived here, this was all farmland…” while he sweeps his hand across the view of endless development. I will be that guy every time I drive down Topanga. I will spend the rest of my life missing the quiet simplicity and wide open space that I took for granted as a child, while also accepting that taking things for granted is what children do best.

So it is in the early evening. The air is warm, but a hint of a chill occasionally swirls around us on a light breeze that barely moves the dry air. I’m standing between my parents, my mother holds my left hand, my father holds my right hand. We are in the yard that separates our little house — a chicken coop that had been converted into a home — from the big farm house that my great grandparents live in. It is their backyard, our frontyard, and my entire world. I will spend hundreds hours on that lawn, listening to Star Trek Power records on my portable plastic record player, in a tee pee that my dad makes for me out of blankets and broomsticks. It will be every planet in our solar system, and every planet I create in my imagination. 

We are next to the walnut tree that will be struck by lightning in a few months. That tree will split in two, catch fire, and the part that falls to the ground will narrowly miss destroying our home. The fire will be extinguished by the rain before the fire department arrives. We stand there, the three of us, beneath the bare branches of that tree, its crisp leaves crunching beneath our feet. We look to the eastern horizon, and we look at the moon.

The moon is as big as the entire sky. It covers the entire horizon, impossibly big. It is yellow and the seas and craters are so big, they look like continents. The moon is so big and so bright, it frightens me, but my father soothes me, tells me that it’s far away, in space, and that we are safe. We stand there, my parents both younger than my children are now, and we marvel at an optical illusion that I will never forget, and never experience again in my life.


That was the moment that I fell in love with space. That was the moment that the moon stopped being a thing in the sky and became a place I could maybe touch one day. From that moment, I wanted to learn everything I could about space. I would read Let’s Go To The Moon with my grandmother as often as she would allow it. I would make rockets out of everything I could get my hands on, and imagine riding them into space. When Star Wars came out a few years later, I wanted to see it because it was about people who lived in space. When I finally got to work on Star Trek, even the longest day with the worst dialog in the first season was amazing to me, whenever I stood on a set and looked out through a window into a fake starfield, because I got to pretend that I, too, lived in space.

I grew up. A lot of things changed in my life, but I never stopped loving space. I never stopped looking up into the dark sky and imagining that, someday, maybe I’d go there and come back.

Today, I found out that I kind of get to be in space and live right here on Earth … because an asteroid has been named after me. It’s asteroid 391257, and it’s currently in Canis Minor. As soon as it gets dark here, I’m going to walk out into my backyard, look up into the sky, just a little above Sirius, and know that, even though I can’t see it with my naked eye, it’s out there, and it’s named after me.

18 January, 2017 Wil 66 Comments
Photo Credit Tony Case on Flickr
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I think it’s time for a reboot check-in

I had decided that I wasn’t going to do these after a year, but since I’m still committed to the changes I made a little over a year ago, and I need to post something today, to keep the chain unbroken, I’m going to check in and see how I’m doing. I haven’t actually thought about these things until now, so when I give myself a grade today, it’ll be an honest grade, based on where I am right now.

If this is your first time hearing about the reboot, here’s what you need to know:

Just about one year ago, I took an honest look at myself and I didn’t like what I saw. I needed to reset a lot of habits, make some significant changes to the way I approached just about everything in my life, and keep working at it, even when it was hard.

I can’t even believe that it’s already been a year, and that it’s only been a year, because time feels like that when you’re 44, I guess.

Here are the things I decided to address:

  • Drink less beer.
  • Read more (and Reddit does not count as reading).
  • Write more.
  • Watch more movies.
  • Get better sleep.
  • Eat better food.
  • Exercise more.

Every month, I wrote a post that looked into each of those things I decided to change, and examined how I was doing with them. That was a helpful part of the exercise, because it made me look at myself and my choices honestly and fearlessly. At times, it motivated me to work harder, and at other times it encouraged me by making me realize that I was doing better than I thought.

This time around, since I haven’t done a public check-in since October, I’m going to give myself two grades on each point. One will be the overall since last time, and one will be for January. Here we go.

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17 January, 2017 Wil 80 Comments

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