I’ve gotten this question a few times over the years I’ve been writing, and it’s one I’ve always struggled to answer effectively. It’s also a question whose answer changes over time–my relationship as an author to Wes has changed quite a lot over the years since I first started posting these stories, and I’m no longer certain this question makes a whole lot of sense to ask, or to try and answer. I’ll try to explain.
I started writing these stories when I was eighteen, a freshman in college, and had just began having sex with guys. I had been reading stories like these ones for ages, of course, but I only started writing one on a whim, because I was sick of waiting for people to write the sort of stories I wanted to read. Of course, when it came time to post the story, I also needed to have a pseudonym of some sort. I knew I wanted it to be a first and last name, as opposed to a username, so I used my own middle name and then did a random page search on Wikipedia until I stumbled across a last name I liked. Hence, Wesley Bracken.
To begin with, it was just a title–I didn’t consider Wes to be a character separate from myself. But as I kept writing and I grew a bit of a reputation, there was an odd feedback loop that started. People felt strongly about Wes, in the way people care strongly about things on the internet, and it peaked with a shitstorm that got kicked up on the old NCMC around a story I posted that bent against the site rules and got deleted. I wrote a screed (you can read it here, and stay for the comments below!) and that, I think, was the first time I understood Wes to have become someone beyond myself. A separate character I could act beyond my own capacities. But Wes only existed because he existed for other people. He was never created by me, but rather by readers–who is this person writing these strange fucking stories? I’ve gotten a lot of imaginative answers to that question over the years, and it never fails to surprise me, who people think Wes is.
For a while, I used that distance, and played Wes as a character, but it’s a rather exhausting charade to keep up, in part because Wes is a lot of the exhausting aspects of myself ramped up to 11–the aggression, the obstinacy, the sarcasm, nihilism and pessimism.
But in the end, Wes and I really are the same person. I feel like the distance between us has been flattening again. I’m just a weird guy in the Seattle area who spends a lot of time writing disturbing stories, because he hates the world as it is and wants to imagine something different. Sexy different. Part of this is also the fact that I’ve become more comfortable being open about my writing with people in real life–not the content, per se, but the act.
Wes started out as an aspiration. He became a character that other people believed in, and who I was happy to pretend to be, off and on. Now, he’s just a part of me, another name that I go by.
As for what Wes and I are in to…I think you already know the answer to that question, don’t you?
Bracken's Corner 