Tag: writing

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!)

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…

“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

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.

Liars

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

in the time of writing poems

the words said no

they said

you have not earned us

you have not bled us from your fingertips

until your heart is a wrung-out rag

you have not wept

no stone has lodged itself in your intestines

cold lurking with the promise of pain

we owe you nothing

said the words

not knowing how they implicate themselves

liars every one

for here is the poem

that they

refused

to write

(April 2022)

Memories of a gallery

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

Making meaning. Can that be a calling?

scribe

conduit

fingers blindly falling

vomiting poetry

verse coming out of my ears

words from my hands

words made of fears

that nothing ever will ever be

enough

we know it’s tough

we know

below

and to the left

of the main figure

the artist has hidden a self-portrait

reflected upside down in the bowl of that one spoon

laid beside the sugar

painted so well you expect to see yourself

(2022)

[Working through some personal goals in a journal, I wrote the first four lines unconsciously. Once I noticed, the rest became inevitable.]

Hardwired

~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

it was always an experiment.  for the first time it wasn’t a journal, and that had always been the problem.  too much churning, mucky pointlessness in those, a daily spilling of mud on a porcelain floor that had to be mopped up again and again. 

this was to be a handprint in wet concrete, a tiny, temporary thing that never went away, disrupting an impervious façade, a reminder of the beauty in incompleteness.  Humans disrupt.  We are hardwired to want.

“Is This Seat Taken?”

a woman's beautiful bare legs as she sits in an easy chair by the window
~ Will Forrest ~ Leave a comment

So: your boyfriend who has family connections to your MBA supervisor invites you to an anonymous orgy. You want to go, because you like to fuck, so much that you agree, despite the fact that you will know probably half of the people there. But you try on the expensive mask he had made which really does cover your face well, a tight fitting cap of blood-red leather that extends to the base of your nose and conceals your hair. You look, in the mask and nothing else, totally gorgeous, a fact he tells you continually as he fucks you from behind, watching himself in the mirror over your shoulder. He is not wrong, and thinking of all the other men who will fuck this gorgeous masked woman, you come, shaking so hard he pulls out, thinking he’s hurt you somehow.

Idiot, you think again.

Yet you go to the party. The orgy. You wear the mask and a garter belt and stockings and heels and a long coat and nothing else. He has waxed not just his pubes but his chest, striding about in leather pants with a tear-away crotch. You spend very little time together, because the pants make you laugh, and as a designated sub that’s the kind of disrespect that earns you a shift in the stocks.

You like getting spanked. You do not like humiliation, being hung out for anyone to torment. Too many of the older men who dominate this scene fall back on that trope, one more reason why you are sitting alone in the back corner of the mansion’s front parlor, wondering if it’s possible to ghost on an orgy.

“Is this seat taken?” Before you answer the man sits down anyway on the other end of the little couch. “I just gotta relax for a bit.” He flops back, breathing hard, his half-hard cock laying against his thigh.

You check him out, because it’s that kind of party. A black beaked mask, Dread Pirate Roberts with a hint of Plague Doctor. The fit body of a dedicated college athlete keeping his shit together. No gray hair in the pubes. Who is he?

“Is the master enjoying his evening?”

“Don’t do that master stuff. You can just talk to me. And I don’t know. Yes and no. I’m thinking about going home.”

Ask me. You blush, because no matter how many dicks your boyfriend lets you have here and now, he will not lend his subs. He has told you so himself, because so many in his clique have asked to fuck you. Asked him, not you.

“Me too,” you say. The plague pirate turns to look directly at you, and you shiver, because the mask is only half of his menace, the rest in his dark eyes that seem to swallow you.

“I want your number,” he says.

“Okay. How—”

“I’ll remember it. And if I don’t, it’s my fault, right?”

“Okay.” You tell him your number.  He says it back to you. “You got it.”

“Does your boyfriend, sorry, master, read your messages?”

“God, no.”

“Good.” He stands up and stretches.  Like the slut you are, you stare at his erection.

“Are you leaving?” you ask.

“Yep.”

“Are you sure you don’t want to—”

He turns to you, and you shiver again under his dark gaze. “Not here. I want you paying attention.”

“Oh.”

He winks and walks away. His ass is amazing.

“Who was that?” your boyfriend asks as he approaches.

“I don’t know.”

“What did he want?” He is fiddling with his detachable crotch again. You do not love him. Now you know that you do not like him either.

 “Nothing.”

“Really?”

 “I’m getting one of those headaches.  Do you have any idea where my coat is?”

(2020)