The Unspeakably Hedonistic Lifestyle of an Author On Book Tour
Sep. 20th, 2025 08:53 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)


It’s just a little before 3pm on a Saturday in Boise, and I’ve fed myself on a Subway Bacon Chicken Ranch sub (with oatmeal raisin cookie), and now I’m going to lie around on a bed in a darkened hotel room, watching YouTube cooking video until my brain is ready for a nice afternoon nap.
These are my unhinged tour habits! The pure licentiousness is the stuff of legend!
Anyway, hello, Boise. I will see you tonight at that most hedonistic of night haunts, the public library.
Tomorrow! Denver! I’ll see you at the Tattered Cover Colfax! 3pm — that’s right, it’s an afternoon event, because it’s Sunday, and we get our iniquity done early on Sunday.
— JS
![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
Yesterday, I had the privilege and the honor to emcee the opening of the new Metro A Line light rail extension from Glendora to Pomona.
If you’re local, you know what a big deal this is, and how much of a difference it’s going to make in the lives of tens of thousands of people who no longer have to endure the 60 or the 210 for their commute.
If you’re not local, you’re gonna have to trust me on this: it’s a big deal, a significant investment in our communities that will endure for generations.
And here is the absolute coolest thing about it: our light rail system in Los Angeles only exists because of my friend and mentor, George Takei.
[George] was appointed to the Board by Mayor Tom Bradley. The Board was comprised of an appointee from each of the five County Board of Supervisors, two appointees of the mayor of Los Angeles, and four appointees of the City Selection Committee representing the other municipalities within Los Angeles County contained in the District.
This Board was tasked with determining the future of passenger rail service, something that hadn’t existed in LA since the Pacific Red Cars were (in my opinion, tragically) decommissioned in 1961. As you can imagine, it faced intense opposition from the usual gang of idiots, so in 1978, when George was on filming Star Trek The Motion Picture, he left the set and went to the board meeting where he cast the deciding vote to approve light rail service for Angelenos.
Think about that for a second. Our entire Metro rail system, which now includes the longest route in the world at over 50 miles, would not exist without George. Never, ever, let them tell you one person can’t make a difference.
I didn’t know any of this until yesterday, so I dropped that story into my prepared remarks, as a way of honoring George’s legacy, Tom Bradley’s legacy, and to celebrate the way Star Trek and its fundamental message of humanist hope are woven throughout the entire Metro system. It was so lovely when all the people who were there cheered for him.
I made myself look like an adult, fooled everyone, and had an absolutely great time. On the train ride back from Pomona to Glendora, I mentioned to Anne that for as long as I can remember, whenever I finish a performance, the only thing I feel is relief; I have always struggled to find joy and satisfaction in a job well done. But yesterday, I felt good about myself. I felt like I wrote a good speech, delivered it well, hit the notes that everyone wanted me to hit, and I felt so happy and maybe even a little bit of pride.
That’s very new for me, and I hope it sticks around.
I posted updates all morning long on my Instagram stories. Behind the jump, I’ll repost all of that stuff, as well as my prepared remarks.

Mom and dad cleaned up so we didn’t embarrass you in front of your friends.
Keeping things in chronological order, here are my prepared remarks:
Good morning! It’s a beautiful and historic day here in Pomona as we celebrate the official grand opening of the A Line Extension to Pomona!I’m Wil Wheaton, and it is truly a pleasure to be your host for today’s celebration of this amazing accomplishment.
I was born and raised in the San Fernando Valley, and I grew up in a middle-class neighborhood in Sunland, before my family moved to La Crescenta in the 80s. When I started my family in the 90s, my wife and I moved to Arcadia, where we raised our children in the new millennium. I’ve seen a lot of things change in five decades. I am old enough to remember when the Valley was mostly farmland. I remember when the 210 was built (and stood in for all of our freeways on one of my favorite television shows, CHiPs.) I remember the 80s, when we had to stay indoors, because the air quality was so bad before the AQMD stepped in.
One thing that hasn’t changed, that has actually been a defining constant, is the love we all have for our city and our neighbors. Sure, we have our fun intra-community rivalries (818 for life!) but at the end of the day, we are all Angelenos who love our city of angels. Our Metro system is an expression of that love for our communities. Our Metro system connects us, brings our communities together, and serves the public good. It is an expression of our civic pride, yet another reason Los Angeles is such a wonderful place to live, work, and raise a family.
But the biggest reason I love LA is our diversity. More people live in Los Angeles County than the total population of 13 states, and we score 95 on the 100 point diversity scale.
I grew up steeped in the culture and traditions that my neighbors brought with them when they came to LA, as well as the cultures and traditions that existed here before my ancestors arrived.
I love that I got to grow up experiencing food and music, fashion and traditions from all over the world, just by walking down the street. I love that I can hop on the metro and get a taco in Highland Park, spend the day at the Long Beach Aquarium, and finish the day at a Kings game. And I know I’m not alone because I see my fellow Angelenos on the train, often taking their families with them to do something that only happens in LA.
Whatever I want, whatever anyone wants, it’s here. Great food, performing arts, museums that are the envy of the world, and near perfect weather, every day, at our beaches and in our mountains. There is so much to do here, being bored is a choice.
In fact, LA is so special, the Angels, down in Orange County, insist we pretend they are from Los Angeles. Uh, you’re not. The only major league baseball team in Los Angeles is the World Series Champion Los Angeles Dodgers.
But I understand your envy, Anaheim. I really do. This is a great place to live. Oh, and Shohei Ohtani plays for our team, which is pretty great. I’d hate to be the team that couldn’t re-sign him!
One of my favorite local bands, Bad Religion, has a song called “You are the government” that reminds us that we, the people, get to decide what our communities look like. When I rode the A line to get here, and when I look around here this morning, I see, over and over again, the good we can do when we come together for the mutual benefit of our communities.
And in that spirit, before I bring up our first speaker, I want to take a moment to personally thank the regular citizens, community organizers, and elected officials who helped move this project through all its stages of planning and construction. I want to thank all the skilled tradespeople who worked so hard to build this line and this beautiful station that will now serve generations.
And finally, I want to thank my fellow Angelenos who love our city of immigrants, who are standing up right now to protect our friends and neighbors, our wonderfully diverse communities, and ensuring that wherever we go, from Pomona to Pasadena, from downtown to Long Beach, from Hollywood to Santa Monica, and all across the San Fernando and San Gabriel valleys, we are all safe.
The people who worked so hard to bring this project to completion cut the ribbon, confetti canons went TO TOWN, and there was much rejoicing.
Then, there were tacos.
We followed our tacos with churros, as is traditional.

Then we rode the train back to Glendora.
It was a deeply meaningful honor and privilege to be invited by Metro to speak at this event, and to share my passion for my city, my neighbors, and our public services. It was an unexpected gift to learn that I’m a link in a chain that was originally forged by one of my favorite people. It was a tangible reminder of what we can do — what we must do — when we come together as citizens and choose to do big things.
The entire Metro system is free to ride this weekend, to celebrate this extension.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Nuke
Sep. 20th, 2025 11:20 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)

Click here to go see the bonus panel!
Hovertext:
Discovering this etymology wasn't just mind-blowing, it was a nucular bomb of revelation.
Today's News:
The Big Idea: William Alexander
Sep. 19th, 2025 09:28 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
You don’t have to fully understand something to enjoy or get value out of it. New York Times bestselling author William Alexander expands this idea to life itself in the Big Idea for his newest novel, Sunward. Read on to see how the world, though sometimes scary and incomprehensible, can also be pretty amazing.
WILLIAM ALEXANDER:
Sunward is space opera about parenting—specifically about parenting robotic kids, and more broadly about parenting kids who are wildly, gloriously, transformatively different from ourselves.
It started as a short story that I wrote for Sunday Morning Transport, when pandemic parenting was much on my mind. My own kids were stuck at home, quarantined from the world but still trying to learn about it via disembodied classrooms. Their experience of grade school was simultaneously contracting and expanding in ways that I had no frame of reference for—except maybe in science fiction. Home was a spacecraft, isolated in the void. We lived in cramped quarters, bouncing off the walls and staring out the windows, but at least we could communicate instantaneously with every other ship and station.
This mix of coziness, claustrophobia, catastrophe, and possibility messed with my head. I tried to squeeze the whole mess into a short story. Then the story grew into a novel—albeit a short one—about parenting juvenile bots in a turbulent solar system.
Science fiction has lots of robotic kids. Some inhabit Pinocchio retellings, others Peter Pan retellings. Some are changelings, embodying old fears alongside newer uncanny valleys. Samuel Butler panicked about mechanical offspring in his 1863 essay “Darwin Among the Machines” (which also predicts eventual war between the machines and humanity). Osamu Tezuka’s beloved Astro Boy broke ground for so much of our science fictional landscape; his 1962 story “Robot Land” includes a robotic uprising set in an amusement park, published eleven years before the movie Westworld.
Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects (which you can find in his second collection Exhalation) critiques the impossible shortcuts that we almost always take in our stories about mechanical people. “Science fiction is filled with artificial beings who, like Athena out of the head of Zeus, spring forth fully formed,” he says in the story notes, “but I don’t believe consciousness actually works that way.” The digients of his novella are infants raised up by the constant attention of caring adults. Intelligent life needs to be nurtured. It takes time. There are no shortcuts.
As adults we become increasingly skilled at pretending—to ourselves, and to everyone else—that we stand on certainties. Kids know better. They are much more accustomed to moving through worlds that they don’t understand, and don’t yet expect to. They find ways to navigate incomprehension.
Science fiction can help us remember how to do the same—not necessarily in its literal predictions of the future, or in its warnings and cautionary tales, but in the way SF fosters an intuitive sense that all of this… <flails at the world like an unhappy muppet> …could be wildly, gloriously, transformatively different.
Sunward: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million|Bookshop
View From a Hotel Window, 9/19/25: San Diego
Sep. 19th, 2025 07:55 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)

Today’s view not only has a parking lot, but also a freeway onramp! This makes it a high-quality view from a hotel window!
(The room and hotel are pretty nice, just to be clear. Tor does not put me up in murder hotels.)
Tonight: I’m at Mysterious Galaxy in San Diego, 7pm! Be there or be somewhere else, I guess.
Tomorrow: I go all the way to Boise, Idaho, for an event at the Boise Public library (Hillcrest Branch), co-sponsored by Rediscovered Books. Also at 7pm! The event is free but please register at the link so they know you’re coming.
— JS
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Sheep
Sep. 19th, 2025 11:20 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)

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Hovertext:
I believe we've been breeding each other for aww, but so far it hasn't been very successful.
Today's News:
Smells Like Corporate
Sep. 19th, 2025 07:00 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
I skated in high school. Not well, mind you, but I enjoyed it, and it was an excuse to roam around town hanging with my friend group at the time. My first experience with Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater was a generic bootleg CD onto which a buddy had pirated/burned an early unfinished concept build he […]
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09/19/25 – Not a Costume
Sep. 19th, 2025 04:01 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
Previous |
Previous |
Not a lot of cooking goes on in the kitchen without any heat.
———————-Alt Text———————
Getting down to brass tacks, Audri said, “Nick, the ‘accident’ I mentioned was by aliens. I was transported into space, or at least my mind was, and then into an alien body.” Nick replied, “You must be joking. Right?” Shloof, Audri pulled off her cloak. Shocked, Nick said, “A costume?” Audri said, “No. I give you permission to touch my hair.” He touched her hair and then recoiled. Audri said, “Do you still love me? You said that you would no matter what I looked like.” Nick said, “I still love you, but also, ‘ick.’ You look like an old mop.” Audri said, “Hey! Bringing up a woman’s age is never okay!”
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Previous |
Hello From Santa Cruz
Sep. 19th, 2025 04:37 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)

Forgot to post a “view from a hotel window” view today, but this interesting contraption was right down the street from me, so I thought you might like it instead. Tonight’s event was lovely and tomorrow I will be in San Diego, at Mysterious Galaxy bookstore at 7pm. You should come by and say hello to me there.
— JS
Girl Genius for Friday, September 19, 2025
Sep. 19th, 2025 04:00 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
The Big Idea: Dan Rice
Sep. 18th, 2025 04:34 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
What’s scarier, a haunted school or lifelong trauma? Spooky season is upon us and author Dan Rice has brought the ghost stories with his newest book, Phantom Algebra. Follow along in his Big Idea to see how ghastly high school can really be.
DAN RICE:
While writing Phantom Algebra, I encountered a challenge I had never faced before. The setting is a shared universe, specifically the fictitious town of Pinedale, North Carolina, located approximately fifty miles or so from Raleigh. The action needed to center around the berg’s haunted high school, Pinedale High.
I wanted the protagonist, Zuri, to be an outsider —the new kid at school —and not someone who believes in ghosts. But how to get her to Pinedale? I could have had a parent land a job in the city and have the story open with the family moving into a new home or Zuri stepping onto the school grounds for the first time. I don’t know…I felt that had been done before and wanted to do something a little different.
I settled on the horror trope of a traumatic past. Zuri and her mother are on the run, have been for years, from Big Jake: estranged father, abusive husband, former boxer, and full-time gangland enforcer. This leads them to Pinedale after Zuri coldcocks her current high school’s star quarterback, ending his attempt to sexually assault her.
Despite the trauma of watching Big Jake nearly beat her mother to death, Zuri is a fighter like him, dreams of being a world champion, and remembers fondly learning to punch, kick, and grapple under his tutelage. Zuri can’t escape the past because every time she follows her first instinct to solve her problems with her fists, she perpetuates her family’s violent legacy. Isn’t that true of all of us? We can never escape the past because it is carried within us. The best we can do is to learn to cope healthily.
At Pinedale High, Zuri encounters challenging academics, especially mathematics, and a student body that believes the school is haunted. She doesn’t believe this for an instant, only giving credence to what she can beat into submission. When circumstances prove she can no longer deny the ghostly world, Zuri is presented with a problem as gnarly as an algebraic equation. How can she battle bullying poltergeists she can’t see or strike?
Zuri navigates Pinedale with the aid of new friends, fellow outcasts like herself, and eventually bonds with a tween spirit haunted by trauma she cannot escape even in death. Freeing the spirit from her abuser means unearthing Pinedale’s celebrated founding father’s legacy of filicide and satanic magic. Many of the town’s inhabitants haven’t an inkling that Pinedale’s foundation is awash in the blood of an innocent, but they will suffer for their communal past unless Zuri and her friends can face down monsters living and dead.
In the end, I found that Pinedale High being a shared story universe didn’t limit my storytelling. By leveraging the character-centric horror trope of past trauma, I told Zuri’s unique story while remaining within the bounds of Pinedale, the high school, the nearby haunted forest, and the handful of shared characters that give the series continuity.
Phantom Algebra: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|IndieBound|iBooks
Author socials: Website|Bluesky
Read an excerpt.
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - Theodicy
Sep. 18th, 2025 11:20 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)

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Hovertext:
How come nobody asks for all-powerful, all-knowing, and at least PRETTY good?
Today's News:
Government censorship
Sep. 17th, 2025 09:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
Comedian says a thing. FCC Commissioner threatens to pull broadcast license of network if it doesn't fire comedian. How is this not PRECISELY government censorship?
This is what got him cancelled – not ill of the dead, but speculation about MAGA motives. “We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it,” Kimmel said in his monologue.
A Check-Up For Saja
Sep. 17th, 2025 06:35 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
I know, I know, you’re probably all terribly sick and tired of seeing our super adorable new kitten Saja, but I’m going to make you look at him again.
This little guy has a vet appointment today; a follow-up to his previous one when I took all three of the kittens in for shots and whatnot. This is just a second round of the necessary shots, and we’re going to see if he’s old enough to get fixed yet! So that may be scheduled, soon, as well.
I’m so thankful that Saja (and the other two kittens) were relatively healthy and that everyone is doing amazing now. It’s truly so lucky that none of them had serious health concerns or feline leukemia or anything like that.
Having Saja around has been absolutely amazing. It’s hard to express how much I love him. I don’t know if it’s because I rescued him off the street or what, but I am so attached to this baby, and I have been since I first saw him. He means so much to me, and my heart feels so full when I look at him. Cuddling him, seeing him play and be a kitten, and just seeing him be alive and well is so incredible.
I’m so excited to know he’ll be in my life for many years to come.
-AMS
View From a Hotel Window, 9/17/25: Spokane, WA
Sep. 17th, 2025 06:33 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)

My hotel room in Spokane is in fact really nice. The view? Maybe less so.
Tonight! Spokane! I’ll be at Auntie’s Bookstore at 7pm. I’ll read stuff and answer questions and sign books, mostly in that order!
Tomorrow! I’m at Bookshop Santa Cruz, also at 7pm! More reading! And answers! And signing! Fun!
— JS
Happiness
Sep. 17th, 2025 05:10 pm![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
Soon! 🍂🎃 (Took me 3 days to draw, but it was worth it!)

Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal - O Monks
Sep. 17th, 2025 11:20 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)

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Hovertext:
I believe Buddhists aren't allowed to get mad about this misrepresentation, because that'd be a form of attachment.
Today's News:
Natty
Sep. 17th, 2025 07:00 am![[syndicated profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/feed.png)
Borderlands 4 has had some varying results re: launch performance, and it seems to have re-ignited a debate over DLSS/Frame Generation. I think it’s an impressive technique that gives older PCs a little more staying power/stability, but there’s obviously some concern it’s being leaned on as a crutch for developers to avoid the need to […]
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