Category: society

Representation matters (so don’t f*** it up)

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

For the first time in my writing life I paid someone to critique a manuscript. It took a week for me to get up the nerve to read the report, because folks, this book is my baby. In a way no book has ever been. There’s something about my main character that won’t let me go. The editor had a similar reaction. In fact, they said some of the nicest things I’ve ever heard about something I wrote. More importantly, they got it: the point, the vibe, the Universal Tropes driving the story.

That being said, the book is not perfect. It may in fact be deeply flawed. Nothing I can’t redeem, and absolutely worth the effort to do so because I want this book to SHINE. If my character Izzy resonates with other readers the way he did with someone I paid to be professionally mean to me, then this might be my first major success. It can’t be held back by a mediocre subplot, wishy-washy supporting characters, and accidental queerbaiting.

That last criticism hurt. With surgical precision, because it was true. For those who haven’t heard the term or perhaps don’t know the meaning, in modern media analysis queerbaiting means to present a character as if they are queer, but never allow them to be openly queer. Worse is when the queer-coded character turns out to be straight. For example Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory: would you have been at all surprised if he had been gay? You know, like Jim Parsons, the actor who played him?

That’s a good indication why queerbaiting is a problem. We see so few queer characters in popular media whose queerness is both present in the story and…not the plot of the story. Because not every story with queer characters needs to be a painful coming out story. Not every Trans character has to struggle with body dysmorphia. We don’t all get rejected by our families. And more to the point, most of the time we aren’t thinking about our orientation. It’s just a fact about us, like the color of our hair and eyes, or whether or not we can stand the taste of coriander. But by not letting characters be openly queer, it traps queer people in this shadow realm of not properly existing in the public consciousness.

Some might argue that the queer agenda is taking up too much air these days. As much as I can speak for the LGBTI+ community at large, we certainly didn’t plan to become ammunition in the culture wars. But the cats are out of the bags, we are out of the shadows, and that’s simply the way of things now.

Which is a lot of words to say, I fucked up. I did myself what I decry in others’ work. Telford seems gay. Possibly asexual. So why did I bend over backwards to make him kiss a girl? Honestly, it was nothing more than carelessness. I am so dialed in on my main character Izzy that I just kind of did whatever for poor Telford. He deserves better. And Izzy deserves my best.

More posts to come on this process, I’m sure. It’s the longest book I’ve ever written and I think it’s going to change my life. If I get it right…

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.

On the Watchtower 

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

If we were not so frightened

If we didn’t need so

If every home was a homecoming 

And none died gnawing bones beneath the walls

Would we still set these lamps

Still ward the world away?

Yes, Brother

For the woods are deep and pathless

Yes, light them

As we prepare to receive 

Yes,

For the night you lose the path

For the night I set the lamps

For you

(November 2022)

Photo by Gadiel Lazcano on Unsplash

Why choose?

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Reverse Harem and the (r)evolution of Romance writing

If you aren’t an avid ebook reader, it’s likely you’ve never heard of the genre, which has begun to call itself “why choose” because algorithms are prurient snitches. Yet it’s the strongest trend in self published romance, with no signs of slowing down.

It is also an astonishing indicator of where culture is headed. Because two out of every five ebooks sold are romance, and reverse harem tropes are EVERYWHERE.

So what the heck is it? Nothing more or less than a romance story where the heroine gets ALL the boys. Without having to choose between them, favoring one and only one. Without lying or cheating, with the consent of all the men, which is perhaps the most fantastical aspect of the genre, that three or more cis-het guys could get over their egos enough to get along with their partner’s metamour.

OK so what the heck is a metamour?

It’s the point at which the Why Choose genre gets really interesting. Because, pardon me if I’m wrong, but this is polyamory. A metamour is your lover’s lover. Not your competition, just “the other person who loves the same person as me.”

Meaning the strongest trend in romance writing is a vigorous, fun-loving, open-hearted repudiation of the nuclear family. One of the lynchpins of Western society, blamed repeatedly (and quite sensibly) for maintaining women’s inferior status. Less than half a decade ago, women in the US were being arrested for wearing pants. A wife needed her husband’s permission to open her own bank account. The assumption was nearly universal that all women wanted was safety. That women weren’t sexual, weren’t interested in freedom in being their own person, in existing for any reason besides replicating DNA aka having babies.

Oh, my sweet summer child…

That has never been enough. And hear me out, this is not some Sandberg gaslighting about how every woman miraculously can have it all aka a high paying high pressure job as well as a functional marriage, happy children, and time enough to seek personal meaning. Such women usually have nannies. And they are frequently miserable. The women, not the nannies, though I reckon a fair few of them are less than thrilled with what often functions like a sort of indentured servitude.

This is of course not universal. But that’s the point. Women want different things. Women can finally have what they want. And yes, RH is a book trend. It isn’t a sign of the death of marriage. But it is certainly a sign that the Overton window has shifted hugely in the direction of even more freedom for women. And for men, who must bear the brunt of being denied softness, emotionality, compassion. Who are taught they must defend their tiny tribe against an entire world which wants them dead. Truth is, the world usually isn’t paying attention. Truth is, modern marriage isn’t a siege state. Wives are not chattel, nor are they princesses, to be kept in a tower and denied the world.

Women are raw, and horny, and also nice and pretty and kind, but still red-blooded, salivating, alive. And we are tired of being told what to do.

There is a world filled with possibilities. Even it’s only words on a page or a screen. A world where women get exactly what they want, and men are happy for it to happen. So come on over! Sometimes the grass really is greener even once you’ve hopped the fence.

The Golden Age is Always Tomorrow

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

There’s a popular illusion that the past was a magically better place, an opinion usually voiced with the words “good old days back when people respected each other” and to this I say: there are no good old days.

Dickens was right, while the past may have been the best of times, it was the absolute fucking worst of times. No more than a hundred years ago, most of us wouldn’t have lived past forty, not (only) because everyone was sick all the time, but because if you weren’t at least middle class, your life was often barely livable. We can’t all have been Napoleon, in other words. Most of us would have been peons.

And no, the 1950s does not qualify. Not while millions worldwide still suffered under the lash of European colonialism.  Not while polio ravaged families and doctors raced to eradicate this deadly virus through mandatory vaccinations. Ahem. Not under Jim Crow, not under McCarthy. There was no golden age. This moment, right here and now, may be our peak, as close as we will ever get, unless we put everything we have into stopping the juggernaut of climate change from crushing everything else.

Your move, humanity.

WHAT RUINED ME Episode 8: The 1990s

a view from the back of a cheering concert crowd in a darkly lit nightclub. The exposed metal beams of the ceiling gleam in the brilliant golden lighting from the stage
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Lots of new readers have started following The Fixer since I last posted one of these.  It seems sensible to preface this episode, which happens to be my 100th post, with explaining again why I say “ruined.”

Because I’m not wrecked. There is as much “wrong” with me as there is with you. We are none of us normal, because the norm isn’t a thing, it’s a statistic.  We can talk as long as you like about the ghost of Aristotle in the shell of modern thought, but suffice to say there is no Normal Person we can all strive to emulate, and there never will be.

So why say ‘ruined’?

First, because it plays to my obsessional idiom, which has most of my written correspondence (from this blog to my text messages) employing the intellectual, somewhat stilted but still wholly lucid prose of an British college don circa 1948, for which I only slightly apologize.

Second, because in a sense it’s true.  Any instinct in me to get along, accept good old school-marriage-breeding-working-death as my inevitable path, was further and further eroded by each of these encounters with The Other.

And boy, was there ever a lot of Other in the mid-1990s.

If you knew where to look.  We used to call it counter-culture, because it offered a wholly alternate universe that felt wildly contrary both to what I’d grown up with and with what was being shown on TV.  A realm in which the earth was held as sacred, my body was mine to both worship and gleefully deface, sexuality of all kinds was not just tolerated but encouraged, drug use was by informed consent and sensible practice while alcohol use was almost nil, and the music was both relentlessly joyful and wildly seditious in a time of increasing state surveillance and corporate control.

I’m not saying it was a golden age because I don’t believe in golden ages.  Much of my experience was a function of my privilege (white, middle class, expensively educated, etc) because looking back I understand how hard other people were struggling for basic rights of safety and freedom that are only now in place.   It’s deeply concerning, even embarrassing, to think how far we’ve backslid in the last few years into unfettered corporate control, restriction of reproductive and sexual rights, and infantilized violence perpetrated against people who are already oppressed.  The more I think about it, the more it makes sense that yeah, Boomers and Gen X are all suffering from lead poisoning from their toxic childhood homes, because otherwise why are they acting like such fucking idiots?

Yeah, yeah, not all Boomers…don’t even start.

On the other hand, I’m firmly in the camp of the historical dialectic (see above re college don) and the notion that the pendulum each time swings further towards justice and freedom for all and away from authoritarianism.  I fully expect that this present day ultra-conservative movement is not a new beginning but their last gasp, the Hail Mary, the desperate acts of desperate individuals who see their old way of life eroding and can’t deal with the fact that change exists, and that it spares no one.

Choice

A mysterious box decorated with gold Chinese scrollwork with an ornate clasp sits on an antique leather desk-top
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

this is the magic of the fear-not ritual

this is why ritual is

so that when you place your hand in the box and

the pain is indescribable

when your fear says: pull away, save yourself

questioning this fear, you remember everyone before who passed this test

generation upon generation who did not pull away

who asked this question: why?

remember this like your own name: pain and fear are two separate things

distinct, divisible, neither inevitable

we mistake them for each other

the experience of one produces the other

but they are separate things

when, from pain, you experience fear

ask it: why?

some pain simply happens

or maybe all things

happen simply

what we call fear is a reflex

the animal retreat

hate is the choice to not question your fear

(July 2022)