WWdN: In Exile

five simple ways to Just Keep Writing

I'm reluctant to pass myself off as some kind of authority on writing, because I still have a lot to learn, but from time to time I'm asked a question that I can answer with some degree of confidence.

That happened earlier today, and (as you'll see at the end of this post) I thought it may be worth sharing here.

On Aug 28, 2008, at 12:52 PM, [redacted] wrote:

When you're writing something that's not for a blog, like a book or script, something that has to remain a secret until it's published, do you just go bonkers?

Yes. Yes I do. It's really hard, because as a blogger you're used to instant feedback to keep you going, but when you're working on something that can't be shared or released the same way blog posts are, you can lose your way and lose your confidence.

I've found a couple ways to help overcome this:

1. Blog less. It's incredibly hard to blog and write a book at the same time, because you're using different muscles. Think of it like trying to run the 100 meter dash and do a marathon at the same time.

2. Make a deadline for yourself, then work backwards to have milestones every day or week, whichever works better for you.

3. Give yourself little rewards when you make a big milestone (5K words, 10K words, 20K words, first draft completed, etc.)

4. Don't show your work to anyone until the first draft is done. Don't even excerpt little bits and put them on your blog. I put about 30 words from House of Cards online, and I lost all of my momentum as a result. I'm not sure why this happens, but it really sucks when it does.

5. Find an editor who you trust to work with you. Good editors do more than just edit the draft you give them, and I know this because I have a great editor.

You know, this may be useful to other people. I'm going to anonymize the line I quoted from you, and post this on my blog. I'm sure readers will have other bits of advice and experience to share in comments.

-Wil

This isn't anything more than common sense, I guess, and it's not even that original (the post I linked to day before yesterday about blogging vs. writing a book covers most of this in much greater detail than I did) but I hope it's helpful anyway.

Wil Wheaton's 2008 PAX Schedule

Please excuse the indexing-friendly title. I hate it as much as you do, but I know there are literally fives of people on the Internets who may want to know this vital information for the coming weekend.

I'll be at Penny Arcade Expo in Seattle this weekend. I'm not keynoting, but I am on a couple of panels, and I will have a booth, stocked with all of my books, plus my glasses and my shoes, so I have them. I don't have a ton of stuff, though, so you should probably drop everything you're doing and go get in line right now.

My schedule looks shockingly similar to this:

Friday

3-4PM: Signing in my booth

7-8PM: Signing in my booth

Saturday

3-4PM : Signing in my booth

6-7PM: Panel - "Is Casual Killing Core Games?" in the Raven Theater. This should be an interesting conversation. I don't think casual is killing core gaming at all, but I'm interested to hear from people who think it is, and tell them why they're so very very wrong.

7-8PM: Signing in my booth

Sunday

11:30-12:30: "The Wil Wheaton Panel!" in the Serpent Theater. I'm going to be honest: I don't think a lot of people are going to come to this. There are two absolutely awesome panels at the same time, including Family Feud with Gabe and Tycho, and if the panel didn't have my name in it, I would skip it, too. However, for those of you who will be in attendance, due to your sacred vow to never watch Family Feud, I'll be reading from Happiest Days and Sunken Treasure, wand I'll do a Q&A if there's enough interest. We'll have fun (oh yes, we'll have fun. We always have fun, and we float, Georgie! We all FLOAT DOWN HERE!) and it will be awesome.

12:15-2PM: Signing in my booth

I reserve the right to bail on signings early if nobody's there, and stay a little longer if that's necessary.

Please, please, please come introduce yourself if you read my blog, especially if you're a regular commenter. It's pretty awesome to have faces to go with the names.

the joys of unsubtle roleplaying

Inspired by my previous post and its related conversation in the geek group, my friend Andrew and I have been talking, as we so often do, about our RPG experiences. He said I could share this one:

Our college group wasn't big on subtle roleplaying. The anecdote that best exemplifies our attitude comes from a random night encounter.

The mage was on guard, heard a rustle in the woods outside the camp, and immediately unleashed a fireball.

"You aren't going to wait to see who it is?" asked the DM (different guy; we rotated). "What if it's one of your friends?"

"They can take the damage," replied the mage's player.

End of encounter.

There are times to take RPGs seriously (or so I've heard) but it's time like these that I look forward to the most when I play a tabletop RPG. If you listened to the Penny Arcade D&D podcasts (JIM DARKMAGIC FOR THE WIN!) you heard something remarkably similar to my friends and me playing . . . well, just about everything, really. That's sort of the whole reason we play games, isn't it?

I'm going to PAX this weekend, where I'm sure I'll engage in quite a bit of the video gaming. I'm especially looking forward to playing Rock Band 2 with the Enforcers, but more than anything else, I'm excited to spend some time in the Original Wireless Gaming area, which I missed last year. It's nothing but classic RPGs and hobby games, all donated and run by volunteers. Last year, there were opportunities to do a one-shot dungeon crawl, and I can't wait to get on the list for one of those if they're doing it again.

underrated sci-fi movies and the geek group

One of my favorite topics when I was writing Geek in Review was the Guilty Pleasures series. It gave me an excuse to watch movies without feeling like I was slacking off, and always generated entertaining discussions (and more than a few suggestions for other movies to use in future columns.)

When I checked in on The Geek Group at Propeller this morning, I saw something similar: Ten Truly Underrated Sci-Fi Movies.

Take a look, and let me know what you think. I wouldn't have included Aeon Flux, which tried real hard but couldn't close the deal, but the rest of them are great, especially Primer, which never gets the respect it deserves.

I think Groups are where Propeller is going to set itself apart from the rest of the social news world, so I really want to build and nurture the Geek group. I think it's a fantastic resource and if there's enough participation, could become a wonderful place for geeks to gather and goof off - I already check in several times a day, even when I'm not doing admin work. In support of that effort, I'm going to close comments on this post, so if you're interested in commenting and stuff, you'll do it there. (Bonus: the Conversations are a lot of fun, too. D&D geeks need to check out What's the most audacious thing you've gotten away with in D&D?)

i thought i was the only one

Writing fiction is a scary, solitary experience for me. Eventually, I get stuff to Andrew and we start working together to hammer out the final draft, but I write my first draft with the door closed, as Stephen King advises, and it can be a lonely time, with Self Doubt and the Inner Critic dropping in uninvited and unannounced from time to time to mess with me before the real fun starts.

As I struggle through the first (really the zero, but that's just semantics) draft of this novella, I have to keep reminding myself that the first drafts of Just A Geek and Dancing Barefoot weren't as easy as Happiest Days , and the first column I wrote for Geek in Review wasn't as effortless as some of the last ones. In other words, I'm learning a new skill, and since I'm mostly on my own as I explore this new territory, it's easy to get lost and confused.

Luckily for me (and all other writers) there are experienced authors who are willing to share with us how they got where they are, so that we may try to follow in their footsteps.

Elizabeth Bear is one of the most fearless, honest, and generous of these authors. Cherie Priest (who makes me wish my name could be turned into a cool anagram) and John Scalzi are right there with her, and if you're a serious writer, you need to be reading their blogs every time they update. I've lost count of the number of times I've read something of theirs and said, "Thank jeebus. I thought I was the only one." It's tremendously reassuring to know that some obstacle I'm struggling with isn't unique to me, or a result of my inexperience or illustrative of a lack of ability, as much as it is just a part of the writing process, something other writers who are much more successful than me have also experienced (and, probably annoying to them but incredibly reassuring to me, still experience.)

Way back in February, Cherie wrote:

I give the hell up. On its present track, Awake Into Darkness simply isn’t working. It’s a tough thing to admit, especially when I’m almost 30,000 words deep in the draft; but if I’m going to be completely honest with myself, I’ve known from the start that it was b0rked — because I was doing a shitty job of recycling old material. I knew from the get-go that I ought to just trash the whole thing and rewrite it, and I didn’t, and that’s nobody’s fault but mine.

At least I’ve come to grips with it in time to do something about it. Following much head-desking and a whole lot of emailing, badgering, and drunken grumbling (at self, husband, editor, etc.) about this story, I think I’ve finally got an idea of how it can work — and yes, it definitely involves starting over from scratch.

I can't imagine starting over after 30K words. Hell, I have a hard time even getting to 30K words, which is something I look forward to not being completely intimidated by in the future. Cherie says that she wrote most of the stuff that didn't work when she was still a rookie (like I am right now). When I've struggled with a story I thought was worth writing, I always thought it meant that I sucked, and just wasn't cut out to write fiction. After reading this, though, I was relieved to have permission to let something go if it just doesn't work. It's also a good time to remind myself: Don't be afraid to suck, and learn from the mistakes you make.

Elizabeth Bear recently said:

... one of the reasons I need breaks between writing things is that telling stories is an exhaustive mental effort. They use up all my thinky, and then I am left without too much else to fill up my time. [...]

And it cracks me up, because when I am actually working on a story and it's ready to be written (as opposed to being hacked out of the living rock to beat a deadline), I am crabby and reclusive and very defensive of my precious time, and very very aware that there's not nearly enough of it. The winged chariot is right at my heels, and there is never enough time in the day and strength in my poor mortal frame to get as much done as I want to.

From time to time, I get creatively exhausted and no matter how hard I try, I can't put two words togeher. Usually, it happens after I get across a particularly important deadline, like my brain just shuts down and refuses to do anything until I take time off and recover HP. Problem is, I always feel guilty, like I'm being a deadbeat while Anne does real work during these times. Other times, I feel like a ferret on meth, struggling to help my fingers keep up with my brain as it unleashes idea after idea at me. It's reassuring to know that someone as successful and as consistently awesome as Elizabeth Bear experiences similar extremes.

In his introduction to The Secret History of The Lost Colony, John said:

The lesson here for writing is that even your “failures” — the stuff that doesn’t work for your book, for whatever reason — can still have value to you as you’re wrestling with your work. This is one reason way, whenever I chop out a significant chunk of text from a book I’m writing, I don’t simply delete it: I cut it and paste it into an “excisions” document that I keep handy. That way I can go back to that material for reference, or to drop a line or an idea into the final version, perhaps in a completely different context, but where it will do some real good. This is what I do, and it’s worked for me so far.

I got a whole book out of one of those folders. I'm intensely grateful to be living in a digital age when it's simple and efficient to hold onto tons of stuff that I'd otherwise throw away, if it was printed out.

As long as we're talking about writing, I wanted to point all my fellow rookie writers to 5 Writing Lessons I Wish I'd Learned the Easy Way. I also wanted to point all my fellow bloggers/writers to a fantastic post I wish I'd written about the difference between writing a book, and writing a blog.

I'm not under the delusion that I'm anywhere close to the same league as the authors I've mentioned in this post, but that's the point. They're all successful and talented and awesome, and instead of hoarding their knowledge and guarding their experience, they share it with us, so that we can dream of one day being like them.

fuh. nuh. muh. nul.

So there's this movie coming out next year. A lot of people want to like it, but an equal number of people are concerned that it may not be as good as they hope. There's a lot riding on this movie for a lot of people - some would say an entire franchise - so there are a lot of people who get . . . touchy . . . when people like me express opinions about it. The studio's done a great job clamping down on actual news, so lots of rumors and speculation have filled the resulting vacuum.

This morning, SF Signal linked to an interview with Kevin Smith (I swear, this blog isn't going to be all Kevin Smith, all the time) where he obliquely discusses a movie that he can't really talk about:

Host: So thumbs up on The Watchmen, what else you got?

Smith: I saw a movie last night that I cannot talk about.

Host: Was it good?

Smith: It was phenomenal.

Host: Any stars, any break out stars, and do they trek?

Smith: The stars absolutely trek in this film. It is fantastic. Anybody who was worried doesn’t need to be worried–about this film I cannot talk about…It was in very capable hands. The director did a phenomenal job–the director and his crew. Top notch cast and the guy that plays the lead is an instant star. That dude is going to be so famous. He is so wonderful. He picked up a role that I would say is pretty challenging for someone to step into the shoes of, because it is a role that has been played before many times by the same guy.

Host: How do you out Shatner, Shatner?

Smith: I don’t know what you are talking about.

Host: I was just saying that as an expression.

Speaking of Kevin Smith (and, really, I swear this isn't going to be a regular thing), Anne and I went to the opening of Crazy 4 Cult 2 at Gallery 1988 on Friday night, thanks to an unexpected invite from Jensen, who I believe is the gallery's owner. It is phenomenal. Let me just say that again, to make my point: fuh. nuh. muh. nul.

I didn't know that some of my favorite artists are in the show, including Ben Walker (who does awesome work with bears and guns) and Dan Goodsell, who does Mr. Toast. Andy Suriano, who you may have seen play the part of my Russian mail order bride on Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show, also has a piece in the show that's spectacular. My favorite pieces in the show, though, have got to be Scott Campbell's*, including the poster for the show, and Kirk Demaris's** family portraits.

I was absolutely blown away by this show, and if you're within . . . let's say two hours of Los Angeles . . . it's worth the effort to come into town and see it before it closes. While you're in the neighborhood, you can buy comics (including the new Star Trek Manga that has my story The Art of War in it, plug plug) at Golden Apple, see a show down the street at ACME, and have dinner at Bulan Thai, the best vegetarian Thai restaurant I've ever been to.

* He has a webcomic that's tremendously entertaining. He also did great showdowns of the 8-bit era for I am 8-bit.

** You could easily lose a few hours enjoying retro culture at Kirk's Secret Fun Spot.

have you played atari today?

Around 1981 or 82, I learned to program - if you could call it that - on the Atari 400, copying programs out of magazines, one uncertain finger at a time. I also learned the proper way to cuss out a computer when I'd miss a comma or make some other mistake, getting nothing more than SYNTAX ERROR for my hours of hard work. Guess which skill still serves me today?

While I was doing some admin stuff on the Geek Group at Propeller this morning, I saw that member JBooth had submitted Atari: The Golden Years. It's a fabulous article at Gamasutra that covers 1978-1981:

This four-year period -- from 1977 to 1981 -- contains some of the most exciting developments the company ever saw in its history: the rise of the 2600, the development of some of the company's most enduringly popular games (Centipede, Asteroids) and the development and release of its first home computing platforms.

This comprehensive look back, filled with quotes from the original creators and other primary sources, offers a detailed peek into the company that popularized video gaming as the '70s turned into the '80s, and created the first viable market for home consoles.

If you ever owned an Atari computer or played any of their ubiquitous games, this article is going to be an awesome ride on the nostalgia bus for you. It's also useful for you damn kids today who want to understand why guys like me get all worked up about 8-bit computers, but get off my lawn before you read it.

You know . . . there are lots of great 80s computer emulators available now, and I've often wondered if it would be as fun as I think to fire up an Atari 400 emulator, track down one of those old magazines, and see if I can actually get one of those games to run.

evil and awesome (but mostly awesome)

Way back in April, John Scalzi wrote on his blog:

Arrangements have been made. Wheels set into motion.

At this point, it is inevitable. Unavoidable.

Implacable would not be too strong a word.

What has begun?

I cannot tell you.

Suffice to say it is evil. And yet awesome, in its way.

And it will be visited upon one of you.

Cryptic, but amusing. I know John well enough to know that he's a devilish schemer with a wicked sense of humor. What, I wondered, was he up to, and who, I pondered, was the unsuspecting victim?

Months passed, and then - on my birthday, no less - he wrote:

Finally. It is done.

And it will be visited upon one of you.

Soon.

Yes, soon.

You should prepare yourself.

Although nothing can truly prepare you.

Because it is evil. Yet awesome.

And it is coming.

It can be held back no longer.

And when it arrives, you will know.

And you will tremble before it.

BWA HA HA HA HA HAH HA!

I had no idea, in April or in July, that I was the intended recipient victim of John's evil, yet awesome scheme.

But more on that in a moment, because some context is in order before we get to the punchline.

I had big plans to road trip up to Vegas with two of my friends and visit Star Trek the Experience one last time before they sent it to the land of wind and ghosts. Unfortunately, gravity and physics had other plans, and I'm not doing much of anything until PAX.

If you've spent any time reading my blog, or if you've read my first two books, you know that The Experience is very special to me, delivering some important perspective when I needed it most:

Until this moment, all I have been able to remember is the pain that came with Star Trek. I'd forgotten the joy.

Star Trek was about sitting next to Brent Spiner, who always made me laugh. It wasn't about the people who made me cry when they booed me offstage at conventions. It was about the awe I felt listening to Patrick Stewart debate the subtle nuances of The Prime Directive with Gene Roddenberry between scenes. It wasn't about the writers who couldn't figure out how to write a believable teenage character. It was about the wonder of walking down those corridors, and pretending that I was on a real spaceship. It was about the pride I felt when I got to wear my first real uniform, go on my first away mission, fire my first phaser, play poker with the other officers in Riker's quarters.

Oh my god. Star Trek was wonderful, and I'd forgotten. I have wasted ten years trying to escape something that I love, for all the wrong reasons.

I was looking forward to this road trip, because love Star Trek, and I love science fiction, but when I hurt myself, my motivation to play through the pain evaporated. See, I've been feeling some Star Trek fatigue recently. There are a lot of factors, including being dooced from the Vegas con and the return of the alt.wesley.die.die.die morons, but the bottom line is: I feel like all the stuff I didn't like about Trek has started to overwhelm the things I love about it. I haven't written a TNG review for TV Squad in months, because it hasn't been as fun to revisit those first season days as it once was.

The thing is . . . maybe I'm taking the whole thing a little too seriously. I mean, honestly, why in the world should I give a shit about some random Internet guy who is obviously stuck in 1990? Sure, it's upsetting that I was the only series regular to be excluded from the biggest Star Trek convention of the year, but it's not like I don't have other things to do with my time, and other conventions to attend.

A tangible reminder to not take this stuff too seriously arrived at my doorstep recently. It was, as promised, evil and awesome:

(More images at Flickr)

For those of you who are scratching your heads right now, that is, in fact, an authentic black velvet Wesley Crusher painting. It was sent anonymously, and all of my friends (truthfully, it turns out) said they had nothing to do with it (I guess I should have asked John's co-conspirator, our mutual friend Burns! if he was involved) so I didn't say anything publicly about it while I attempted to uncover the identity of my mysterious benefactor.

This morning, I sent John an e-mail with some of the awesome comments on yesterday's post about Zoe's Tale. In the ensuing conversation, he outed himself as the evil genius behind this particular artistic scheme.

For the last few months, I've been focused on the pain that came with Star Trek. I'd forgotten the joy.

Star Trek isn't about petty grudges or anonymous insults from emotionally stunted people who are stuck in 1990. It is something I did twenty years ago, that inspired a generation of kids to pursue science and engineering. Star Trek is a fantastically entertaining show, even when it's really, really awful, and I can feel proud of being part of it, without letting it define the beginning and end of my creative life.

Without knowing that I needed a reminder not to take this stuff so seriously, without knowing - in April, when the wheels were set into motion - that around the beginning of August I'd be feeling pretty lousy about getting cut from the show I look forward to attending every year, John did what good friends do: pick you up when you're down, and provide reality checks when you need them the most.

Star Trek is something that I shouldn't take as seriously as I've taken it lately. I'd given idiots way too much control over how I felt about it, and how I felt about that part of my life where Star Trek and me intersect. I'd lost perspective, and it took a velvet Wesley Crusher to bring it back.

It hangs behind me in my office now, evil and awesome, a reminder to remember the joy, and not take things so damn seriously.

privacy is a fundamental human right

Bruce Schneier writes another thoughtful and insightful essay on privacy:

Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we're doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.

We do nothing wrong when we make love or go to the bathroom. We are not deliberately hiding anything when we seek out private places for reflection or conversation. We keep private journals, sing in the privacy of the shower, and write letters to secret lovers and then burn them. Privacy is a basic human need.

[...]

[I]f we are observed in all matters, we are constantly under threat of correction, judgment, criticism, even plagiarism of our own uniqueness. We become children, fettered under watchful eyes, constantly fearful that -- either now or in the uncertain future -- patterns we leave behind will be brought back to implicate us, by whatever authority has now become focused upon our once-private and innocent acts. We lose our individuality, because everything we do is observable and recordable.

[...]

How many of us have paused during conversation in the past four-and-a-half years, suddenly aware that we might be eavesdropped on? Probably it was a phone conversation, although maybe it was an e-mail or instant-message exchange or a conversation in a public place. Maybe the topic was terrorism, or politics, or Islam. We stop suddenly, momentarily afraid that our words might be taken out of context, then we laugh at our paranoia and go on. But our demeanor has changed, and our words are subtly altered.

This is the loss of freedom we face when our privacy is taken from us. This is life in former East Germany, or life in Saddam Hussein's Iraq. And it's our future as we allow an ever-intrusive eye into our personal, private lives.

I reject the notion that we have to choose between privacy and security, and I agree with the oft-repeated quote about the foolishness of sacrificing the former in pursuit of the latter.

O UJXUY QAFCQ RFZUJ SLGNT U

We deserve privacy, and we don't have to give it up to have security. They work very well together. Encoding messages for my friends and family is fun, but I sure don't want to feel like I have to do it all the time, just because I can't trust my government - and, increasingly, my neighbors - to leave me alone.

scalzi's new book is out

What kind of friend would I be if I didn't remind everyone that John Scalzi's newest book, Zoe's Tale hit bookstores today?

John says:

I’m really proud of Zoë as a character; I think she’s one of the best I’ve ever written. I also think that that in many ways Zoe’s Tale is the best book in the entire Old Man’s War sequence, which is saying something, considering it’s the fourth book in the universe, and two of them have got Hugo nods. But there it is: The amount of work I had to do to get Zoë right is also reflected in the rest of the book as well. It’s good.

I’m also happy to say that the goal of making this a standalone novel seems to have been achieved: I’ve heard back from folks who have read the book cold, without having read the other books in the sequence, and it’s worked for them. This is good news because, as most of you know, Zoe’s Tale was written with an eye toward opening up this universe to younger readers who might have missed the other books; it’s the book I can point to when someone asks if they can give a book of mine to their daughter or nephew or whomever.

I'm currently reading (and loving) Soon I will be Invincible,* but as soon as I finish it, Zoe's Tale is at the top of my list, leapfrogging over a giant stack of books that just said, "Hey! We've been waiting in line here! Come on! No cuts!"

Sorry, giant stack of books, but I like the Old Man's War universe so damn much, it always gets cuts.

... okay, back cuts behind Immortal Iron Fist. Sorry, The Terror, you'll have to keep waiting. (But if Zoe's Tale is anything like the other books in the Old Man's War universe, you'll only have to wait a few days. I usually have a damn hard time putting them down.)

*Link and title fixed. I was in a hurry to get out of the house when I wrote this post this morning.