worth one thousand words

This kid who sat next to me though much of elementary school (thanks, alphabetization!) could draw anything. He could look at something, pick up a pencil, and recreate it on paper. His drawings were so good and so effortless, it was more like he was capturing what he saw and transporting it into a dimension that existed on the pages of his Trapper Keeper.

I was inspired by this kid, and I had a very vivid imagination, so I was constantly trying to draw things that I saw in my head, with …. poor results.

I just couldn’t do it. I didn’t understand perspective, I didn’t understand shading, and I didn’t have the innate ability that this kid and people like him had. I recall feeling frustrated and sad and eventually giving up.

I don’t know what happened to that kid, or if he ever did anything with his artistic talent. He’d be 43 now, too, which is kind of a mindfuck because I can only see him as a 3rd and 4th grader, sitting under the smog-filled sky of Los Angeles in the early 80s, drawing dragons and goblins and space ships on the playground.

Even though I was a child actor, and did a lot of work back then (good work, even), I didn’t think of myself as an artist or a creator until I was in my twenties. When I was a child, I didn’t have a choice about acting, so it was something I did because I had to. I did my best because I wanted and needed to please the adults around me, and because it’s what my parents expected me to do. It was never my choice.

It was never my choice.

Still, part of me wanted to make things where things weren’t before, so part of me was an artist, even though I didn’t know it. Part of me loved to tell stories and make things up about fantastic creatures and worlds and things that existed because I imagined them. That part of me was satisfied by and found a home in D&D, where I made up heroes and a world for them to fight and die in. Part of me was an artist, a storyteller, a creator. I just didn’t know that’s what we called people who liked to do the things that I liked to do. I thought that artists were, like, Picasso (and the only reason I knew that Picasso was a person and an artist was because I heard his name on commercials for the Norton Simon museum in Pasadena when I was watching Batman after school) and that they only did paintings that were either boring or weird.

In my defense, I was like nine years old.

As I grew older, and I slowly came to realize over the course of about fifteen years that I was actually an artist who needed to create things the way a normal person needs to eat food, I continued to express that part of me as an actor, but mostly as a writer (this is all covered in delightful detail in my sensational book, Just A Geek, kids! Buy ten copies and use eight of them to keep warm when the world ends!.)

I work as an actor and a writer now. I produce Tabletop and Titansgrave, and I’ll probably direct at least some short films before the end of next year. I’m still a creator, and I proudly and loudly accept that I’m a capital-a Artist.

…but I think about that kid from school all the time, and I think about how I have always wanted to be able to take things I see in my head, or things I see with my eyes, and recreate them with pens and pencils. Like, I’m really good at taking words and images and using my voice and body to turn them into emotional things for other people, whether I’m doing it on a television or (rarely) on a movie screen. I’m really good at doing it in voice-only situations, and I’m so proud of that that I don’t even feel like a giant self-absorbed dick saying that.

…Okay, I feel weird saying that, but at least I can say it and feel proud of it, and like it’s okay to feel proud of it, instead of the way I usually feel about everything I do.

So this is nearly 1000 words of introduction to get to this picture I drew last night.

It’s not that great, but it’s mostly what I saw in my imagination (the buildings) and the mountains (with my eyes when I was driving home). It was fun to draw it, and there were moments when I genuinely surprised myself. It isn’t perfect, but it’s a thing where there wasn’t a thing before, and I made it.

The February Reboot Check-in That Happened in March

I’m really not good at titles, you guys.

So it’s time to check in on my life reboot, and see how I’m doing. As I did last time, I’ll grave — grave? Well, that’s a Freudian slip of the touch-typing fingers, isn’t it? — grade myself on a bit of a curve.

Here are the things I committed to doing, back in October:

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.

Let’s see how I’m doing since my last check-in, near the end of January. Spoiler: pretty good.

Continue reading… →

Launch A Thousand Ships

One more thing: Guest writer Will Hindmarch didn’t take the opportunity to share this post last week, while Wil Wheaton was on a boat, but here it is now, revised and shared because of reasons.

This bottle of American single-malt whiskey was made at the St. George distillery across the water from San Francisco. This bottle was a gift and I’d saved the last dram. That dram belonged to a special day. That day arrived this past Tuesday.

The idea was to create a platform for collaborative gaming online, something with a bit of roleplaying and some narrative sensibilities. It didn’t start with me. It started with Stephen Hood, whose vision, code, and moxie lit the way. It grew and shone thanks to the skills of a steadfast and creative engineer named Josh Whiting. They devoted their time and ingenuity to getting excited and making a thing — a place to help people play and tell stories online, together.

I came on board to help spark and hone some of the gameplay and structure for the story-worlds where games could unfold. Personally, I’m enamored with fictional places and collaborative storytelling, from the often fantastical worlds of roleplaying games to the worlds built for fiction at Shared Worlds, where I work most summers. So, for me, a whole new kind of spell was cast on the project when the authors and artists started coming on board to share their own worlds for play. Some of these worlds were built especially for play, some were adapted from existing novels and stories.

And this past Tuesday, they went live online. The game’s called Storium.

Here’s the thing: a remarkable team of coders, editors, art directors, designers, and writers made Storium. Well, sort of. The launch doesn’t finish this sort of project any more than takeoff completes a flight. The Storium team has a lot of work ahead, developing and building on the work they’ve already done and responding to the needs of a whole lot of storytelling players. When I poured that last dram from the bottle for myself, I realized I’d made a mistake. (I do that sometimes.) I meant to toast to the Storium team on a job well done — and toast them I did! — but what I should have done was bought a bottle of champagne to break over its bow. It’s a launch, after all. The ship is built and it’s lovely, but it was made for the voyage. Stories get written down and bound in ink and paper, but words are for reading. People got excited and made a thing, but that’s not the end of it. It’s the start of something.

Onward.

reach the beach

We had five minutes to get back to the ship, and we were at least ten minutes away.

I began making plans to spend at least one night in St. Maarten, while hoping that somehow one of the waves our little boat was racing over would drop us into a wormhole that ended at the pier. Then, I had an idea. “Hey, you can drop us off at that dock which is right next to the pier, right? We don’t need to go to a dock that’s a seven minute walk away, do we?”

“I can try,” the captain said.

Four minutes (which simultaneously felt like forever and also passed much faster than time typically allows) later, the closer dock was in view. It would be close, but we were going to make it. That’s when the little boat we were on veered sharply to port, and began to go toward the other dock.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“See that boat behind us?”

I turned and looked over my shoulder, aft (to use a nautical term), and saw a black Zodiac raft. On that raft were five men dressed all in black. Holding machine guns, which were also painted black. Mounted on the raft was a large machine gun. It was not black, but it was pointed right at us.

“Um…”

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