Category: ADHD

A new fighter has entered the arena

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

First, the good news: the hardest book I’ve ever written is done.  Not done because editing etc but I have finished the so-called Zero Draft.  Writers might know what I mean by a Zero Draft: that ugly, clunky, maybe horrible bunch of words that you have pasted together with spit and prayers in the hope that it tells a story similar to the one you imagined.  I found calling it anything else inhibited my ability to get the dang words on paper.

Now can put “An Inconvenient Earl” aside for a little and focus on, oh, I dunno, anything else on earth.  Like the new challenge I’ve set myself. This one is way more achievable.  Fifty thousand words less than what I tried to write in the second half of last year.  That attempt was side-lined  by post-Covid brain fog, which believe me is real and just as bad as everyone says.  

My humble goal for the first half of 2022 is to reach a total of one million words by the middle of this year.  I don’t mean all at once. I mean since I started seriously grinding at the self-published author game, in February of 2020.  I’m only about 120,000 words away. 

Two novels by June?  No problem.

Oh hey, while I’ve got you here…I’m building a list of pre-release readers for this and other books. Comment or message me if you’re interested in free books for life (and maybe even your name in the credits!)

New recipes for the uninhibited

a cluster of wine glasses lay on their sides on a white marble counter, dregs of white and red wine in each glass. a little of the red wine has spilled on the marble.
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

(who wish they were maybe just a bit more inhibited now and then because really, saying yes to everything is sometimes a bad idea)

Part Two of our ongoing series of semi-sarcastic but functional drink choices for people who are trying to reframe their relationship with alcohol, caffeine, and all the other complicated molecules that so radically affect how we think and act.

[Read Part One here]

The Interrupter

The low- or zero alcohol drink that tastes like booze that you drink when you’re already drunk and want to keep drunkening further but know you cannot, for your health and manners. Best served fizzy.

The Cold Front

Whatever medication you say you’re taking so your pushy relatives stop asking you why you aren’t drinking at Christmas.  Please pretend to consume responsibly by faking a minor ailment that won’t lead to a ton of questions.

(All recipes by The Fixer, some fairly insignificant rights reserved)

In Defence of Being Interesting

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

or

When Every Day is Hallowe’en

Though I keep my face off this blog for the most part, should you ever meet me in person, you will almost certainly remember what I was wearing.  To sum it up in a hundred and forty characters or less, my aesthetic ideal is something in the realm of Jay Gatsby’s disreputable cousin, down for the regatta with a cask of bootleg Canadian rum in the backseat of my Studebaker.  Like, when I die, I want to come back as the Arrow Collar Man, dig?

Steal His Look!

My ADHD is the high flicker style, where I benefit from nearly constant stimulation.  My exterior conditions affect me so much that I do best when I surround myself with fun, interesting things to keep my neurons firing.  

Clothing achieves this very well.  Compact, portable, and perhaps the most psychologically rich expression of the human experience, clothes are the first of all first impressions, for when a stranger approaches, long before you can make out their face, you can see what they’re wearing. 

Dressing to be noticed–being deliberately attention-getting–involves a constant negotiation with your fears.  It makes routine the assertion of your right to exist as you wish.  Being thought ridiculous becomes mere background, a given.  We are all ridiculous.  We are all in drag.  Some of us just have more consciously formed personas.  

And people freely give me compliments.  They go out of their way, cross rooms to speak to me, to tell me they like how I look.  This feeds my soul, not because I live for praise (although that’s in there too for this precocious only child of a chaotic family) but because it thrills me to think I’ve made someone happy, just by being myself.  I take it as almost a sacred duty to be able to provide what might be the most interesting moment of someone’s day.

Like being kind to grocery store clerks, being nice to your server at the restaurant.  Nice things are (duh) nice and we don’t get a lot of them in our day to day lives, not usually without being told to pay for it. Being nice costs nothing.  Being interesting, which is really only being fully present in your life, however you choose to shape it, costs you nothing.  

Be as alive as you can, as often as you can.  Wear that shirt you think is too bright.  Buy the hat.  Put on something shiny or sparkly or beautiful today, something to make you happy.

Life is what you make it.  I like making it more interesting.

The hangover

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

We get them from drinking, from drugs.  From the ending of a significant relationship.  From reading a book so stunning you can’t imagine reading anything else until you’ve gotten over it. And from writing, though I won’t claim to have produce any truly intoxicating prose.  Yet.

Funnily enough, one of the hallmark symptoms of a book-writing hangover is complete denial that that’s what you’re experiencing.  I laid down 20,000 (coherent, edited) words in only a few weeks. Yesterday I cried as I wrote the ending, because it’s a teaser story for a series I’m writing next year so it doesn’t end with a happily ever after, or even a happy for now. And yet this morning as I sat dumbfounded at my desk, unable to rouse the slightest interest in any aspect of authorpreneurship, I didn’t once think I had a hangover.

Of course I do.  I broke their hearts (spoiler: they’re not mad at each other.) And yes, fictional characters are just words arranged in a certain sequence on a page, but they are also active thought-forms, with what often feels to their creator as a sort of independent self-awareness.  It takes time for the writer to detach from a deeply felt composition. I’ve nursed this idea for a year, and now it’s no longer necessary.  There is a measure of grieving in this.  The last book was worse, as it was the culmination of two years of work and hung on a character who has become as real to me as my IRL friends.  That I can’t shake his hand is slightly painful. 

Only yesterday I wrote that creativity is a strange phenomenon.  The existence of the writing hangover just proves my point.

Remember to refill the well.

Photo by Levi XU on Unsplash

Why write?

~ Will Forrest ~ 2 Comments

Because it seems impossible not to

Because at least i will remember what i had to say

Because i am so very afraid of someone reading what i have written

Because the world has enough “unsuccessful” artists wallowing in insecurity, waiting endlessly for unobtainable perfection before they “enter the world.”  You are already in the world.  You have always been in the world.  There is nothing but the world.  Be in it.

Because we have so much awfulness to get through

Because silence is deadly

Because more is not worse

Because math

Because it’s not impossible that I might actually be nearly as clever, almost as acute and expressive, as I expect a good writer to be

Because there’s only one way to find out

(2021)

Travelling

an aerial photo of a dramatically cloudy sky at sunset hazily overlaid by a drone-taken photo of a stark white iceberg edged with green
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

I practice a form of time travel called insomnia

or maybe it practices me

a liminal state

awake but wrongly

the morning uninevitable

though it is always morning somewhere

what is a morning but the night’s fist unclenching

present always but not noticed until it strikes

rattling your old bones

the earth dragged onward

spiraling through all that night

that fist

opening again and again

and closing

and us

raked by cosmic winds

barely clinging 

all our ambitions a smear on glass

a concrescence of matter

a chance

I practice a form of time travel called insomnia

or maybe it practices me

Is there such a thing as a blessed ride on the swings?

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

For the past few years I have been going to bed so early it’s a problem. I’m missing time with my family, and I’m waking up at 3AM local time for no reason other than I went to bed at 8:30 the night before and I’m a person who does best on 7 hours of sleep.

Why is this interesting?  Because lately I’ve been trying to stay awake longer. So after dinner I walk to a local park and ride on the swings until I can’t bear it, then walk home. this is a peculiar aim, given my tendency to get motion sickness from, like, every conveyance I’m not piloting myself. The big swings at the amusement park? Big ol’ yuck (don’t ask me about the pirate ship, me hearties.)

At any rate, there I was, walking across the park at dusk. As I neared the swings I noticed a woman with a rolling walker, doing laps around the playground with the determination of someone told by their doctor to “use it or lose it to amputation.” Someone struggling to stay active in a world that seems bent on her senescence.

With a smile I passed her to claim a swing, where I sat facing the sunset, pumping my legs, riding aloft on a drum and bass playlist that never fails to energize me. I don’t count it a good go on the swings unless I see over the crossbar. One of my characters whose book has yet to be published wrote a poem about swings. In it he writes:

One day you will let go

At the top of the arch of the swing

In spite of the lake and the cliffs and the sky and the steel

You will let go and she will be there

To catch you

I always swing until I see the sky above the crossbar. It was no different tonight, as I leaned into each swoop of the parabola, kicking my legs to arc higher, squinting into the cotton candy summer sunset. Wanting the wind in my hair, I tossed aside my hat, and as the woman with the walker bent to retrieve it I told her to leave it be, that I didn’t mind, that I’d come back to it.

She circled me again, two or three times, before she brought her walker over to the handicapped swing. Then got on the swing and swung along with me.

Was this something she did all the time?  Or did my swinging somehow give her permission? I couldn’t have asked.  My heart was too full.  From her complexion I might guess she wasn’t born in my country, but to say a word about what we were doing felt wholly unnecessary. We swung, me kicking myself as high as I dared, her reclined in a seat made for comfort, made for those to whom swinging might otherwise be a luxury, an impossibility.

When she’d had her fill of the swing, she resumed her circuit round me. When she reached my fallen hat, she bent to pick it up, then tossed it to me.

I just about caught it.

Why I say I’m ‘ruined’

an overhead view of the night sky through a twisting rocky canyon
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Never not new. Never not the stranger. The kid from overseas who looks normal but speaks weird.  The unbaptized kid at the Catholic school, mouthing liturgy at morning mass because I’ve never heard it before (and imagine the brass of my parents to have straight up lied to the superintendent to get me a placement.) The one with weird hair. The nerd. The suck-up (I never, because if you’re a clever and quiet student, the teachers will suck up to you.) 

The drop-out.

But it’s not a bad thing. None of these are bad things. I don’t put much faith in categories like bad/good, which seem firm and logical but are wholly subjective. It is, as one says, as it is.  This is what happened, and it cannot be changed.

So then why do I say these events I describe ‘ruined’ me?  Ruining implies a pristine state that can be defiled. To say a woman is ‘ruined’ used to (and in many cases still does) mean that she fucked before her wedding day.  Ruined cities litter the earth, relics of human ambition, testaments to mortality’s deft hand and the way that all things end.  Was I ever whole? Pristine? Or was that bit about Original Sin saying something else? 

We are all stardust, strung together in fragile molecular webs that break and heal and break and heal and break until they cannot heal.  No wonder we die, for surely it becomes too much, this being alive, this always being given things to touch and lose and want and find.  We die and become stardust again. Is that the ruin?  My too clear seeing of these webs, my fervent need to say “look, do you see the glory woven through it all?”

I believed in other worlds.  All these things were proof.  These moments, these shifts, these odd exposures I call the things that ruined me.  Evidence that other worlds were real and that you could go to them. That nothing I saw around me had to be the way it was. That the future was full of more than the present could hold.

Is it the future yet?

In case of emergency, fill glass

~ Will Forrest ~ 1 Comment

If you have a rich inner dialog , one of those voices is probably the bartender.  Allow them to delight your many selves with one of the following recipes, crafted to unpick the neural knots of decades of compulsive overstimulation.  Choose from:

The Civil Service

Black tea with a side of buttered toast.  May be served continually and at any time throughout the day as required to maintain decorum

The Ersatz

Steamed milk with instant decaf to provide the experience of a latte made with high-grade espresso, but without interfering with your meds

The Sidestep

Literally any drink that will effectively distract you from craving alcohol

(All recipes by The Fixer, some fairly insignificant rights reserved)