WIL WHEATON dot NET

Information Doesn’t Want to Be Free

Posted: 6 December, 2016

I worked on an audiobook all day yesterday. I don’t think I can talk about the specifics of it, but I’m proud of the word I did.

But I can point out this cool news that Cory Doctorow posted on boingboing yesterday, about an audtiobook that I read for him a couple of years ago:

I released an audio edition of the book in 2014, read by the incomparable Wil Wheaton, who also read the audiobook of my novel Homeland). At the time, I tried to get Neil and Amanda into a studio to record their intros, but we couldn’t get the stars to align.

But good things come to those who wait! Neil Gaiman’s 2016 essay collection The View From the Cheap Seats includes his introduction to my book, and the audiobook edition — which Neil himself read — therefore includes Neil’s reading of this essay.

Thanks to Neil, his agents, and the kind people at Harper Audio, I was able to get permission to include Neil’s reading of his essay for a remastered audio version of the audiobook.

I really like Information Doesn’t Want To Be Free. I learned a lot from it, and it helped me grow as an independent artist and creator. You can get your own DRM-free copy for $15.

the cookie told me so

by Wil

Posted: 5 December, 2016

Okay so the whole point of this Daily December thing is to just put something new here every day, and not worry about exactly what it is. We’re four — five? Wait. Did I miss a day?

Okay, I just checked and I didn’t miss a day. That’s weird. Time is a flat circle, man, I read about it in The Bearenstein Bears And The King In Yellow.

Anyway, this is a good exercise for me. Just post a thing that I care about, or think is cool for some reason, and don’t worry too much about it being something deep and whatever.

So.

I don’t remember why I started doing “Goodnight, nerds” on Twitter, with a picture from Frinkiac, but now it’s a silly thing I look forward to every night before bed. I actually say to Anne, “I have to go tell the nerds goodnight” before I get into bed.

I usually hit the random button until I come across something from the first eight seasons or so. Occasionally something from the recent seasons shows up that’s really funny on its own, and I’ll grab it just in case, but I like to focus on the classics.

You know, for something dumb that I do to amuse myself, a put a lot of thought into it — well, more thought than you’d expect, I guess.

I don’t watch The Simpsons every week like I used to. We’ve both changed since the 90s, and I think it’s okay to move on and do other things. Shows like Bob’s Burgers and Bojack Horseman are more my speed these days.

I’m performing an audiobook all day today, so I have to get going, but I’m putting this here so I won’t forget: Bojack Horseman is a thing I want to write about in a little more depth when I have some time.

The 404 page at The Outline is pretty great.

you just start and you keep going until you’re finished

by Wil

Posted: 4 December, 2016

I’ve had this idea for a short supernatural horror story for years, but never actually committed to writing it. I guess the idea of the thing was so pleasing to me, I didn’t want to risk ruining it by writing it badly.

But a few months ago, I wrote an entirely different story, and showed it to a friend of mine who is a fucking amazing author who had offered to take a look at anything I wrote, if I ever wanted his feedback.

So on this other thing (which is called The Magician’s Path), I just wasn’t sure if it worked. I wasn’t sure if it all held together, or if it even told the story I wanted to tell. I sent it to my friend, and told him that if he thought it sucked, it would be really useful and helpful if he could tell me why it sucked, so I knew where to focus on developing my skills as a storyteller. He didn’t reply for a few days, and I thought, “Jeeze, I guess it sucks even harder than I thought it did.”

Then he texted me and told me that he really liked it, and didn’t think it needed much work. He hadn’t replied to be because he had gotten busy. Let that be a lesson to all of us about the things we presume based upon incomplete information.

As it turned out, he was coming to LA, and he offered to come to Castle Wheaton and go over it with me, so I could understand what I’d written from a structure standpoint, a story standpoint, a prose standpoint, etc.

We sat in my kitchen and went through it (it’s not long at all, like 4000 words) and while he showed me things, I began to feel like I was more capable than I thought I was. My instincts were good, my ideas made sense, and while the draft didn’t exactly need anything, if I did a couple of things to it, it would help it be better.

I want to say that it was like learning to walk, but it was more like suddenly having the confidence to stand up and stop crawling. My friend unlocked this thing inside of me that I’d been holding back because I was so afraid of failure, and all these ideas that I’d had for years started clamoring around inside my imagination to get out and become proper stories.

I started and abandoned a couple of things, because they weren’t the right thing for me to be writing at the time, and finally settled on the thing that was a short story that became a novella that wants to be a novel and still really needs a good title. Neil Gaiman says that each thing you write teaches you how to write it, that you have to learn while you’re doing it, and that every story is different. While that thing was teaching me how to write it, it was also teaching me how to just write the idea I have, without fear or judgement, and keep going until it’s finished.

Around the second week of October, I had to write a really difficult scene in that story. Without getting too precious about it, I just had to walk away from it for a little bit, and my brain was all “Why don’t you write the swamp story, and release it around Halloween?”

There isn’t a swamp in the story anymore, but I was like, “Good idea, brain,” and I got to work. It ended up being more than I expected, and I didn’t come close to making that Halloween deadline. But I finished it on Friday, and I’ve been deliberately taking this weekend off from it, even though I really want to get back to work on it and do the rewrites.

I’ll probably finish the rewrites sometime next week, and then I’ll go back to the novel, which feels like it’s about 90% finished, because I want to finish the first draft of it by the end of the year.

When it’s finished, I’ll go back to my whiteboard and pick the next thing that’s going to go into the collection of short stories that all of these things have come out of, and if everything goes according to plan, I’ll have at least one book (and hopefully two) published early next year.

if coffee then coffee do coffee more coffee else coffee

by Wil

Updated: 3 December, 2016

Since I’m not drinking this year, I haven’t been making beer. But I still like to make food things, so I’ve been teaching myself how to bake bread and roast coffee beans.

So the thing about making beer is that it really isn’t that difficult. Brooklyn Brew Shop says If you can make oatmeal, you can make beer, and it is entirely true. If you can just follow a recipe, you can turn malted barley, water, hops, and yeast into beer.

The thing about baking bread is that there’s a little more intuition to it than making beer, but not much. It’s incredibly satisfying to mix up flour, water, salt, and yeast by hand, fold the dough, let it rise, shape it into loaves, and bake it. There are all sorts of different types of bread to make, but that basic combination is pretty easy to understand. Like brewing, if you can follow directions, you can turn those things into bread.

Roasting coffee, though, is much more difficult to perfect. I’m using a smart roaster (the Behmor 1600+) that controls the delicate parts of the process, including the heat curve, the speed of the turning drum that holds the beans, and the cooling process. But roasting coffee isn’t something where you put the beans in, push some buttons, and wait until PRESTO you have roasted coffee beans. There’s a steep and complex learning curve (at least there was for me) and a very small margin of error. In my experience, when I’m roasting 1/4 pound to 1/2 pound of beans, there’s anywhere from 15 to 45 seconds of intense terror that I have to watch very closely, because in that tiny window of time, I’ll either end up with something decent or a complete a pile of fail. Unlike beer, which can sometimes end up not as hoppy or malty as I wanted, but still be drinkable, or bread, which may not rise as much as I wanted but still makes a nice tartine, if the coffee beans are off, they pretty much have to go into the trash. I mean, unless you’re really into wet cardboard.

So it was kind of a big deal for me recently when I had acquired enough data to feel like I knew what I was doing, and could reasonably expect the raw beans I put into the roaster to come out tasting like something I wanted to drink and share with others. (I didn’t mention that roasting coffee beans provides an opportunity for lots of notes, just like brewing and baking does, and it’s essential to do that if you want to get anywhere close to mastering it).

Anyway, I decided to offer some beans in the secret store, and the first batch came out yesterday. It’s pretty much exactly how I wanted it to come out, and I’m proud of myself, so I put some pictures from the roast on the other side of the jump, along with some notes on the process.

a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam

by Wil

Posted: 2 December, 2016

this is fine.

Okay day two of putting whatever the hell I want on my blog! This is great. Everything is great. Nothing is terrible. Facts and truth really do matter and bad people are held accountable for being bad. Really! They are! I swear. Ignore all evidence to the contrary because the world is definitely not on fire.

…well, that got dark in a hurry.

I’m probably going to finish the first draft of Ravenswood today. I wanted to finish it last night, but I just ran out of gas, sort of like when I go out for a run, really want to keep going, but my body is just at its limit and can’t be pushed any further. I’m really excited about this story, though, and I’m looking forward to releasing it in the Mysterious Future.

Speaking of running, I don’t feel like doing an in-depth review of my reboot for October and November, but I will give myself an overall grade for both months: C-. I can do better, and I will.

Have a good weekend. Here’s Robert Picardo reading Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot.