Tag: writing

The Indie Author Spotlight – a brief introduction

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

One of the best things about independent AKA self-publishing is the variety of stories we are telling. Publishing companies are under pressure to sign *profitable* authors, but when has the profit motive ever produced the best art?

The best stories are happening underground. Indie publishing is all about helping each other. My book might not be your next favorite, but I bet you’ll love something by one of my friends. I have been profiling fellow authors on my newsletter for a few years now, and thought this blog would be a good platform to expand the reach of this feature. Anything to get me off ordinary social media…

I’ll be back in a few days with the first installment of this new series. Or join my readers club if you want to find out more about my books: http://willforrest.com/newsletter/

Why do they hate us?

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

So, it’s like that, is it? You really want to read this book that badly, huh? All I did was casually post the meme that inspired it and my Threads blew up. At least compared to my normal bookish content.

I don’t expect any of my other book promo posts to do this well. The mysterious entity we refer to as the social media algorithm (but which is really a bunch of underpaid staffers supporting their billionaire employer’s fascist ideology) doesn’t want to see us win, and will crush your reach if it senses even the slightest chance that you’re going to reach people organically.

Good thing I had a review copy link ready to give people. Even so, I wish I had set up pre-orders, because not everyone wants the responsibility of a review copy. JK there is zero responsibility. I just want people to read the damn thing.

So if you like queer romance full of disaster gays making bad decisions and learning to get over them, adorable twinks who don’t understand how many people want to cherish them, and the trope I like to call Oblivious-to-Lovers where two best friends (who occasionally bang) realize that this is what love looks like for them: I got you, babe.

OMG yes I want to read this book.

books = art

A close-up photo of a fountain pen nib partway through writing on lined paper with black ink..
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

I just read a post on That Subscription Site Full of Fash (not linking to it, see under Full of Fash), where the writer argued that writing isn’t art because we sell it like a commodity.

I’m sorry, what?

Books (e-books & print) are reproductions of a larger piece of art. Saying books aren’t art is like saying a lithographic print isn’t art. Just because it can be replicated and sold in small, affordable versions doesn’t lessen its artistry. The original art – the carved plate – will never be seen by the public, just like a manuscript will never be seen by the public.

The art of a book is in its totality, from the first draft to the cover design to the font choice. Art isn’t special and should not be treated like some far away thing that only clever people do while us plebian slobs consume it. Art is everywhere, everyone can be an artist, and getting over the Big-A art concept is important to undo this idea of virtuous consumption that comes with it, this idea that calling it Big-A Art elevates it above our mortal plane. I would argue that selling things at a price only wealthy people can afford is a moral failure. You’re catering to the literal worst people on earth. Anyone who can drop a million bucks on a single piece of art? Must be nice, now fund a library or go away.

Sorrynotsorry but if you sell it, it’s a commodity. Big, expensive art that exists as a singular piece is still a fucking commodity. You expect money for it. You didn’t do it for fun or for your mom but to sell. It’s art but it’s still a commodity.

I am an artist.

This is not up for debate.

Thank you for your attention.

Red State

A stack of aged hardcover books sits on a plain wooden shelf beside a blank notebook and a pen.
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Writers weep and howl and pour out anguish in the form of words

Wanting to be seen and wanting others to be heard

Seek the neglected beauty in strange thoughts and hopes and faces

Fantastic worlds where power lurks in unexpected places

Where the wicked is the one who doesn’t see the witch,

While the open hearted hero is the one who will be rich

I want it all, the universe, contained between these pages

Where happiness belongs to those who have wept in other ages

Alone, I am surrounded by the ghosts who I invoked

A symphony of voices that in other times were choked

I am not worth of this message, this divine immanence

This way of saying damn the guards as I reach across the fence

Please take my hand, we haven’t long, I see their fires on the hill

If we don’t save these books from burning

Who will?

(Will Forrest, 2023)

Crunch Time

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

I owe the world a novel in 70 days.

I see no reason why this can’t be done.

Modern authorship is a make-your-own-rules kind of game. Self-published, mainstream, hybrid, neither (ask me about subscriptions to The All-Hearts Cabaret) and it’s up to you, the author, to decide how you want to play it.

Me, I’m doing my freaking best under the weight of my neurodivergent, gender-baffled self-awareness. I want to be/do/know/have/eat/encompass everything that exists, and this is a real problem when it comes time to make decisions.

And yet…

On Tuesday I visited one of the very nice nurse practitioners at my doctor’s clinic. No knock to the NP, y’all are keeping Western Medicine functioning, but this poor child doesn’t know me from a hole in the ground. So she went ahead and prescribed me medication that I (and many of you) expect will make me want to unalive myself.

Baby…I don’t do speed.

I just don’t. That class of drugs is Bad For Me. And when the popular literature tells me that no one knows *why* this particular drug works,? No. Just no. I’m not that messed up, TBH. I *like* my neurodivergence for the most part. It’s fun to have this many ideas. Maybe I could do better at keeping appointments and finding my keys, but the last time I tried this class of meds was a nightmare. I made a vast number of bad choices, while totally ignoring the work I needed to do, and ended up sobbing under my desk more days than not.

So…fuck you.

Fuck this.

Please, please don’t take my experiences as advice. You do you, as we say, and decide for yourself. Me? I’m going to just learn how to be this shambolic, well-intended, heartfelt and whole and every now and then problematic neurospicy genderqueer who gives no f’s for ordinary people’s comfort because I’m having too much fun.

There is no right way to do life.

I’m trouble, but it’s the good kind.

Sentient Glitter

a black sphere streaks across a black background, trailing a purple and blue aurora like a comet streaking through deep space
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

“The thing is, none of that shit is real.  Nothing is real, and I can prove it.  Pick any molecule in existence.  If that molecule was a solar system, that is, if some atom in a molecule in a mitochondrion in a cell in your body was the size of the sun, its electrons are somewhere out past Pluto. Most of you is empty space. 

Wait, it gets worse.  I can prove you don’t exist.  Science is fantastic.  I mean, I get why people think they’re just making stuff up, because quantum physics is bonkers.

Because if you get down that small, if you’re looking at electrons, first of all you’re using the most advanced science we’ve ever scienced, machines the size of cities, billions of dollars of infrastructure.  And it still barely works.  You’re trying to catch ghosts.  Really you are because the only way you see quantum particles is smashing them into each other and taking a photo.

I’m not kidding.  This is science.  That’s what they do at the CERN super-collider, which is why they call it a collider.

But think about that.  They’re seeking the building blocks of all we know, and you’d think it would be obvious.  I mean, we’re made of atoms, everything is made of atoms, but atoms don’t really seem to be made of anything at all.

You can know where a quantum particle was, or you can know where it’s going.  You cannot, cannot by the fundamental structure of the universe, know both.  They’re like cockroaches: if you turn on the light they disappear under the cabinets. I mean it, if you locate a quantum particle, the act of looking at it makes it change direction.

Imagine you’re at a baseball game and you’re looking at something else.  Like there’s someone on the jumbotron who doesn’t know her nip has slipped or whatever is distracting you.  And you hear the crack as the batter hits the ball and so you look and you looking makes that sweet long drive to the unguarded right field suddenly in midair veer to the left and land in the midfielder’s glove.

That’s what doing quantum physics is like.  At a million bucks a throw.

Here’s the even worse bit:  in the end the odds of finding any one particle in any one given state or location are just that, odds.  There is no certainty at the bottom of reality.  Just chance.  Your particles come and go, fluctuate in and out of being, are at best potentialities that walk and talk and wear pants and think they’re in charge of some shit when you don’t even really exist. You are seafoam on an ever-cresting wave sweeping through time and space, sentient glitter that winks in and out of existence faster than you or I can imagine.

So why the fuck does it matter which bathroom I use?”

WHY I READ* ROMANCE

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

TL:DR because I don’t trust other fiction.

I toddled down a rabbit hole this morning.  I say toddled because I got myself out so quickly instead of losing 2 hours to doomscrolling.

I was following a series of increasingly strident flags declaring that THIS  is “the great gay American novel.”  And I mean, I like great novels and gay people and am interested in America and anyone who has the nerve to lift the curtain.  But like I always do, I started by reading the worst reviews. That’s where the gold is, the truth, the ick, or in some cases “this was too horny for me and had too many queer characters” in which case it’s a one-click buy. But sometimes it’s:

“FUCK. THIS. BOOK.” 

That’s a one-click read, that review. If it inspires such vitriol then either it’s a masterpiece or a steaming turd.

Ah.  The latter.

Because I’m absolutely not a little bit sorry, but The Great Gay American Novel is not allowed to be a goddamn Kill-Your-Gays trope.  Not a fucking chance.

We’ve heard those stories. They’re called queer history.  Despair, isolation, mental illness, and often the only defence is to destroy all human feeling in your soul so you don’t have to cope with the fact that if everyone knew you for who you are, they wouldn’t just hate you, they would want you dead.

Boring.

Boooooooorrrrrrrring because it’s horrible and spiritually deadening and it still happens in real life all the time and so we don’t need a 700 page novel about a loser who spends the whole book being awful to everyone and experiencing zero emotional growth but he just happens to be a gay man in a book about gay men so that makes it THE GREAT GAY AMERICAN NOVEL. It just feels like more trauma porn: look, here’s a walking, talking tragedy, let’s zoom in closer on all his faults. Now closer. NOW CLOSER. 

Look, I haven’t read this book and under no circumstances will I ever read it (ok, a million dollars but I get half in advance.) I am basing my opinions on one review and the blurb of the book. And an interview in which the author said they didn’t believe in psychology and that people who were broken should essentially just stay broken.

That’s when I realized I’d *never* read the book, nor probably anything else this author has written. The way to help someone who is broken is to see them, hear them, love them, help them. “I see your pain.  Your pain is real.  Pain ends.  I trust you. I believe you.” You don’t shrug and then take character notes.  I refuse to read 700 pages about someone who refuses to grow, who gets no help, and whose main characteristic is being an irredeemable piece of shit.  Just sounds like a novel about straight people.

*and write

Disorderly Conduct

scrabble letters arranged on a plain white surface to spell the words "life will not wait"
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

I told WordPress to notify me twice a week that it was time to post something.  I began immediately to resent this, and have ignored several notifications.  This is me all over. It doesn’t matter if an event is in a calendar, on a chart, in my phone, in an email.  As soon as I’m told to do something I’m not already happily doing, my RSD and defiance disorder go on high alert and I start deliberately, some might say belligerently, ignoring the notifications.

Which is why I have yet to discover an author business planning system that sticks.  No matter how carefully I craft my quarterly plan, my weekly schedule, I just don’t do the dang work.  I’m so good at ignoring important things that I started asking myself if I have Asperger’s.  I so often refuse to do what’s best, even when it’s obviously what’s needed and would be really easy to do, though I genuinely do like myself, in a compassionate, c’mere you dumb-ass kinda way.

I think and think and think and in truth I probably just spend too much time alone.  I can overthink anything, which can be good when you’re doing big vision work, and much less helpful when you’re trying to pick a task and stick with it until you can call it done. 

Because I have so many things to do, it’s a struggle to prioritize.  Everything feels like a priority, and I don’t want to spend all my time planning, but I’m not achieving much with the time I have so maybe what I really need is to get the heck over myself, sit down and do the work *I know* needs to get done, and let the rest fall into place.

The place where I get all of it right is just over the horizon. I have a flat tire and I’m fucking hungry, but if I can get this wheel back on, I can start rolling again and get to where I want to be.

Do you use a planner? Google calendar or similar? What works for you?

Throwing Darts

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

they sold the lot on Main St where they never built that high-rise 

but good luck building anything in this economy 

the air is too hot

the scent of cigarettes boiling off the other passengers

as I wonder what’s the point of poetry 

what can we make from words?

what words 

still let themselves be made into anything?

I told her I only read poetry 

that reading a whole book

takes years

the feelings stacked one atop the next

gravy over cake

no differences between sorrow and a theorized joy beyond the writer’s means

a poem is a mouthful 

a minute’s grace

a massacre in millimeters

the barest bruise

a slap in the face 

remorseless 

starving

true

if only all truths were so easily digested 

instead of sticking in your gut

dragging you along with them 

to end up inside out 

yet in writing poetry 

we feel that same laceration

spilling ourselves

spoiling the calm completion of a blank page

for nothing more than one vain moment’s proof

that we existed

(2023)

Common sense

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment
Daily writing prompt
Describe something you learned in high school.
View all responses

“High school?  Shit, I’ve been trying to forget it.  All I learned is that everyone’s so steeped in their own BS by the time they get there that most of us don’t learn a thing. Sure, it’s good for kids to be taught not just science and math but how to read, how to think, how to get to know other people. But the way most high schools are run, they’re not much better than jail.  Just a way to keep kids off the streets so old people feel safe walking about and adults don’t have anyone coming after their jobs.  I mean, if everyone really gave a shit about kids, they’d pass some gun laws.”