Category: writing

The Player of Games

~ 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.)

A sign from the gods

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Or: how do I choose what to write without needing to choose?

My “to-be-written” pile is pretty intense. Maybe down to a dozen by now but still that’s a lot of books.  Somewhat less than a million words, if we average 60,000-65,000 words per book.  Absolutely doable within a few years, because it only took three years for the first 850k.

Now I’m left with the start of three series but no ends.  While none of these series have made me rich, neither has anything else I’ve written, which I take as a lack of exposure, not quality.  My readers exist, they just don’t know it yet. And one of the most satisfying experiences for a reader is a completed series.

I started publishing under a disposable pen name.  Under that name, I released my first full length novel, a bonkers erotic romance about fin de siècle swingers who ball their way across Europe and back.  At the end, our plucky if rather sticky heroes are forced to separate, one couple to try their luck in New England, the other trio setting off for Imperial Japan, to reunite with yet another 1890’s hornbag.

I wrote the New England book last summer, mainly as I’d already written a big chunk of it at the time I wrote the first. It’s an equally bonkers novella involving archaeology and (God help me) turn of the century reproductive rights that ends with another hasty escape, this duo of sticky heroes absconding cross country to the amoral paradise of California. 

I’ve since rereleased the first book under my current pen name.  Despite my strange ambivalence after the fact (is it too raw? too filthy? too political?  a ridiculous piece of slanderous trash?) I’ll be putting out the second book in April.  And yet…I haven’t written the third book.  I was still not sure that I would.  But part of my faith is accepting synchronicities at face value.  I don’t believe things happen for “reasons” but I’m not going to ignore it when it seems like they do.

The first standout was this post about late 19th century Westerners having “samurai” portraits painted on their trips to Japan.  You can still get this done, and I have a revolting photo of myself as a geisha from a visit to a television company’s theme park/historical recreation site/active film set (Japan’s a hell of a drug.)

Of course Matti would have this done, I thought.  Get talked into it by Shigeru.  Get teased about it later by Paul, who would offer to do better with his camera. The scene unfurled before me, so fully formed I haven’t written it down because it’s whole as is.

At some point prior to that I bought this book. I pick up a lot of books for pennies at yard sales and thrift shops, and couldn’t tell you when or where I got this.  Flipping through the other day, I found excerpts from a diary kept by a Japanese man in 1905, written in Roman script. Romaji, as it’s called, is a transliteration of Japanese syllables into Roman letters, i.e. what English is written in. This is what we read outside of Japan.  Okinawa, Osaka, Tokyo: these words are written in romaji so that non-Japanese people can read them.

In 1905, a poet kept a diary that almost no one could read.  A Japanese person would not know the characters, and Westerners did not speak enough Japanese. It is as a consequence deeply personal, even more than most diaries, which are only secret if kept secret.  This was a confession, all the writer’s fears for the future, his abiding existentialism encoded in a book only he could read.

Chills, baby, and they were multiplying.  Much of Oh Vienna! is built around diary entries.  Matt keeps a journal of his scientific “inquiries” into human desire which devolves into a open-hearted testimony to his first love. It is to reunite with that love that Matt and his companions travel halfway round the world.  The next book clearly needs a diary to structure it, and perhaps that’s what I always found missing from Book 2. On I went, shelving this in the Very Interesting section of my mental library.

And then…and then KJ happened. Again.  Charles’ books repeatedly tear me apart, and have in a way ruined me for most other books.  So when she posted the covers of the Japanese edition of The Magpie Lord…

I cried. I’m crying right now.  I don’t know why, other than the books are so beautiful and the story so touching yet vivid and lively (and filthy, did I mention filthy?) and her characters are perfect and I want to be so good a writer that I deserve a set of books this fucking beautiful.   Hitch your wagon to a star, right?

Not that my next book will deserve such a tribute (that enough people in Japan want to read it that they translated it, designed new covers, and are printing paperbacks.)  But the river flows downhill, and all rivers become the sea, and I don’t know what I’m trying to say with this except I’m writing that next book.  The last of the Libertines. Okinawa, Mon Amour.  Spring 2024.

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.

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…

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!)

“Answer me these questions three…”

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

“…because I’m too lazy to search the archived threads”

There are three questions every baby writer seems to ask when they join the online author-verse and start fishing for trade secrets.  I used to answer these questions when I came across them on forums and chats, but they get asked with such regularity that I got tired of doing other people’s homework.  The internet is right there, people.

So please enjoy my arrogantly definitive answers to the three questions I see asked again and again and again:  

1) How do I keep my vague, fledgling story idea protected from being stolen?

2) How do I know if my writing is shit?

3) How do I learn how to write?

  1. How do I protect my ideas?

You don’t, because no one cares about your ideas.*  Honestly, ideas are cheap.  Cheap, cheap, cheap. Any writer with a serious habit will have so many ideas attacking them on the daily that they would have to live forever to write them all. Writers don’t lack ideas, and we don’t care about yours. Your ideas are likely not even as good as you think. They matter to you, and they may lead you to tell the best story you have ever told, but whether it’s some junk scribbled on a napkin, an outline you share on a critique group, or a book you give away as a reader freebie, no one will bother to steal your ideas, because they would still have to go through the effort of taking your ideas and writing a book with them, then making money out of it, which is the real challenge.

2. How do I know if my writing is shit?

Assume that it is. If this is your first attempt, your writing is 99.9% likely to be not the best you’ll ever do. Accept this fact from the outset. Accept that your writing will not match your expectations at first. The only way to get better is to keep writing. So if you have a precious, perfect, magical idea, maybe don’t start with it. Write some junk first. Get good at writing, then start on your Great Work.

Imagine you wanted to become a professional baker.  You don’t go from standing in the grocery aisle looking at the cake mixes thinking I can do better to turning out a six-tier wedding cake overnight.  Particularly if you’ve never made a cake before, you’re gonna have to make a lot of cake in between having the idea to make a wedding cake, and actually serving it. Make those shitty, crumbly, collapsing cakes you need to make on your path to nailing the perfect Genoise. There are no shortcuts. This quote from Ira Glass is another way of saying the same thing.

3. How do I learn how to write?

By writing, and by reading. Read books that are like the ones you want to write. Read well-written books of all genres. Read different books than you normally do. Read books about writing.  

But always be writing.  It’s a muscle, and you have to use it or it shrivels. Books take effort to write, and it’s healthy to assume that your first work might kind of suck.  At least compared to what you will capable of in five years. Read and write and read and write and read and write and read. Repeat until you die.

Writers, what other hugely general advice do you find yourself constantly giving?

*you always own your ideas, even if you haven’t lodged them with a copyright registry.  Please consult legal professionals for more nuance, but having your ideas stolen should be one of the last things a fledgling author needs to worry about.

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.

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)

People you meet on vacation

a row of palm tress perfectly reflected in a still body of water
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

One of the few philosophers of the 21st Century known to the general public, Alain de Botton is renowned for his detailed explorations of the minutiae of daily life (for a given quantity of middle class white Europeans, but more on that below.) If The Art of Travel is an indication, he is also the sort of person I hate meeting on vacation.

He’s the Show Me state, arriving grumpy and rumpled from his voyage to stand before the purported spectacle he has dutifully come to observe and demand that it enthrall him, turning away spitting into the dust when the vista/church façade/thing in the guide book cannot overcome his exhaustion, his highway numbness, his sense of entitlement. All I could think was, brother, you’ve got to get out more.  

De Botton’s enduring thesis appears to be that, since travel is never quite what we expect it to be, we shouldn’t do it at all.  Perhaps because he draws inspiration from some of Europe’s greatest grumps. Anyone who’s travelled a lot may have noticed that no type of person is more consistently displeased by the facts of travelling than middle-aged white men, yet these are de Botton’s only voices of reference. 

Men like Charles Baudelaire, who crafted many beautiful sentences in his writing, evoking our emotions with a master’s touch, but who personally was a miserable shit who despised the world and sought constantly to escape from it.  Ought we really to take his word on the value of going abroad?  A man who was so disgusted by a layover in the tropical isle of Mauritius that he cancelled his entire trip and went home? That’s not exactly the mark of a staggering genius.

“Yeah, Charlie, looks like it sucked. How many days of sunshine did you say they have?”

Yes, there are moments of more interesting thought, but I was in truth too busy travelling (and enjoying the shit out of it) to read much of the rest of the book. I do know that it has confirmed my intention to never, ever go on an ocean cruise. Because if I encounter a fellow traveler of De Botton’s temperament, I want to be able to walk away.