blog Photo Credit Tony Case on Flickr

It’s my 44th Birthday. Time for a check-in.

Posted on By Wil

Wil and WilToday, I complete my 44th trip around the Sun. It’s only taken me a little over 16,000 days, so my pace is pretty solid.

Most birthdays since I turned 30 have just been another X in the box, more or less, but this one is the first since I made a deliberate choice to reboot my life, so now I can clearly and honestly assess how that’s been going (which I guess is what I’ve done every month since I started, but whatever. It sounds profound so there.)

One year ago today, I was at GenCon, having the worst birthday and worst GenCon of my life. I should have been having fun, playing games, and celebrating Tabletop, but I spent the entire convention meeting with game publishers who had been lied to by the same person (who I thought was a trusted friend) who had been lying to me for three years, using me and his position as a trusted part of Tabletop to advance his own goals. While I was trying to deal with the emotional effects of being so totally and utterly betrayed, I also had to try my best to set it aside and save not just my show, but dozens of relationships that I didn’t even know had been severely damaged. I sat down with people who didn’t know me, who I didn’t know, and had to listen to them tell me about all the lies they’d been told about me, about my show, and about my personal values. It was horrible. I had a terrible time, and by the time the day was over, I just wanted to drink beer until I couldn’t feel feelings.

What a difference a year makes. Instead of trying not to cry all day, I’m enjoying the peace and quiet of my home. Instead of struggling to find some enthusiasm to make more Tabletop, I’m creating and writing the stories I’ve been wanting to tell for months. Instead of cleaning up someone else’s mess, I’m spending the day with the people I love.

Being betrayed by someone I loved like family was one of the most painful and devastating things I’ve ever experienced. But I can take something good out of it: it forced me to look at what I was doing with my life, how I was coping with the way I was feeling, and why I had allowed all of it to happen in the first place.

It forced me to get serious about dealing with all that unhappiness, and ask myself what is important to me? What do I want to do with my life? What can I do to take control of my life? How can I be responsible for my happiness?

It’s an ongoing process. Some days are harder than others. I make mistakes, but I learn from them. Months later, I still have profound realizations about my life, my art, and where they intersect all the time, thanks to the clarity and focus my life reboot has given me.

I never would have expected my 44th birthday to be a Big One™, but here we are. Let’s check-in and see how my seven things are working out.

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a truck paper rhino

Posted on By Wil

This thing I’m working on has lived in my head for about a year, so it’s kind of stale and not as interesting to me as it was when I had the idea. But I decided that writing and finishing what I start is really important, just like knowing the difference between “I’m bored with this” and “this is genuinely not good” when assessing whether or not to keep on going.

There’s a point in my creative writing process where I always decide that the whole thing is shit, I am shit, the world is shit, and I should set the whole thing on fire. It took me years to realize that it’s just a normal part of my process, and it’s more the frustration of wanting the thing to be finished, than it is any of the other things. I used to worry that this thing sucked, and therefore I sucked, and Carrie’s mom was right: they’re all gonna laugh at me.

But this is the hard part of the work (and it’s still better work than real work) and everything is worth doing is hard. Getting past this, I think, is what separates professionals from everyone else. I’ve committed to finishing a book of short fiction by the end of this year, and the only way that happens is when I do the work.

So I’m doing the work.

The big challenge today, so I could get past this step where I hate it and hate myself and hate the whole idea, was forcing the main character to tell me what his primary conflict was, and why he cared about The Thing He Cares About (and, consequently, why we are supposed to care about it). So I had him ask a character who wants something from him, literally, “Why me?” And we found out, together, what was missing, and what was making me hate this thing. Now that the question is answered, I can finish the draft I didn’t write very long today. It was only a few hours of work, and I only got 470 words down when I clicked save for the day, but that’s more than I had before I started. And, to be honest, once I got into this scene that is forced me to define exactly what was missing from my protagonist, it was really fun to do the work.

At the moment, this draft is mostly crap. But it’s crap I can fix and turn into something I’m proud of, instead of a series of blank pages.

So.

I screencapped the title image from MetroLyrics, because I thought it looked cool.

Film

broadcasting on the deep space network

Posted on By Wil

This is another one of those visual background noise things I like to make.

I used some public domain moving images that I found at Internet Archive, did a bunch of editing and filtering in iMovie, and then replaced the sound with a classic out-of-print ambient track from Earth to Infinity called Memphis to Mars.

I’m surprisingly happy with the way this turned out. When I watched it all the way through, it made me think of syncing Dark Side of the Moon with Wizard of Oz or Echoes with Jupiter and Beyond the Infinite. That wasn’t intentional, but I’m happy it turned out that way.

 

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My Keynote Address to the 2016 Mensa Annual Gathering

Posted on By Wil
IMG_20160701_201803
Seconds before I started my address.

This is a slightly edited copy of my prepared remarks for the Mensa Annual Gathering. These remarks are meant to be heard and performed, so some of the nuance may be lost in the text.

Mental Hopscotch
If I’m so smart, why is my brain so dumb?

When Mensa invited me to speak to you tonight, it was easy to say yes. Though I am not a member – and I’ll get to that in a minute – my son is. In fact, he took and passed the test when he was 16, the youngest in his group. Joining Mensa was something he’d wanted to do since he was in sixth grade, and because I am a loving and supportive father, I thought that I’d help him prepare. I was in GATE, then AP, then honors, then Starfleet, so I figured that I could be a useful resource for him … and holy shit was I wrong. It was a humbling moment for me, eleven years ago, when I discovered that not only did my son not need my help, but I was wholly unable to give it. Like, I’m a smart guy, but as far as I am concerned, the Mensa test may as well be administered in Aramaic to subjects who are blindfolded and underwater. On Europa.

What I remember from the practice tests I looked at and then quickly ran terrified away from was that they tested my ability to reason and extrapolate the solutions to problems both complex and relatively simple, often from incomplete information. I didn’t have too much trouble with that part of it, but it was the math that killed me, because even though I’ve tried over and over again since I was in third grade, when it comes to math, I am talking Malibu Stacy.

Still, I accepted this invitation to speak tonight because one of my fundamental rules for living a successful and happy life is: don’t be the smartest person in the room, its corollary is: if you look around and see that you are the smartest person in the room, find a new room. This is the only way you keep growing and challenging yourself to be the most interesting human you can be.

The thing about that is … well, when you’re literally put on a pedestal in front of that room? It’s … really fucking terrifying to stand here. What could I possibly tell a room full of people who are smarter than me? Something geeky? Okay, that’s … well … right. Something geeky. Talk about something geeky that’s going to be relevant to a massively diverse group of people who probably aren’t judging me, but I’ll just proceed as if they are because that’s how my stupid brain works.

Okay … something geeky … something geeky …

I’m a geek! Everything in my life is geeky!

It’s going to be okay, Wheaton. Just sit down, and write about what you know. (more…)