Still Just a Geek, page 64
*I know where some of you are. I even know how some of you are doing. I hope the rest of you are happy, healthy, and thriving.
*RIP ThinkGeek.
*Then, and now, Marayelizabeth is one of the truly great humans on this planet, and in indie books.
*And holy shit we still are what the fuck how did we get so old dude?!
*RIP Jack.
*Long before Just a Geek was even an idea, there was my blog. I know it seems hard to believe now, but my blog was a novelty for a minute, and a lot of people who read it when it was new found out about it because of that novelty.
Way back then, Facebook didn’t even exist. MySpace was just starting. Google didn’t exist. The average person didn’t have Internet access fast enough to download a video, and the streaming we take for granted today was science fiction.
In that world, at least for me, everything felt much more centralized than it does today. If you could get noticed by MetaFilter, Memepool, and Fark, you could basically capture the attention of what felt like the entire Internet. In that world, a former child actor could build a website from scratch and start writing a public journal there, and it stood out.
I’ve heard Hank and John Green talk about early YouTube, when it seemed like everyone knew everyone else because they sort of did. It was all just so much smaller then, and it was easier to stand out.
So I stood out. And one of the people who noticed would become one of my most cherished friends, and my first editor.
I can’t remember if Andrew e-mailed me when I wrote about how much I loved GURPS, which he was editing at the time, or if it was one of the other times I wrote about how one of Steve Jackson’s games was a load-bearing pillar in not only my gaming life but kind of my entire nerd identity.
I just remember that he e-mailed me, and we hit it off pretty quickly. We liked a lot of the same things outside of gaming, and if you are one of the people who shares my privilege of knowing him, you know that he was just so kind, supportive, gentle, and disarmingly funny. How could you not want to be friends with him?
A few more months, maybe a year, maybe two, went by, and I started to feel pressure, internal and external, to write a book. I was resistant, but I ultimately relented for reasons that aren’t important right now, if ever.
I tell the story of turning my blog into a book in Just a Geek, so you know how all that happened.
What you don’t know, because I don’t think I’ve ever written about it until now, is that when I was in the earliest stages of drawing up an outline for a book that didn’t even have a title, Andrew was on the phone with me—a legit long-distance landline phone call—helping me make sense of it all.
When I dragged myself through the first draft of the book that still didn’t have a title, Andrew guided and supported me every single step of the way.
I’m realizing now that Andrew was more like an academic adviser and mentor than editor. I’m remembering that he once talked about how much he liked being a mentor for people when he had the opportunity.
Anyway, I eventually got to the end of the first draft of what I temporarily titled (and I cannot believe I am about to admit this in public) “King of the Mountain.” For some reason that is as stupid as it is best forgotten.
I exported that draft as a PDF, and then I burned that PDF to a CD-ROM. I took that CD-ROM to a local print shop, and I paid them to print and bind a few copies of that manuscript. I still have at least one of them. I asked for one copy to be unbound, and I mailed that copy to Andrew in Austin, Texas, where he lived.
Andrew took out what we would eventually, lovingly, call his Red Pen of Doom, and he marked up my entire manuscript. Then he stuffed it all back into an envelope and mailed it back to me. I remember pacing around the house on the cordless phone while Andrew and I went over his notes. I remember feeling so grateful that this kind, thoughtful, talented, incredibly skilled professional editor was helping me with my dumb book in his free time, just because we had become friends. I’m just now realizing that I didn’t even have the money to pay him then, and he probably would have refused anyway. Sometimes something breaks your way, and you don’t even know for close to twenty years how much it meant, you know?
I feel like we worked on one more draft together before O’Reilly took over.
If it isn’t clear already, I’m going to really billboard this: Just a Geek would not exist, Dancing Barefoot would not exist, my entire writing career would not exist, if not for Andrew Hackard.
I’ve worked with other editors whom I respect, whom I have a great creative relationship with, whose comments and occasional dips into personal stuff I have enjoyed. But none of them were anything close to the friend Andrew was to me.
Because 2020 wasn’t enough of a shitshow already, Andrew was diagnosed with brain cancer. I was one of the very few people he told about it, and we talked all through his treatment until we couldn’t. We lost Andrew in June 2021.
When I turned in my final draft (which is really like your final first draft) back in May, all of us were hoping that somehow Andrew would roll a critical success on his save versus cancer, so this annotation originally read:
I love you, buddy. Can you believe this is even happening now? Remember where this all started?
I really wish you got to see this, Andrew. If there is some kind of supernatural afterlife, whoever you’re sharing it with is so lucky you’re with them. I miss you.
*So this was the original acknowledgments. New acknowledgments for all those that helped make this version of the book is coming later.
I’m definitely thinking of acknowledging my editor for this edition. I’m just not sure if it will be in a positive light.
*Chances are you’re going to have to find this used now, but I hope you can find it and give it a shot—I’m really proud of that little book.
*Again, yes, this is still an active site!
*Editor: Some stats:
225 uses of the word “cool” in its various forms
33 uses of the word “lame” in its various forms
59 uses of “geek” (not counting the running heads)
122 uses of “fun”
82 uses of “funny”
Me: How many uses of “go fuck yourself”?
*So that will be $3,400, donated to Stomp Out Bullying.
*It’s October 25, 2021, at 4:20 (nice) in the afternoon. I’m doing my final pass, using all the notes I’ve received since I turned this manuscript in back in May. I spent the last six-ish months working on the trauma I unearthed in 2020 while I worked on this book. I spent a lot of time in therapy, and I am so happy to tell you that it’s helped me, tremendously. There still hasn’t been this “I took the splinter out” catharsis, but I just feel so much closer to healed than I did. Maybe that specific kind of catharsis isn’t going to happen for me. That’s okay.
*You can listen here: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1JfeUW2hQ48p4qDpabfKHA?si=0d9474e0f20c47c1
*Me: I mean, they just read all about me. Do you really need this bio?
Editor: Yes, Wil.
Wil Wheaton, Still Just a Geek
