Just a Geek

Just a Geek

Wil Wheaton

Copyright © 2009 Wil Wheaton

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Dedication

for Anne

Foreword

JUST AN INTRODUCTION

Q. Who is Wil Wheaton?

A.
Wil Wheaton is an actor. He is also, as you'll realize once you've read this book, a writer. He was famously in
Star Trek: The Next Generation
and the Rob Reiner film
Stand By Me
, and much less famously in Roger Avary's wonderfully peculiar Frankenstein film
Mr. Stitch
.

Q. Who are you and why are you writing this introduction? Do you know Wil? Were you in
Star Trek
too?

A.
I'm Neil Gaiman. I write stuff, comics—most famously a comic called
Sandman
—and screenplays and books.

And no, I've never met Wil. We were meant to be guests together at a Linux and sci-fi convention called Penguicon in April 2004, but he wound up missing it entirely because he was on call for a part in a movie. He stayed home and waited, and they didn't need him after all. This phenomenon will seem less surprising to you after you've read this book.

As to why I'm writing this foreword, well, Wil asked me (although that doesn't always work, and that isn't why I said yes). The nearest I came to being in
Star Trek
was once writing an episode of
Babylon 5
, which isn't really very near. And even though I pointed out that having an introduction by Patrick Stewart would sell more copies, Wil held firm in his belief that he wanted me to introduce his book. This is because Wil is a geek. If you're a true geek, I'm pretty much as cool as Patrick Stewart.

And I said yes, because...

I completely missed
Star Trek: The Next Generation
. Maybe I wasn't watching much TV when it was on, or maybe I was just looking in the wrong direction, and the names of the actors in
Stand By Me
never made it into my head. So I found out about Wil when I came to live in the U.S., a dozen years ago, and was told that I needed to sign up for GEnie (an online bulletin board) because that was where all the writers I knew hung out and conversed.

So I went to GEnie, and I noticed, in passing, that the
Sandman
discussion there had been started by one WIL WHEATON under, I believe, the alias of "Roq Lobster," but I could be wrong. It was long, long ago after all, back in the days when we knew how much faster a 14,400 modem was than the 300 down, 75 up ones we'd been using a few years earlier, back in the days when Spam was only a noxious pinkish-grey lunch meat, back when you could lose an entire afternoon tinkering with your
config.sys
file in a desperate attempt to make your computer do something the manual was convinced it already did.

Time passed, as it has a habit of doing. In early 2001, I started an online journal, ostensibly because I had a book releasing and I liked the idea of taking people backstage and showing them what happens between an author finishing a book and the book coming out. I'd keep the journal for a few months. That was the plan. Three years later, I'm still keeping it, pretty much daily, and I'm damned if I can tell you why.

I learned about Wil's journal back then, when I started: he began his around the same time, and he made the mistake of mentioning online that he'd always wanted to play Morpheus in a
Sandman
movie. Several dozen people helpfully sent me the link.

I started reading Wil's journal, checking up and checking in every month or so to see what he was doing and how he was doing. Not because he was famous, or semi-famous, or whatever, but because he was interesting, and what he was writing was interesting. The Internet is cruel and harshly Darwinian in that regard. People read what you write if they want to. If you don't interest them, they go away. Wil's life is interesting, and he communicates that well. Also, he's really likeable. He's having too much fun.

Which is, I suppose, why I said yes to writing this introduction. How could I refuse? I've never met him, and I like him. I worry about him—or at least, his career—too, a bit. You can't help it.

This is a book, as you'll discover, about honesty, about the erasure of image. In an era of people blogging as pseudo-celebrities, this is the story of a celebrity blogging as a person. In
Just a Geek
, Wil uses his online journal as a place to begin to tell his story—diaries as performance art. This is his account of himself and of growing up (at least partly) in public.

It's a lot of work, keeping a journal, inviting the world into your head. Sometimes you stay up much too late writing it, and you always reveal more than you planned. That's the way of it. (Although
Just a Geek
is a lot more than a fix-up or a "best-of "
wilwheaton.net
. The journal entries punctuate it, but the story he tells is bigger than that.)

As you read this you'll learn about life in the shadow of
Star Trek
; you'll learn about being an actor, and the jobs that come and the jobs that don't; you'll cheer and you'll care.

Somebody—probably F. Scott Fitzgerald, and a quick Google would confirm that, but I'm typing this late at night, on a plane home, in a thunderstorm, having spent the day in Hollywood, pitching a movie to a terribly literal studio boss and the first actual Hollywood Yes Man I've ever run into, so you're on your own on this one—said there are no second acts in American Lives. The joy of
Just a Geek
comes as we watch Wil begin by desperately trying to refute this, in transparent denial of the facts; but then, simply by writing and talking, he creates his own second act. And it's not the one he was expecting, or the one he was looking for. Much more interestingly and satisfyingly, it's the one he needed. And the one we need too.

You'll see.

Anyway, as we all discover, sooner or later, you're never
just
a geek.

—Neil Gaiman

Somewhere over America in a Thunderstorm, May 2004

Part I. A Note to the Reader

"Not that it matters, but most of this is true."

--William Goldman Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

MOST OF THE MATERIAL
in this book was originally written for my weblog, (the cool kids call it a "blog") an almost daily diary that I publish at my website,
wilwheaton.net
.

As I went through my archives and pulled out entries to include here, I was strongly tempted to make massive changes to the material. I think I'm a much more competent writer now than I was when I started keeping the blog, and some of the earlier entries make me cringe.

However, I resisted. My evolution as a writer is a big part of this story, and cleaning up the older entries too much would rob you (and me) of some fun.

I
have
made small changes: hyperlinks have been removed, and I've filled in some details that would not be obvious "offline," but the fundamental meaning of each entry is unchanged.

It may help the reader to see the conventions I use in this book when I quote weblog entries:

THE DATE OF THE WEBLOG

The title of the entry

The body of the weblog.

All of the entries are still online at
wilwheaton.net
, organized by date, if you're the type of person who has to run a mental
/usr/bin/diff
on everything you see. Just make sure you pipe the output into a text file. There's a lot of information in there. This book chronicles a long journey. It has its peaks and valleys, but I promise it has a happy ending.