“You open your safe and find ashes.”

November 4, 2025 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

As authors, we are constantly on the receiving end of all sorts of advice about how to promote our work, much of which rely on magical thinking and/or spending a lot of money (or both.) Selling books in person, selling books at a discount, selling yourself as a brand, but for pure return on your investment, nothing beats giving away free books.

I’m not handing out paperbacks on the street, but I’m not the only one who believes in the power of free. Attract abundance by being abundant. Give books to everyone who wants one: that’s how you win fans for life.

Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.”

― Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

Readers win too, because *ahem* book tastes are subjective. I honestly don’t expect everyone in the world to enjoy what I write. I would rather you read my free stories and decide that my work isn’t to your liking than make you pay money for a book that you end up hating. Costco has it right: give away as many free samples as you can. Your fans will find their way to you.

Visit my Free Reads page for bonus material from my series and some standalone shorts. I’ll be adding to the page in the next few months as I build up to the release of a series I’ve been working on for ten years. Mary Mac and her band of merry perverts have some deep lore, y’all. I have stories for years.

And they wondered what the secret was

May 2, 2023 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Gaining traction–getting attention–on the internet is an opaque process for the most part. If, like me, you aren’t doing a frequent deep dive into how your content is getting served to the public then you probably have very little idea why something you post does or does not get clicks. To try and game social media algorithms is to play against masters of obfuscating data trails. Certain enormous retailers are equally secretive about how they intervene in the relationship between buyer and seller. To the liars fall the spoils, we must say in this situation, because the retailers and media corporations both hold the majority of the power and make a substantial amount of the money.

The joke to me is that the harder I try and use the interlaced nature of the internet, the worse my reach is. This blog for example: if I embed a video, if I use the scheduler, if I use the auto-repost function, my content goes unseen. Not just zero likes but zero views. This is, in a word, bullshit. We built the internet to be interconnected. Isn’t that what it’s a short form of, interconnected network? It’s like we built highway interchanges then put brick walls across them. What’s the point of the internet if every node on it savagely protects itself from all other nodes?

I didn’t know what this post was about when I started writing. Only that I wanted to test my theory above. I needed a post, and now I think what it’s about is to say that:

The point of the internet is not to make the shareholders of social media corporations rich. It’s to connect across a network.

Seems obvious, doesn’t it? Much rarer in practice.

A week ago I joined a Discord server hosted by one of my favorite authors (It’s invite only so don’t even ask, IYKYK.) It is one of the finest instances of people being quality on the internet: the encouragement from other members, the positivity everyone exudes, the ethical durability of the group rules, all at a time when I was kind of starved for human interaction. It is however a very select group. Small numbers seem important when maintaining the quality of social groups. I will be curious to see this group evolve, and I’m glad that I joined in the first days.

All relationships begin with unknowing. To get to know a person is to train your brain, to construct a reality within it that contains that other person. I’m maybe not sufficiently afraid of strangers, which is a gift of my race and social class, though statistics leave no one unharmed. But I like strangers, new people, potential. I like reaching out, even if now and then I get my fingers bitten. Haven’t lost one yet.

Who owns us?

April 11, 2023 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Way back in the wayback, I started this blog by talking about Cory Doctorow. He really is a smart person, and in this guest blog for indie author legend Brian Sanderson he brings his ethics and intellect to bear on how Amazon is ripping everyone off.

The problem with Audible is not that it makes a wide catalog of audiobooks available through a convenient app. The problem is that Audible uses technology, accounting fraud, and market power to steal vast fortunes from creative workers and the audiences who love their books.

Disclosure: I’m an author who uses Amazon as a sales platform, but in this insular space I feel safe in expressing my deep concern that we have let a single corporation insert itself into so much of our daily lives. I’ll let Doctorow himself speak to that.

GUEST EDITORIAL: CORY DOCTOROW IS A BESTSELLING AUTHOR, BUT AUDIBLE WON’T CARRY HIS AUDIOBOOKS

I don’t have any audiobooks for sale. Authorship and publishing take so much attention that I haven’t had any to spare for yet another aspect of it, so I can’t add much commentary. But Doctorow has nothing to gain by refusing to list his audiobooks on Amazon. In fact:

my agent tells me that it cost me a fully paid-off mortgage and a fully funded college savings account for my daughter.
w

If more big-name authors were prepared to starve Audible of their content, would Amazon cave to pressure and make the deal fair for everyone? Or is it going to take another few election cycles before President Warren (don’t laugh) demands the break-up of this predatory company?

Until then, I’ll keep listing my books on every platform I can. There is another way. We can and must find it. For everyone’s sake.

The Player of Games

February 9, 2023 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

I did it. I played the game. I did the tricks, I sat up, I begged. I scheduled my posts. I groomed my hashtags. I added IDs for the visually impaired.

I featured an image. I added a quote. I cross-posted. I rained content.

I should have just had a nap, because I’m exhausted. And I got nothing.

And I wondered in my delirium if maybe if posts weren’t suppressed and artists had reach and fans saw all your content and we didn’t have to pay for even the barest shred of eyeball time that maybe we would all be making money and wouldn’t mind paying.

Twenty bucks says this gets more views than any of my carefully curated content. This Luddite mumbling, this petty little whinge. Better feature an image, keep the variables constant.

And prepare for nothing.

(In the meanwhile, read my previous post, it’s nice and long and has a bit about KJ Charles.)

No flash photography

November 7, 2022 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Banksy is one of the greatest living artists. Because we don’t know if anything he’s ever told us is true.

Even when he says he’s telling the truth. Particularly when he says he is, as in his film Exit Through the Gift Shop. Tracing Banksy’s often reluctant involvement in the abrupt rise and fall of another street artist, the film is either a shocking record of true life, or a sublime fake.

We don’t know.

That’s the art.

Not the spray paint, not the ruined theme parks, but the very inscrutability of the artist’s existence. The art is in the fact that we will carve out of our very walls a rock he is said to have touched and hang the rock on an art gallery wall then charge other people money to view it. The art is the news story about the painting which shredded itself the moment it was sold.

He is invisible, criminal, liminal. We might never see his face. That is his art, and our psychology is his canvas.

photos by Lewis Roberts / Robin Wersich / Cole Patrick on Unsplash / treatment by The Fixer

The chipped stone wall of an insurance firm’s downtown office, the alley which never sees sun, the corner of the underground parking garage where a drift of dead leaves has gathered: this is the mental state of so many of us. Waiting for the unknown to express itself upon us.

A vivid red balloon, a bunch of flowers, a rat with a felt-tipped pen scrawling a name, any name.

Making something from nothing.

Making us into art.

seo

a fluffy Pomeranian dog in glasses and a sweater works hard at his computer like a good doggo!!

March 3, 2022 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

the algorithm told me to post poems on a Thursday

the algorithm thinks that poems rhyme

the algorithm doesn’t think

it’s only code

two digits

what happens if I don’t fi

WHAT RUINED ME Episode 5: A copy of Fetish Times

closeup of a woman's back, tied with hemp shibari ropes

March 1, 2022February 17, 2023 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

There was that time I was coming down after a semi-licit rave at a downtown ballet studio. I’d only just met the woman whose apartment we were in, though she knew some of my friends. It must have been spring, for the room was full of sunlight.

The woman was a dominatrix. Messily beautiful, twice my age. I am quite sure that if she tried to fuck me I would have said yes. Instead I read the magazine Fetish Times.

It was 1994. The internet was barely a word. No smartphones, no cameras, no 3.5 million search results and nothing to Google it from (sorry Netscape, you did your best.) We still called it cyberpunk, for fuck’s sake. Then adolescent me picked up one of western culture’s strangest artefacts and the bottom dropped out of the world. Thanks to the imprinting effects of psychedelics, there was no coming back.

I was appalled. I read it cover to cover. No one noticed. They talked about San Francisco in the 1980s, about tweakers on roller-skates and failed revolutions. I read about…stuff.

Why do we want it so weird? Who told me to ask my first lover to pour hot wax on me, the third time I ever had sex? That was before I’d seen the magazine. He asked what I wanted and that’s what I wanted. We were barely dating. I just went to his house to fuck. To smoke hash. To read his mind-bendingly seditious books and fantasise about changing the world.

Am I ready?

Are you?

Not For Trade

February 16, 2022 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

or

“Do you ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?”

I don’t align with all of Brian Eno’s public opinions, but I can’t find fault with him on the subject of NFTs. Like him, I can’t say that I’ve ever understood why they need to exist. How does making something owned make it better? “A person claims exclusive ownership of this.” So fucking what? If anything, the thing owned has lost value, because now it is removed from public meaning-making.

Putting your art on the NFT marketplace fees like fighting other artists for the coins some rich idiot tossed from the upper deck of the RMS Titanic. We’re all going to die in about an hour, but by all means, let’s fight for that silver. Something to grip in our teeth on the way down. Something to pay the ferryman.

Crypto-bros like to think they’re anarchists, but the point of anarchism (not anarchy, but capital-A Anarchism, as in the political philosophy of localized self-governance, with special emphasis on governance) isn’t to “fuck the system” but to create a system that is incapable of fucking us. There’s still going to have to be A System. None of the comforts of the modern world exist without a cohesive society with ample financial resources. If we burn the world, the internet goes too. Oops.

The more we do what crypto-bros think is best, the less livable the world becomes. Right down to, where do they think their microwaveable pizza crust comes from? Their own ingenuity? Or hundreds of workers in a supply chain that will collapse if we keep burning the world by mining cryptocurrency. There will be no pizza. No Soylent, no poké bowl delivered by an Ubereats driver whose take won’t cover the cost of the gas to get it to your house. If push comes to shove, the crypto-bros can always eat each other. Looks like they’ve already begun.

Bach Door Shenanigans

A metal door in an alley decorated with uplifting graffiti including a rainbow, MLKJr and an avocado

February 10, 2022March 19, 2023 ~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

In March of 2020 I started reading this book.

a paperback edition of the book Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas R. Hofstadter — *Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid* by Douglas R. Hofstadter.
(Heck, try and say that five times fast.)

At 777 sizeable pages, it took what felt like all pandemic (ha hahahhhahha, but anyway) to finish. A good eight or nine months at least, in which time I became absolutely convinced that what we call cognition is merely sophistication.

Stack enough layers of iterative analysis on top of one another and the system behaves as if it were intelligent. That’s what our brains are. The cerebral cortex is literally the icing on a cake whose foundation is cellular away/towards membrane awareness. Maybe it’s my own of confirmation bias, but it made some damn sense.

While reading this tome (if ever a book deserved the word) I also wrote some 350,000 words of fiction, most of which I’ve published. My own afflictions and ideas like the preceding have made it very easy to feel the characters are real people who exist independent of my imagination. This is obviously false. However…

Even though there isn’t a thinking mind, stack enough data in a single system, connect the points, allow for feedback, and one begins to observe something like intelligence. Fictional characters do not have minds, but as they say, if it quacks like a duck…

Many writers find a strong character will “come alive” and present them with ideas they might not have come up with before the character was given form. One “gets to know” the characters, even though it is the author who adds the information layer by layer, getting closer to the point where that concretion of one’s own thoughts begins to resemble something that thinks.

This is when characters can “take over” and tell the writer how to change their stories to suit. Who the fuck is doing this? You, but also The-You-That-Is-Not-You. It’s the old witnessing-the-witness epiphenomenon. Which part of you is aware of your awareness? This has yet to be satisfactorily determined by science, and may be, like the sight of the back of one’s own head, not possible for us to fully know.

A fictional character certainly does not have consciousness as we know it. It is, in a sense, an AI script being run by the computer of your brain. However this makes it able to manifest behaviour which seems so much like consciousness that we pragmatically can treat it as such.

Let your characters tell you what to do. It’s just you telling yourself, but these backdoor shenanigans are where the interesting things happen.