How to bend reality and become a bad4$$ timespace mage

I am not playing today. Let's get weird with it.

Hi,

They say some people have a "reality-distortion field" around them. I think that's because they have a very specific win condition, and are willing to sacrifice everything else for it.

In 2024, I wanted to get to 1,000 paying members in my community. If that was the metric that mattered, then what had to be true to make that happen?

• I would need way more people to know about my work, which is why I invested so heavily in advertising, and positioned myself with things like our Substack book and virtual conference.

• I would likely need to discount below what is reasonable so that people would take a chance on the community, which led to me offering pricing as low as $1/yr.

• I would have to maximize my paywall, which led to me adding over 900 exclusive posts in an epic bundle that rivals anything else out there.

• I would have to launch the community more times than I was comfortable doing, gathering 50-250 people each time, and adding more value so they don't churn.

The result? I ended this year with 1,100 members. Woohoo!

It’s a great feeling, and looks like I bent reality to get there, but those 1,100 members only pay an average of $17.65/yr, way below the $80 average from other publications. With 1,100 members, that's still over $20k, but it's not as much as you would expect from somebody with that kind of membership, right?

I sacrificed maximizing my money and maximizing my free subscribers (since I sent a lot of promotional emails) to get to that 1,100 goal, but I did it. It's still awesome magic, but when you see the seams it becomes a little less awesome, right?

What generally happens with people is that they say "I want 1,000+ members and to make $100k". For some people that is reasonable, but mostly those two metrics conflict with each other.

Lee Savino

did this the right way when we started working together. She made a lot of money doing one thing exceptionally, and was able to funnel her attention, energy, and money into other areas, like our podcast, The Six Figure Author Experiment, and our upcoming comic book, without the risk of bankrupting her. ‘

I have never been this smart.

If you want to make $100k, then you should be offering a high end product for $2k-$10k and creating a premium experience to bring in the biggest spenders. That means you probably won’t also be able to build a 1,000+ membership.

In the same way, if you want to be #1 on Amazon, you should probably write contemporary romance with high steam...

...but most of you want to be #1 on Amazon while writing goat-herder, time-travel, horror-fantasy-satire, and that's probably not going to happen.

This is because you’re trying to access new magic, and that takes a lot of energy. While there is a deep well of energy to access the things already in your wheelhouse, there is only finite magic to explore new areas.

Bending reality is always accessing new magic. If you already had access to the skills you need to get where you wanted to go, then you wouldn’t have to change reality at all.

Most people want to bend all of reality at once, which is impossible. If you want to bend reality, you have to pick a very small corner and focus everything on twisting it just a little bit.

So, today, I’m going to show you how to bend reality to your whim and survive to tell about it.

Is learning to bend reality even worth it?

Why should you bother learning how to bend reality, especially if it’s nearly impossible, requires a ton of sacrifice, and you might not even be happy at the end of it?

Because the world often sucks. If you don’t have the ability to change it, then you will likely spiral and feel hopeless. That is a terrible feeling, and it's permeating through every corner of the world. Everyone I know is dealing with some type of hopelessness...

...except for people who can change their reality. Honestly, I can’t remember the last time I felt hopeless since I learned how to bend reality to my will.

One of Aaron Sorkin's first shows was called Sports Night about an ESPN-style late night sports show, and featured a producer named Dana Whitaker who ran the titular show-inside-the-show. During an argument with a corporate suit who told her that the budget she put forth was "too ambitious", she said something that I think about every day.

“God forbid we have ambition.”

Once you have the ability to change reality, then you never have to accept your lot in life. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be grateful for the things you have, but well…god forbid we have ambition, right?

It's something I think about whenever somebody says my ideas are too big and that I'll crumble under them. God forbid we have ambition.

Their words (usually) come from a place of love, but people assume that just because they crumbled under the weight of ambition that we will, too. They don't want you to feel the pain they did, but pain is a natural byproduct of growth, and short term pain is often necessary to create long term happiness.

The Harry Potter books taught us that people with ambition are evil. One of its core messages is that literally all evil wizards come from the house whose defining attribute is ambition. There are seriously so many things about that series that piss me off, but this is one of its most insufferable bits. The only Slytherins who don't become evil are the ones that cast off ambition to live "normal" lives as unambitious wizards.

Screw normal, though. We are writers, creators, and magicians. Our lives were meant to be abnormal. I signed up for this life to become extraordinary.

I am very ambitious, and I love it. My reach always exceeds my grasp, and it's what makes me great. It's also what makes me empathetic and caring, and why I want more for everyone else, just as badly as I want it for me. I want to channel my ambition to changing reality for the better for everyone.

I am kind because I am ambitious, not despite of it.

I love ambition, and I spent a lot of my adulthood feeling shame for it. It just reinforces puritanical values and capitalist indoctrination that our reach should never exceed your grasp.

Screw that.

Ambition is good. It’s how we got to the moon. Ambition is fueled by hope, and hope is a very good thing. Yes, untethered ambition can lead to some heinous stuff, but ambition is also how every good thing starts, too.

Bending reality takes ambition, and if you don’t have any, your fingers won’t even tingle with the spark of magic. If you don’t feed it the right kind of ambition, it will turn murky and horrid in your hand. If you don’t feed it enough, then it will never have enough power to complete the spell.

Bending reality is powerful magic, and frankly most people aren’t equipped to wield it. Not because they can't, but because they don't know right elements to cast the spell without hurting themselves. When they try, it either blows up in their face or, more likely, nothing happens. Then, they assume everyone will have the same experience, but that's demonstrably not true because somebody can change reality. If somebody can do something, it means the ability to bend reality can come from anyone.

The question is whether it will come from you, but there is no doubt in my mind that it can come from you.

Most authors don’t have a money problem or a productivity problem. They have a sequencing problem. They do things out of order, and without focus, so the magic can’t take hold.

Once you know what to do, in the right order, and focus all your ambition at it, then you start building momentum. Then, you can literally change everything.

I was talking to an accomplished timespace magician a few years ago who told me that while anyone can change, almost nobody does. In fact, up to 97% of people never change, at least on a fundamental level. That number is staggering, and yet, it also shows that 3% do, and that is equally incredible. It means 3% of people have figured out how to warp reality and bend it to their whims.

Yet, instead of listening to the 3%, almost everyone is listening to the 97%, because their voices are overwhelming, and overwhelmingly negative, telling us not to change because we’ll get hurt.

We tell children they can be anything they want and then beat them down to regress back to the mean the moment they get too ambitious. Did you ever think, though, that maybe children are so happy because they change their reality every single day? That kind of magic is everywhere for children, and yet, it's impossible for us to conceive of doing the same.

When I was younger, everyone was going to be an artist, or a director, or a writer. I just figured everyone would follow through, but I got to the other side of the mountain and found that everyone I knew became a doctor, or sales manager, or accountant. They lost that spark. So, why would we trust them about how to get it back?

It’s coming from a place of love, but frankly, they don’t know the spell. Either it rebounded on them, blew up in their face, or sat inert in their hands. Unless you have the right elements to cast the spell, then it will hurt…bad…and it might scar you forever.

If you trust people who don't know the spell, you'll never learn it. You might not learn it even if you find the right teacher, but your odds are infinitely higher that way.

You will not change your reality without incredible effort, but with tremendous effort, you just might, especially with the right teacher.

Is it worth it? I don't know if that's even the right question. If you have ambition to change your situation though, it’s also the only choice. You have this fount of power growing inside of you, ready to burst. The question is, how do you find the right magician to teach you the order so you can control your own destiny?

That is the kind of magic I love. The type that gives you agency in a world that’s dead set on taking it away from you.

At its core, this is the kind of magic I teach. The platforms are nice. The techniques are nice, but really, what we’re trying to do is give you the right sequence to literally change reality.

Once you have it, feel the pulse of it beating in your hands, that makes all the difference.

How do you bend reality to your will?

So, how do you, a mere mortal, bend reality to your will, when you don’t have a deep well of mana or an affinity for spacetime magic?

Well, first it’s important to note that even for powerful mages, bending reality is very very, very hard. It requires a lot of focus and energy, but anyone can bend reality a little bit, and become more powerful with time.

1. Become really, really good at the thing you do. Before you can bend reality, you need to be really, really good at the thing you’re already doing; so good that it is obvious to anyone who knows anything that you know what you’re doing. You are basically parlaying your current knowledge with the gods of reality itself during the process of casting this spell. They say luck is what happens when preparation meets opportunity, and this is the ultimate expression of that concept.

2. Acknowledge that you only get 1-2 shots to bend reality at a time. The surest way to fail your skill check is to try to do too many things at once. I recommend not trying to bend reality more than 1-2 times a year, especially since you still have to live your current life while you’re building your new reality. It’s too powerful a spell to split your focus. If you can’t devote time to your biggest goals, find a smaller piece of reality to bend and start there.

3. Don’t aim too high too fast. As a mere mortal, you probably don’t have the energy to turn yourself into a seven figure author tomorrow, or even this year. However, if that’s your end goal, then you can work back to a reality bend that is more achievable, like becoming a full-time author in one year, or building a mailing list of 1,000 people. If you have more resources, you can bend reality further, but most people aim too high and burn out in the process, until they are consumed by the same magic they hoped would save them.

4. Set your intention in the future. Monica licensed my non-fiction catalog in November 2020, and our first book together, Get Your Book Selling on Kickstarter, didn’t come out until October 2021. Even though Cthulhu is Hard to Spell came out in September of 2018, I started recruiting for it in 2017. Even though our Future of Publishing Mastermind happened in February 2024, we announced it in February 2024. It takes months, or even years, to bend reality, and you need to have enough focus on a small enough point to pull it off. Often you’ll even need to put together a prototype to get people on board. We had much more success recruiting for Cthulhu is Hard to Spell after I raised $27k for our Monsters and Other Scary Shit anthology.

5. Align all your goals to one focal point. Gary Keller and Jay Papasan wrote a book called The One Thing, where they talk extensively about how most people fail to bend reality because they expend too much energy chasing 100 different goals at once, but if you can turn all of your actions toward one focal point, then you can multiple your energy exponentially. That doesn’t mean you are only doing one thing. There are usually 100 little things that need to click into place before you can bend reality, For instance, in order to make our Writer MBA conference successful, we thought we needed a mailing list of 40-50k people. During 2025, I spent lots of my time and money building a mailing list, which had the tangential benefit of helping me break 1,000 members in my Author Stack community, and in order to make that happen, a dozen smaller things had to click into place.

6. Decide what you’re willing to sacrifice. Bending reality isn’t dark magic, but it does require sacrifices from you. To get The Author Stack to 1,000 paying members, I sacrificed a lot of money by cutting the cost of my membership by up to 99% and additionally by spending $50k on advertising in the last couple of years. I also spent hundreds of hours in my community building it, even before it could sustain itself. You might sacrifice your free time, your attention, or any number of things to bend reality.

7. Find a collaborator. Back in step 1, we talked about parlaying your current talent to bend reality, and this is where that comes into play. It’s almost impossible to bend reality enough on your own to successfully cast this spell. You almost always need help. With our anthologies Monsters and Other Scary Shit (that broke my career open) and Cthulhu is Hard to Spell (that gave me a career), I worked with hundreds of creators all pointing in one direction. I never would have been able to break through into indie publishing thought leadership without Monica Leonelle taking a chance on me, and we never would have been able to mount our conference without our conference directors, Mel Jolly and Tawdra Kandle. Each time I partnered with people who were already doing what I wanted to do at a high level, and used their momentum and mine to build my mana well. A big part of this spell is being “annointed” by people who are ahead of you on the journey to give the magic permission to work. By the way, you don’t have to “earn your way” into collaborators. Often, you can pay them for their time and expertise, even if that is future payment. While I’ve been blessed by a lot of equity collaborators, I straight paid Kris Simon to work on my Cthulhu is Hard to Spell book, and we also pay Mel and Tawdra to run our conference. They might have only said yes because I had a track record, but you would be surprised how far you can get by exchanging money for talent.

8. Play the long game. Most people focus on small, quick wins, but bending reality takes time and focus. I’ve never been able to pull this off in less than 9 months, and even then only because one reality bend built upon the next. There are usually dozens, even hundreds, of ingredients to put together for this to work, and you still have to live your current life while you’re building your new reality.

9. The ultimate sacrifice is your old life. Once you jump into your new reality, your old reality will start to feel small and uncomfortable. You’ll meet new people who are more aligned with your new goals, and many of your old friends will stop being able to relate to you and drift away. Many people will be bitter and angry at you for daring to better yourself, and you’ll find people hostile toward you who used to support you. Look for the people who are still on your journey even in your new reality, because there are some of them, too, and others who will cheer you on, but you have to be willing to sacrifice your old life to bend reality. It is big, powerful magic, and once you pull it off, you’ll never feel good in your old life again.

10. Your next leap should build upon your last one. You probably won’t be able to jump directly into your perfect life. Some magicians can pull it off in one go, but most of us mere mortals don’t have the power to bend reality that much. Instead, you’ll need to pull off a series of leaps, each of which should build on each other. I started out making movies before I decided I wanted to work in comics and publishing, and made 3-4 big leaps during my publishing career to get close enough to attract Monica’s attention, and that leap got us closer to making the conference, and even then there will likely be other leaps that require even more energy. Each time I’ve been able to jump further because I had a deeper well of mana, but it’s still a series of leaps. Now, we’re working with many of the biggest players in indie publishing, but we still have more leaps to make to reach our next goal.

11. Once you’re ready to enter your new reality, it will be as easy as taking a step. There is no doubt that this is difficult magic, but the difficulty isn’t in the casting. It’s in the prepping. Once you unlock all the pieces and are ready to step into your reality, it’s as easy as turning a knob and walking through. If it’s not easy to unlock that reality, then you still have more work to do.

Bending reality isn’t a metaphor. It’s not wishful thinking or magical realism. It’s the hard, gritty, deliberate act of reshaping your life into something that didn’t exist before you showed up. It’s ambition paired with execution. Vision paired with sequencing. Magic paired with effort.

Most people never do it. Not because they can’t, but because they’re taught not to try.

They aim too big, too soon. Or they try to change everything all at once. Or they don’t aim at all because the people around them are terrified of change and pass that fear on like a family recipe.

But if you want to break out of the life you're in and create something radically different, then you have to start thinking like a magician.

Not in the fantasy sense, but in the practical sense. There is no cheat code. But there is a process. And once you learn it, once you feel it, it changes everything.

You don’t need to be born special. You don’t need to be chosen. You just have to choose yourself, and start bending.

What do you think?

• Do you know anyone who’s a timespace witch, where reality seems to bend around them?

Let us know in the comments.

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