Why do they hate us?

October 3, 2025 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

So, it’s like that, is it? You really want to read this book that badly, huh? All I did was casually post the meme that inspired it and my Threads blew up. At least compared to my normal bookish content.

I don’t expect any of my other book promo posts to do this well. The mysterious entity we refer to as the social media algorithm (but which is really a bunch of underpaid staffers supporting their billionaire employer’s fascist ideology) doesn’t want to see us win, and will crush your reach if it senses even the slightest chance that you’re going to reach people organically.

Good thing I had a review copy link ready to give people. Even so, I wish I had set up pre-orders, because not everyone wants the responsibility of a review copy. JK there is zero responsibility. I just want people to read the damn thing.

So if you like queer romance full of disaster gays making bad decisions and learning to get over them, adorable twinks who don’t understand how many people want to cherish them, and the trope I like to call Oblivious-to-Lovers where two best friends (who occasionally bang) realize that this is what love looks like for them: I got you, babe.

OMG yes I want to read this book.

Between an app and a hard place

October 1, 2025 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Innovation is bullshit. There, I said it. Tech companies feel the need to justify their existence by constantly ‘upgrading’ their products but it comes at the cost of stability. Every time I develop competency on a platform, the company reformats. My writer website is stuck on a platform that’s being phased out by my ISP. The new platform is hard to navigate and has me wanting to delete the whole thing and start over. Or maybe just direct everything here.

I spend too much time managing the peripherals of publishing. Every solution to this seems to depend on learning yet another system then making all the systems play nicely together. It’s time to cut some ties.

Ironically that might mean showing up here more. I could never bring myself to delete this blog entirely. Too many years, too many posts, and I like the URL, so there. Let’s see what happens.

In the kitchen today: Classic Unsweetened Chocolate Brownies and Jerk Chicken with onions & peppers

I’m just here for the recipes.

an assortment of baking ingredients and a rolling pin lying on a white cloth with blue stripes.

August 7, 2025August 8, 2025 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Because I’m sure as fk not posting anything else these days, am I?

Chocolate Cookies

Adapted from: Soft Chocolate Cookies

I’m a parent and also interested in my own health, so I have reduced the sugar from the original recipe and also swapped in whole wheat flour. I was trying to approximate Bear Paws packaged cookies, but better – no palm oil or packaging and a lot more fiber. The result is a thick cookie with a soft, brownie-like texture. The high butter ratio means they will flatten out if you don’t chill the dough very well before baking.

Makes 12-15 cookies

1/2 cup butter

1/3 cup each white sugar & brown sugar

1 egg

1 teaspoon vanilla extract

1 cup whole wheat flour (or 3/4 cup plain flour + 1/4 wheat germ)

1/4 cup cocoa powder

1/2 teaspoon soda

dash of salt

Sift together the flour, cocoa, baking soda, and salt. Cube the cold butter and beat until softened with an electric mixer. Add the sugars and beat until no lumps of butter remain. Add the egg and vanilla extract and beat well, then add dry ingredients in two batches, combining well.

Chill the dough for at least an hour, then roll into 2.5cm/1″ balls. Chill for another hour or longer before baking (I freeze the balls then bake them straight from the freezer.)

Preheat oven to 350 F. Line a baking sheet with parchment or a silicone mat. Leave space between the cookies in case they spread. Bake for 8-10 minutes, or just until edges have set and the tops are no longer pudding-like. Do not overbake–they will firm up as they cool. Leave them on the baking sheet until they are mostly cool. I don’t know how long they keep because they never last more than a few days.

Once more again with feeling!

February 20, 2025 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Ok so I’m back? I dunno, the fact that I never gave up this blog maybe means I was eventually come back to it. I still have “blogger” on my business bio so there: validation.
I deleted a lot of posts. Some of it was whiny, some was incomprehensible. I might take down the poems because I would like to release them as a book. And there is a lot of content I never posted in the first place. Most of that will likely stay hidden. If it wasn’t worth it at the time, do I really expect it’s improved with aging?
I am also playing with my writer website. Right now this feeds there, and I’d like to think I’ll start posting more book news here among my other rumblings. We’ll see how that goes. I was 5 minutes from starting a Substack but oh, how I do not wish to start over again. I don’t have the hustle to turn a Substack into a great paying venture (at least not yet) so I’ll just burble away here for now. This is a year of pruning my orchard, of getting rid of dead wood i.e. poorly performing components of my system. Yeah there’s a system. It’s not great but it’s there.
Maybe this time I’ll stick to it.

Regrets, I’ve had a few

July 13, 2024 ~ Will Forrest ~ 1 Comment

Well, it’s official. I don’t care about this blog anymore. I’ve had it for three years and that seems to be my upper limit for investing in projects that don’t have external motivation or a tangible return. I never really posted for attention, mainly for my own interest. I’ve gained no more than a handful of subscribers, and I don’t feel like doing the work to get more.

So I guess this is the end.

I don’t know if I ever had a goal with blogging. Just the desire to try. To see what happened. To help me build a routine around writing, but in the last three years I’ve learned that as much as routines help me navigate my daily life, they completely derail my creativity. Being obliged to write is the surest way of rendering me incapable of writing.

And, like…I’m bored of it. I don’t even read blogs with any regularity. I’d rather read a book. And blogs about writing tend to focus on beginner stuff that I’ve heard before, tried before, and either have already integrated into my habits or have discarded because it didn’t work.

Blogging is one of the latter. A habit I want to discard because it’s not bringing me joy. It’s not selling any books, either. And to be perfectly honest, that matters to me almost as much as the joy.

If you want to stay in my circle, I’m active here: https://www.threads.net/@willforrestthewriter

If you like my writing, find my fiction here: https://willforrest.com/books/

さようなら

End Times

May 29, 2024 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

when I reach

one hundred poems

will I stop?

burn them

on a stony beach

in midnight solitude

or shall I carve them in my skin

to walk through the streets

bleeding my truth?

one hundred thoughts too strong

for conversation

we hide in poetry

its sense of song

protecting us from our uncertainties

our unformed faith

eulogies for our forgotten hope

we let these words convince us

that we have done all we can do

this line

these lines

the limit

of belief

——-

My sixth post of the year and might be my last ever on this blog. I don’t have the time, motivation, or audience to make it worth keeping up, and an abandoned blog seems worse than one that ceases to exist. This won’t be the first site I’ve deleted. This is my content and I don’t want it laying around, training AI without me granting permission.

WordPress is a very good backbone for websites and not much of a vibe otherwise. The whole Meta suite is an exhausting grind (even Threads, which I loved for six months.) X is a toxic wasteland, the other platforms (Bluesky, Mastodon) too convoluted. Social media in general is not the paradise we deserve.

Maybe I’ll open a MySpace account…

My brain, the contrarian

an antique phrenology model of a human head. the top of the skull has been removed to show a model of the brain. Phrenology terms are written in German across the top of the model's forehead. The image is eerie and forlorn.

April 16, 2024 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Nothing derails my plans more effectively than making them. For example: I set up my personal brand as author, blogger, and general nuisance and then essentially stopped blogging.

I have a lot going on, and this site was only ever meant to be an exercise in working out my thoughts coherently enough that other people would be able to read them, thereby clarifying these thoughts for me. I don’t know if that happened. As well as several dozen poems, I’ve posted a lot of rambling rants, a lot of mediocre ‘content’ as we’re meant to call everything that arises from the slightest creative human endeavor.

Is this post content? Is it shareable? Do I care?

Most of my parasocial needs are being met on Threads right now. It’s not a perfect platform thanks to Meta, who are either fascists or idiots or both given the way they disable trans and POC accounts via algorithm but won’t take down hate accounts despite hundreds of real users’ reports. They don’t fucking care, but I’m content to work chaos on the margins. I don’t have the energy to get on BlueSky or Mastodon or anything else. I’ll wait for a new exodus, when the process of enshittification has gone too far to tolerate.

Find me on Threads if you want to microdose more of my belligerent optimism: https://www.threads.net/@willforrestthewriter

This Explains Everything

April 3, 2024 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

In celebration of Autism Awareness Month, I’d like to make you aware that I have autism.

Just a little. What we used to call Asperger’s Syndrome but don’t anymore because Asperger was a nasty little fascist and his aim was to determine which autistic people were socially valuable and which were, you know, expendable.

So fuck that. Thanks to a host of diagnostic tools* I am now confident in saying I have autism.

The kind where you can still have relationships and conversations but it comes at a high cost, demanding more of your cognitive capacity than neurotypical people expend on the same activities. The kind you figure out you have when you’re in your forties and are worn out from decades of trying to do what everyone else does, and failing. The kind that seems really trendy now, as if it’s a fun way to cook eggs or tie your shoes that we learned in a TikTok. What’s really happened is that the criteria for autism has been revised, and now represents a broader and more accurate picture of how it presents.

I don’t want to say ‘syndrome’ or ‘disorder’. That sort of language is itself part of the problem. I am not a bad or broken person, not incapable and in need of repair. I am simply differently endowed, and for the most part lacking context in society, which tends to flatten difference in the name of general harmony.

Ant the truth is, the real truth, the reason I’m writing this blog, is not because I feel a deep-seated need to reach out to you, this small group of strangers who will read these words, but because I put the word ‘blogger’ in my fucking author bio, and it’s been so long since I posted that it feels like a lie.

————-

*please do not come at me re self-diagnosis, the available tools are the same as what they use in clinics.