Category: the mind

Who the heck am I?  I mean this week…

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

I can overthink anything.  You name it, I can lose myself down a rabbit hole of reverie that will touch on any and every topic my pick-n-mix brain can associate with it.

So when it comes to who I am as an author, you better believe I have come at this hot mess of an identity crisis from every angle under the sun.  Total anonymity.  Full disclosure.  Pen names that had nothing to do with my real name, and one that is an amalgam of names by which I’ve been known all my life. This is before I start thinking about gender, both mine and my characters.

Everything feels up for grabs, as if I am remaking the world if only in a very narrow way.  But what set me off?  Why think about any of this?

I was interested in joining a book promotion with a group of other authors.   LGBTI+ books were siloed off in their own category, regardless of genre.  Most of the authors in the category were cis-presenting white women writing thinly veiled fanfic of Buffy (everyone’s a dude and they all bang) and/or Brokeback Mountain (everyone’s a cowboy and two of them bang.)  If that’s your trot, as Chuck Tingle says, let’s trot,

I usually go a different way.  Because I’m a pernicious troublemaker who has never found a foothold in the mainstream.  But what does this mean for my career?  If I write about diversely queer characters, am I doomed to scrabble at the margins, never gaining a fan-base, never writing a book that other people truly want to read? Can I really survive the long hours, months, years to build a following?  Other people are making it work, though they started sooner, have a head start so to speak.  My genre is certainly niche, but it exists and the reader base is committed and growing. There is light at the end of the tunnel.

So why didn’t I join the promo?

Because I hadn’t done all this thinking yet.  I hadn’t come to terms with the ever more obvious truth that I really only want to write about queer love. Y’all straights got plenty to read.  I want to tell a different story.  Love is love, however, even if you’re the straightest arrow ever drawn, and being bi (though maybe I should start saying ‘pan’ as gender is a social construct and doesn’t really exist) I’m fine with heterosexual unions.  I just don’t much care to read or write about them.

Perhaps the most valuable thought that came up is the difficulty of straddling certain genre divides.  It’s one thing to write a historical paranormal shifter omegaverse time travel story and quite another to put both a straight and a gay romance arc into that story.  There’s an ick factor around romance a.k.a. kissing that cannot be denied or even overcome.  Many people find out they’re a certain orientation by a bit of exposure to what it turns out they don’t like.  When that first kiss makes your skin crawl but not in a good way and you realize you can’t kiss that sort of person ever again.  

I don’t need people putting my books down because of that mood.  Just because my edges are blurry as heck doesn’t mean I can assume the same about readers.  In fact, the longer I work in self-publishing the more I understand that I am not my target market.  For starters, there’s only one of me, and my tastes are unpredictable.  I need total strangers to see, want, then read my books.  Then to want to read all the others (in their niche genre interest, that is, which ought to be obvious from a glance at my books’ covers or I’m doing genre fiction wrong.)

The big promo has started and I’ve missed my chance for the year.  Such is life, and I can only wish that I’d been thinking clearer that month and been able to come to these conclusions while I could still get involved.  We do what we can, and in December 2022 that turned out to be almost nothing while I recovered from you-know-what.  Brain fog is real, yo, and it’s a sonofabitch.

Manifesting despite yourself

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

I’m not one of those meek, retiring kinds of ADHD.  I’m of the “you wanna start some shit?” variety, with high scores for Defiance Disorder and Rejection Sensitive Dysphoria, meaning I’m always on the hunt for a bridge to burn. I’ve quit jobs to make sure I had the weekend off.

I also think magic is in a way very real.  Not that handwavium, turn you into a frog/newt/beddable-monster movie type of magic, but the kind where you deliberately reprogram your own brain to perceive reality in a different way. Practitioners might believe they’re reprograming everyone’s reality as well, but as the only reality you have access to is the one that your brain creates inside itself, I find this a bridge too far for even me to burn (see above.)  Let’s just say that the world contains more information than any brain can compute, and if you point yourself at different parts of it, your experience is often that of having created something from nothing.  The opportunities were always there, you just maybe weren’t looking directly at them.

So when I see the rise in popularity of “manifesting” to reach one’s goals, I suppress my inner cynic who says it’s a bunch of neo-hippy woo.  As a pantheistic pragmatist with a taste for Spinoza, why should I care how people do their magic, as long as they’re getting results?  The crystals, the candles, the Burning Man vibes, the binaural beats: my only objection is aesthetic, as in I don’t like cottagecore and my high flicker rate ADHD has *issues* with delta drone.

I’d be a sorry sort of Discordian if I gave anyone lip over how they conducted their spiritual business.  Heck, I routinely beg my deity NOT to intervene: “lemme have this one, ‘kay? You can do what you want with me after.” 

This never works, by the way. What we want and what The Universe wants often has nothing to do with each other.  I find myself infested with its merciless directives, seething with manifestation, which in my case takes the form of my favourite characters from my books taking up permanent residence in my head. I can’t complain, because (ahem) I get results. Their energy, their imaginary love for me sustains me as if they were real people standing beside me, even when I’m at my worst.  They both are and are not real.  What matters is that it works.

So I will gleefully cling to my belief that no sane person holding a quartz while they meditate seriously thinks the rock is doing anything other than being something to pay attention to.  That’s all magick is.  Paying attention like never before.  Paying so much attention to some stupid shiny rock in your hand, glowing in the flicker of beeswax candles, that you don’t notice everything you’ve ever wanted sneaking up behind you, waiting for you to properly open your eyes.

I’M BACK, BABY

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

That’s it. That’s the post.  I have finally shed the post-Covid brain fog.  And to anyone suffering from “long Covid”: I have tasted a tiny bit of your pain and I offer every bit of sympathy and funding you require to navigate this blameless nightmare.

Ok, here’s the rest of the post, because AS IF that’s all I’ve got to say.

I have hated writing this book.  Every word, every freaking *keystroke* was a gargantuan effort requiring all my will. Up until the last week.  Now it’s a dream come true, the chapters falling together like someone else wrote them for me and I just have to fit them together.  A perfect side character stepped fully formed out of my brain and performed a key role in the story while earning himself a lead role in a future book.

People…this is going to work.

“This” being my delusional but totally achievable dream of making a living from writing what I want. I’m releasing six books this year, not counting the short stories and re-launches.  I’m writing at least four, one of which is going to be done by the end of the week.  I have never felt more engaged with my writing career.

2023 is my year.  Yeah, right, we’re not supposed to say that anymore.  This is supposed to be a year for heaving a sigh of relief.  As a card-carrying Discordian (look it up yourself, ‘kay? Providing succinct answers is as close as we get to a mortal sin) I’ve waited my entire life for this numerological opportunity.  Me and the goddess, we’re lighting this year up like you’ve never seen. 

the soundtrack to my revival: Bop x Subwave’s set from the release party for their album “Renaissance.’ I have listened to this slapper of a set twice a day, every day since it dropped last month.  Tell me you’re a 90’s kid…

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.

A brief reply

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

what if

the fact that

we make all meaning

wasn’t so frightening

what if

all that happened to you

simply happened

not by some secret choice

not by your soul’s decree to test you with this struggle

not by some greater need for you to know this pain

but just by chance

by the unequal equilibrium of time

and your passage through it

pain is not a prize

neither is its end

what if

we learned to love

the fact that

there is

nothing

to love

(2022)

I rarely explain my poetry.  If the meaning isn’t embedded in the words and cadence then I’ve written it wrong.

In this case I wish it known, as I am attempting to offer a counter narrative to the idea that suffering is both virtuous and necessary.  Trauma isn’t really a gift.  It isn’t a magical “teaching.”  It’s one’s recovery from a painful or stressful experience that is the teaching.  Trauma is the damage that occurs when we have no teacher.

Suffering in itself is not particularly noble. Maybe you need to believe it is, as part of your journey to overcoming your trauma, but it was not and is not necessary for you to experience pain in order for you to be a whole person.  The nobility of suffering is a lie of power, to make the oppressed love their oppression.

You do not need to burn in order to rise.

You didn’t deserve to be hurt.

Photo by Raimond Klavins on Unsplash

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

You cannot have it all

On a pale blue background, a fortune cookie has been broken in half and pulled apart to show the fortune, which reads "A plan you have been working on for a long time is beginning to take shape."
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

In something like 1997 I went to the Detroit Auto Show

Big deal, because no one ever does that, right?  It felt big.  It may in fact be the last time I felt technology was going to solve our problems, because they had electric cars, and they weren’t horrible little boxes but huge shiny objects of maximum desire. 

After a few hours of bright lights on slowly rotating supercars, we left the semi-arid wasteland that was downtown Detroit in the mid-1990s and returned to the innocuous inner/outer suburb of Ferndale (pre-gentrification, as in they didn’t even have an Old Navy yet) in my friend’s economy four-door.  An American-made car with an engine so poorly designed he feared to drive it two weekends in a row.  Clearly we were not yet living in the glittering super-future.

But I had a thought. Like any good chaos magician, I know what thoughts can do.  So I let this thought have its way for a little.  It was a thought about myself in the future.

Even ordinary people have heard of using visualization to get their goals. This is nothing new to magick, and is pretty much how anyone gets anything done, not by knowing how they will do the thing but by knowing what they want to have done by the end of doing it.

You have to see it, feel it, taste it, know the experience of success.  Our brains are easily fooled.  Thoughts and memories strike us like lived experience, and so giving yourself the “false memory” of having achieved your goal fools the mind into thinking: yes, you have achieved before, and yes, it was this amazing.  So let’s do it again.  

Cognitive Behavioural Therapy and vision-work and “clarifying your goals” are similar paths to a similar goal, that of getting to know the feeling of having what you want.  It’s one thing to plan how to reach your goal.  What works even better is believing the goal is so achievable that it might as well have already happened.  It exists in the future and all you need to do is keep moving and you will align with it. 

I don’t give a hot damn whether magick is ‘real’ or not.  It’s real because it works (we can discuss spelling in a minute if anyone cares.)  It’s so real that science does it too (see above under CBT) and spiritual practitioners of all stripes have been doing more or less exactly that for centuries.

What’s my point?

My point is that as we left the auto show I saw a sort of self.  A me that I might be.  And I wanted it.  I wanted that me to be a real me, to be where I was at the age of 45.  In ways too complex to explain, through circumstance and luck and a number of really interesting mistakes, I think I might have done it.

I think about myself way too much.  Really I do, so much that I had to start writing fiction to deal with all the selves I wish I could be. 

I can never read all the books I want; I can never be all the people I want and live all the lives I want. I can never train myself in all the skills I want. And why do I want? I want to live and feel all the shades, tones and variations of mental and physical experience possible in my life. And I am horribly limited.

― Sylvia Plath, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

I’ve come to terms with my limitations.  There are thousands of experiences I will not and cannot ever have, no matter how badly I want them.  This isn’t because I’m denying myself, but because I simply do not have space or time in this single human life to do all one could ever want to do.  I have to choose how I spend my time with deliberation because I can only have so many decades left, and certain paths take a long time to walk. I could become a neurosurgeon/flamenco world champion/*insert huge achievement* if I truly wished, but I would have to give up what I’m presently doing and make that my sole endeavor. Do you see now what I mean?  There’s just too much world.  I can’t have it all.

But I can have my little vision.  I have become my little vision. 

Which means I had better get another one.