WWdN: In Exile

unicorn pegasus kitten. scalzorc. clown sweater. fanfic. AWESOME.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "I will never again in my life see something this epic, so I may as well pluck my eyes out with a spork right now."

It's an understandable reaction, for I had it myself ... but before you get all sporky on your face, you may want to head over to John Scalzi's Whatever and find out exactly what this is all about.

in which a list is completed

Belle and Sebastian played in my office, while I got ready for this weekend's convention.

I zipped up my backpack, stood up, and stretched. I made that ughh noise that, as a child, I always associated with old people.

I walked a couple steps across the room and sat down at my desk to look at the big list of things I needed to complete before heading out to Phoenix for the comicon. I uncapped my pen, and put a line through "pack the nerd bag."

"Hey," I thought, "the only thing left on the list is 'make the setlist for the awesome hour!'"

I jumped up and ran into the back of the house, where Anne was dumping a basket of laundry onto our bed. "Dude! I finished almost everything on my list!"

"Are you going to relax, now?"

"As soon as I figure out what my setlist is going to be," I said. I pulled a still-warm T-shirt out of the pile and began to fold it. "Oh, I'm totally taking this to Phoenix with me."

Before she could speak, I added, "Nnnnnnnerrrrrrd ... shhhiiirrrttt!"

She looked at me and barely suppressed a smile.

"Sorry, I'm a little relieved that I'm basically done with my list, and super excited to go spend a few days among my tribe."

The smile appeared. "I know."

I reached into the pile of clothes and pulled out a pair of jeans. "Remember how much you loved putting on jeans right out of the dryer when you were a kid?"

"And you'd jump into them and try not to let the rivets burn you," she said.

I tentatively touched a rivet near one of the front pockets. It was warm, but not hot.

"When the kids were little," Anne said, "I'd put their jeans into the dryer before school on really cold days."

"Ha! I totally remember that," I said. I folded up the jeans and began sorting socks.

We folded in happy silence for a few minutes.

"I really don't know that I'm going to do for my Awesome Hour," I said. "I think I want to read two short stories, and then spend the second half of the hour doing Q and A."

I began the process of sorting my socks, which really should be easy, but never is.

"Some day, when I have 'fuck you' money, I'm totally buying all new socks, and they'll all be exactly the same, so I don't have to do this ever again."

"It's good to have goals," she said.

A light went off in my brain. "I know what I'm going to read."

"Oh? Is it a story about your socks?"

"Nope." I told her what my plan was.

"Yeah, that's entertaining."

We finished folding our clothes, and put everything away.

"I'm going to go play Red Dead Redemption, now," I said. "I think I've earned it, and I need to decompress a little bit, after such a busy day."

"Just don't shoot your horse this time," she said, dryly.

"Hey! That was an accident!"

Earlier in the day, I'd related to her how, the night before, I'd been out hunting coyotes (you know, like you do) and while aiming down from my horse, I accidentally shot it in the neck and killed it. I was so traumatized, I broke my personal rule about never reloading from a saved game file if things don't work out the way I want them to.

"If you say so," she said. "Don't stay up too late."

"I won't."

I kissed her goodnight, and a few minutes later found myself roaming the old west.

"Hey, Wil," my brain said.

"What, brain?"

"You're a cowboy..."

"Don't you fucking dare, brain."

"On a steel horse you ride..."

"I swear to god, I'm going to kill you with so much beer..."

"You're wanted..."

In spite of myself, I sang, "WAAAANNNTTTEEEEDDDD..."

My brain joined me: "Dead or aliiiivvvveee!"

I tried to pretend that it wasn't awesome, but my brain pointed out that, being my brain, it knew exactly what I was thinking.

"Hey, just look at it this way," my brain said, "I'm preparing you for Rock Band at the convention this weekend."

"I ... you ... just ..." I had trouble speaking.

"Yeah, that's me fucking with you. Just say 'thank you', and you can get back to playing the game.

I sighed. "Thank you, brain."

"You're welcome. Now try not to shoot your horse."

in which another secret is revealed...

Spoiler alert:

If this interests you, you really want to listen to Radio Free Burrito Episode 28.

dejected arr

On my patio, birds alternately sing to each other and furiously jostle for position on my bird feeders. Baby birds in a nest above my kitchen window chirp at their mother for food.

The inexplicably comforting smell of wet grass rides a gentle breeze through my open window and fills my office with memories of childhood days when spring was warm enough to play in the hose with my brother and sister.

A few houses up the street, a lawnmower drones on, more of a resonant hum than an actual sound. 

My dogs, until recently chasing each other all over the house and through the open doors into the yard, sleep on the floor, their favorite rope toy between them.

I have a ton of work to get done before I leave for Phoenix tomorrow, and I'm feeling more than a little stressed out and overwhelmed. I'd hoped that taking a few moments to appreciate the peace and serenity around me would have calmed me down, but now I just feel like I've wasted time I should have spent working.

Dejected arr.

Starship Spitzer presents: The Bots of Both Worlds

Many months ago, I went over to the Spitzer Science Center at Caltech to record this episode of Spaceship Spitzer. I played a (hopefully) humorous semi-parody of myself, and I also did the voice for the robot called Irwin. What I didn't know until I saw this yesterday was that Amy Okuda, who plays Tinkerballa on The Guild, was also in this (because we didn't work at the same time.)

Hey guess what? If you have a pair of those red and blue 3D glasses, you can also watch it in 3D, which I understand is all the rage among the damn kids today.

I'm super proud of this video, and I'm honored to be part of something like this, because it makes science accessible to younger people, while making it entertaining for them and for adults. You'll notice that I didn't say "makes science cool," because I believe that science already is cool.

I hope that programs like Starship Spitzer will do for today's children what series like Cosmos and guys like The Star Hustler did for me when I was a kid: get me excited not just about what's out there, but helped me experience the thrill of exploring and understanding it.

Listen, do me a favor: go outside tonight, and look up at the moon. While you do that, consider this inspirational line from last night's Big Bang Theory, (which I'll paraphrase because I can't find it online): Our species went to the moon and left evidence of our visit there, just sixty years after barely achieving flight. Which goes like this: "...there are man-made objects on the moon, put there by a member of a species that only 60 years before had just invented the airplane." (Thanks, karohemd!)

We have to understand our universe. We have to know what's out there. I think we have to keep looking up, and we have to keep exploring, because if we keep screwing up our own planet in the relentless pursuit of even more money for jerks who could don't care about the rest of us, we're going to need someplace to go.

excerpted from Just A Geek: a sort of homecoming

As I said in my last post, I'm really excited for all of the events on my schedule at the Phoenix Comicon this weekend, especially the TNG panel, because I get to share the stage with Jonathan and LeVar. Even though I talk to LeVar fairly often, we've never spoken together at a con. Though I've recently seen Jonathan quite a lot, he and I haven't been on stage together since 2001, when I was in a very different emotional place, struggling like crazy to figure out how to handle my post-Star Trek life, while I was also struggling to just survive as a working actor.

I wrote about that con in Just A Geek. This is from Chapter 7, which is subtitled "a sort of homecoming":

When I worked on Star Trek, I always struggled to fit in with the adults around me. It was easy to relate to them professionally, but  on a personal level, no matter how hard I tried, I was still a kid and they were still adults. I often thought that Wesley Crusher could have been a much richer and more interesting character if the writers had taken advantage of that very real turmoil that existed within me, and used it to add some humanity to Wesley in between the Nanite making and polarity reversing . . . but I guess it was more fun (and easier) to write for the android. I can't say that I blame them.

For whatever reason, I was never able to entirely lose that teenage angst, and whenever I attended a Star Trek event, or saw one of the cast members, I immediately felt like I was 16 again. Because of that feeling –   and, if I was willing to be truly, fearlessly honest with myself, the fact that I hadn't done very much with my career since leaving the show –  I avoided Star Trek events (and that inevitable feeling of shame and angst that accompanied them) for years. Of course there were exceptions, but they were few and far between.

In 2001, I was presented with an opportunity to share the stage with the Big Three of The Next Generation: Brent Spiner, Patrick Stewart and Jonathan Frakes. The event was called “The Galaxy Ball.” Robert Beltran, the actor who played Chakotay on Voyager, hosts it each year to benefit the Down Syndrome Association of Los Angeles, Doctors Without Borders, the Pediatric AIDS Foundation, and some other worthwhile charities. When I received the invitation, that familiar anxiety and apprehension sprung up immediately. 

“What will I talk about? What have I done? How can I face them?”  The Voice of Self Doubt was relentless.

“Easy,” Prove To Everyone said, “You've got your website. You've got the shows you do at ACME. You've got a wife and stepkids. You're not a kid anymore. You kicked ass in Vegas, and you can kick ass again. Besides, when will you have a chance to be on stage with these guys again?”

“You’re right,” I said, “but if you keep talking to yourself like this, they’re going to throw you out of Starbucks.”

I looked up, and offered a smile to the girl scouts who were staring at me. I bought several hundred dollars worth of Thin Mints to solidify my reputation as an eccentric millionaire playboy who hangs out at Starbucks in his Bermuda shorts.

When the day came to go to the ball, I dressed in my finest gown, and bid my wicked stepsisters goodbye as I got into my carri  – 

Wait. Sorry. That’s not my story. That’s Cinderella's story. I often get us confused.

The morning of the ball, I had a major fashion crisis. I was going to wear a suit, but I felt like I was playing dress up. I put on an ironic hipster T-shirt and black jeans, but then I felt like a child. I settled on this cool black cowboy shirt with eagles on the front and jeans. I looked at myself in the mirror that hangs on the back of my bedroom door, and thought I looked kind of cool. 

"You guys stay here," I said to Prove To Everyone and The Voice of Self Doubt. "I'm doing this on my own today." I ignored the explosion of discarded clothes that littered the rest of my room, and left the drawers open when I left.

During the twenty minute drive to the ball, I went over material in my head. I prepared jokes and did improv warm up exercises, and by the time I got there I felt like I’d been on stage for three hours.

I parked my car in the self-park garage. I convinced myself that it was stupid to cough up seven bucks for a valet to drive it forty feet, but the truth was all the other guys have luxury cars, and my VW seemed a little . . . unimpressive. 

I made my way to the green room, and discovered Jonathan Frakes, who had arrived ahead of me. 

“Hi, Johnny,” I said. I felt my face get warm.

A huge smile spread across his face as he stood up. 

“W!” he said, “You look great, man!” 

I love it when he calls me “W” (pronounced “double-you”)  –  my whole life I wanted a cool poker nickname, and it’s the closest I’ve ever come.

He closed the distance between us in two strides, and wrapped his arms around me in a big, fatherly bearhug. 

“You too,” I said. 

“Have you eaten?” he said.

“Some coffee and toast this morning,” I said. I didn’t mention anything about my nervous stomach, and the barely-touched  omelette I left on the table.

“Help yourself,” he said, and pointed to a table where some food was set out. “They always give us too much food, you know?”

I laughed. I haven’t spent nearly enough time in green rooms to know, but I took his word for it.

I opened a ginger ale and picked up a handful of veggies. As I munched on a carrot, he said, “How have you been?”

It was the question that I always dreaded. I would always smile bravely, ignore the knot in my chest, and say something like,“Oh, you know . . . Things are slow, but I have an audition next week.” 

I spoke before that familiar knot could tighten.

“Not too bad. I haven’t worked in ages, but I’m doing a really good sketch comedy show at ACME in Hollywood.” I lifted my ginger ale with a mostly-steady hand, and took a long drink.

“And I made myself a website where I write a lot of stuff. It’s pretty fun.”

“Have you been doing any cons?” He asked.

“A few,” I said. “I did one in Vegas last month.” 

“Slanted Fedora?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“How did it go?”

“I took my sketch group out there and we did a show. It was really fun.”

“Oh! I heard about that. I hear you’re really funny.” 

“Yeah, I try to entertain the kids.” I said. The knot tightened so violently in my chest, it felt like a heart attack. I felt intensely uncomfortable and embarrassed. The feeling surprised me; here was the one thing that I’d been doing, and doing well -- I was very proud of my sketch work, yet I didn't want to talk about it. 

“I may be funny in some sketch comedy shows that hardly anyone ever sees,” I thought, “but I'm struggling to pay my bills, I can't get hired for anything in Hollywood, and all of you guys have gone on to be rich and famous. I may be funny, but I sure fucked up the biggest opportunity of my career when I quit 'Star Trek.'”

I shoved several carrots in my mouth and I changed the subject.

“Have you been watching TNG on TNN?”

“Yeah,” he said, “it’s amazing how those old shows hold up.”

“Except Angel One,” I said.

“And Code of Honor,” he said.

“No vaccine!” we said in unison, quoting one of the actors in that show and laughed. The knot loosened.

“It’s so weird for me to watch them,” I said, “because I was so young. It’s like my high school yearbook has come to life.”

“That’s because you’ve actually grown up since then,” he said, “the rest of us have just gotten fatter.”

“Don’t let Marina hear you say that,” I said.

He thought for a moment, and added, “Okay, all of us except Marina.”

He winked. I smiled. The knot untied itself.

“Seriously, though,” he said, “we’ve just gotten older. You’re the only one of us who’s actually changed.”

“I guess you’re right,” I said.

I'm older and changed, now. I'm a fundamentally different person than I was when I wrote this: I'm much happier, I feel like my life is more or less under my control, and I spend as much time feeling grateful for what I have as I once spent worrying about what I didn't. I feel really secure and happy with my relationship to Star Trek, and when I speak at a con, I don't feel like I'm just resting on the faded laurels of something I did over twenty years ago, rehashing stories people know like the lyrics to an old pop song.

My acting and writing careers are doing better than I ever dreamed possible when I nervously drove myself to the Galaxy Ball almost ten years - wow, almost a decade - ago. It looks like I'll be a recurring character on The Big Bang Theory and Eureka, and I think I may get to do more episodes of Leverage. My manager says that casting people are asking about me all the time because they want to put me into their shows, and I've even had development meetings with executives at major networks who specifically want to work with me. w00tstock is just starting out, and it's already exceeding our wildest expectations; it's so much fun to do, but more importantly, it seems to matter to the people who come to see it, which fills me with joy.

I'm sitting at my desk right now, while my dog snores on the floor against the wall behind me, underneath the velvet Wesley Crusher John Scalzi gave me. On the bookshelf next to me, there are copies of every book I've written, and there are even a couple of awards I've received for some of my work. From where I am (physically and emotionally) at this moment, reading about the fear and anxiety I had in 2001 fills me with a mixture of sadness, relief, and gratitude. Just A Geek is about a journey, and for me, that journey wasn't fully completed until I wrote about taking it. I'm trying to find a way to turn some of that story into an entertaining stage show, so I've been rereading Just A Geek, emotionally reliving that journey, and viscerally remembering just how terrible it felt to be imprisoned by the voices of Self Doubt and Prove To Everyone.

Riding that emotional roller coaster again, even if it's only in my memory, reminds me how it feels to be at the other parabola on this particular horizontal axis of symmetry (I guess you could call this feeling my irrational normal curve, if you were into stretching a mathematical metaphor right past its breaking point) and every day I'm more than a little scared that I'm going to fuck it all up, somehow, that I'm standing atop some precarious house of cards that could collapse at any moment, and because the cards were designed by an evil wizard, they have razors for edges and will cut me to ribbons when I fall. (There's always an evil wizard, guys. I know it sounds crazy, but it's true; that's science.)

I've worked really hard to get from where I was in 2001 to where I am now, and looking back on the years in between, I can see more good times than bad, even if it felt that the opposite was true at the time. I also see that I was never alone. I was always accompanied by my wife and family, as well as everyone who read and commented on my blog, bought my books, and encouraged me, in one way or another, to just keep going and never give up. I don't know how many of you reading this today have been here since the old days, but for those of you who are: thank you for helping me not die of dysentery on the trail.

I'm really looking forward to this convention. I can't wait to see my friends, host the second annual RockBand party, reveal some fairly big secrets about some fairly awesome projects during my Awesome Hour, attend an actual nerd prom, and do something so epic with Scalzi, we're both preparing to pass out a white paper titled The Recalibration of Things What Are Epic. The only thing I'm even remotely worried about is not having enough energy to fully enjoy all of the cool things I'm scheduled to do ... and if that is my biggest problem, if that is what I'm worried about, well, my life is good.

Yeah, my life is very good, indeed.

the obligatory phoenix comicon schedule post

My official and complete schedule for the Phoenix Comicon has been finalized and posted. It looks an awful lot like this:

Wil Wheaton Presents: The Awesome Hour! - Fri at 4:30 pm
Wil Wheaton RockBand - Fri 10:00 pm at the Hyatt
Felicia Day & Wil Wheaton: The Guild  - Sat at noon
Star Trek: TNG Reunion  - Sat at 4:30 pm
Geek Prom with Felicia Day- Sat 10:00 pm at the Hyatt
Super Happy Fun Time with John and Wil - Sunday at 3:00 pm

In addition, there is a non-zero chance that I'll drop into the Eureka panel on Sunday, and I think the con has me doing at least one of those photo-op things, too.

When I'm not at one of the scheduled events, I'll be at a table in the exhibitor's hall, signing autographs and stuff. I will, as usual, sign just about anything reasonable you bring me, though I reserve the right to determine what does and does not fall under that description. For your convenience, I'm bringing some 8x10s, Memories of the Future, Sunken Treasure, and a small number of Happiest Days of Our Lives Special Editions. 

I'm really looking forward to this con, and all of the panels I'm doing, especially the TNG reunion panel. In fact, thinking about that panel inspired quite a bit of bloggery, and I just cut 2000 words out of this post, because I thought it deserved its own entry, which will post in a little bit.

The Empire Strikes Back (1950)

I think this may be the most impressive Star Wars parody/tribute/whatever I've ever seen, and I've seen some truly great ones.

This makes me want to do a 13 episode webseries, probably serialized 3 minutes at a time, that's entirely done in the 1950s Sci-Fi style, with locations at Vasquez Rocks, sets that look like the inside of a submarine, with square-jawed heroes and bullet-bra'd heroines. 

From the Vault: "Foster is down!"

Today is the first day in a week that I didn't get up at 4am to go to work. I really wish I could say what I've been working on, because it's awesome, but I have to keep that information in a secure location for at least a few more days.

It was pretty great that I got to sleep late - I rolled out of bed at 8, despite my efforts to convince my brain that it should shut the fuck up and sleep while it can - and it was especially nice to see that my dogs were so happy to see me.

Both of the dogs met me at my bedroom door and proceeded to follow me all around the house while I made breakfast and stuff. I texted Anne: The dogs must have missed me, because they've been following me everywhere since I got out of bed 20 minutes ago." She texted back "Oh, I didn't feed them before I left." I replied, "Awwww DAMMIT!"

It's been a pretty great day already, what with the sleeping in and basically earning a day off, but it's about to get a whole lot better, since Red Dead Redemption came out today, and I can play a whole bunch of it without feeling guilty.

Some of you may know that I'm a character in RDR ... now all of you know that I'm a character in RDR ... and it's always fun and weird to play a game where I can hear my own voice come out of one of the characters. Thinking about that while I made my coffee this morning reminded me of this post from the vault about a character I played in Ghost Recon 2 many years ago:

I play David Foster in Ghost Recon 2. I've been waiting for months to play it (ever since I recorded my first few lines of dialogue), and last night, I finally got my chance to try it out.

I couldn't sleep, so rather than lie in bed and toss around until I woke Anne and got The Wrath, I quietly went down to the living room to play.

Okay, the first mission? SO @!#$^%ING HARD! But that's good, because it sets it up for the player that this isn't going to be a cake walk. Save early, and save often, as the saying goes.

After several tries, I finally completed it with my entire squad intact, if slightly wounded. Funtimes!

On to mission two: blew the bridge with no problem, and lead my squad around the left side of the building complex, where we took a big group of hostiles completely by surprise! Yes! A few times, I heard me (Foster) tell myself, "Great shot!" or "Fire in the hole!" I must say, I am quite the badass . . . and so is David Foster.

So.

After we cleared this courtyard, I consulted my map and saw that we had a few hundred meters to cover before we met up with the British squad, so decided to send my men on the right flank while I went up the left side.

"Copy that," is that last thing I heard myself (Foster) say before a hail of gunfire errupted from behind some bushes.

"GARRAGGHHH!!!!!" I (Foster)screamed.

"Foster's been hit, captain!" Someone in my squad said, while I listened to myself (Foster) writhe in agony. "Oh shit!" I thought. "I have to save myself!"

I ordered my squad to lay down suppressive fire on the two North Koreans who had me (Foster) pinned down, and I crawled through the grass until I was close enough to adminster aid.

I heard the zip of the bullet cut through the air in front of me, just before it buried itself into my (Foster's) head.

"Foster is down!"

"We've lost Foster!"

"NOOOOO!" I shouted, loud enough to wake my entire house.

Luckily, the doors were all closed, and maybe my scream was louder in my head than it was in my living room, because The Wrath I would have gotten when Anne realized I was mourning my (Foster's) death in a video game would not have been pretty.

I reloaded the mission and tried again. This time, I ordered Foster to hang back while I tossed way too many grenades near the area where I knew the hostiles were lurking. Yeah, I spammed 'em good.

We hooked up with the Brits, held off a pretty nasty assault while we waited for extraction, and made it into the chopper relatively unscathed.

I don't know why, but I left out a key detail when I wrote that: I had Foster park himself in the start area, and didn't let him move until the entire area was cleared. It was a tough mission, and I made it tougher by doing it without one of my key party members, because I was so traumatized by his (my) untimely demise.

I cringe when I hear my writing voice from those days, but I'm willing cut myself a tiny bit of slack, because I was young and foolish then (I feel old and foolish now). The story still makes me smile, though, so I think it's a fair trade off. As Chuck Lorre would say, "Not so funny then, very funny now."

some of us are looking at the stars

On January 28, 1986, I was home from school with the flu. I remember that, no matter what I did, I couldn't get warm, so I was sitting in a hot bath when my mom knocked on the bathroom door. 

"There was an accident with the space shuttle," she said, in the same voice she used when she told me that my grandmother had died.

For the next few hours, I sat on the couch, wrapped up in as many blankets as we had, and watched one of the local news networks - probably ABC - cover the unfolding disaster. Because of the fever and the years between now and then, I can't recall a single detail other than how impossible the whole thing felt. How could something like that even happen? And did it mean that we'd never put people into space again?

This morning, I sat in my office and watched the shuttle Atlantis launch into space via a NASA TV stream through VLC on a monitor that is bigger than my family's 1986 television. When mission control gave the order to go with throttle up, I held my breath like I have every single time since the shuttle program was reinstated in 1988, and when the shuttle separated from the boosters and glided into orbit, I got something in my eye. Just take a moment, if you don't mind, and think about what it means that we can leave our planet, even if we've "only" gotten as far as the dark side of the moon. Think about what it means that something as incredible as putting humans into space and bringing them back safely to Earth today earns less media attention and public excitement than the typical celebrity breakup.

It is amazing that we can do this, and even though I've come to believe the shuttle program isn't the best way to spend NASA's tiny budget (which is a pitiful fraction of what it should be), I hope that there was a child watching the launch today who will feel inspired to reach out to the stars and see what's out there.

We humans are a flawed species, to put it mildly, and I think we could do a much better job taking care of our planet and each other ... but when I see what we're capable of doing, it gives me hope that the future I pretended to live in twenty years ago will actually arrive some day.

FSMspeed, Atlantis.