Oh, Whatever, Everything Is Totally Great For Writers Right Now

What’s that? How is it being a writer right now? An author? Ha ha, yeah, man, yeah, no, it’s fucking great, everything is super cool right just, just really chill and what is it the kids say? Skibidi? It’s all coming up skibidi. Skibidi toilets all the way down, dude.

Yeah, no, check it out, right? So it’s like, publishers always threw us to the wolves a little but — but then there was Twitter, which was this rickety platform we could all stand on and squawk like angry blue jays about our books. Except then I guess that got bought by an apartheid-huffing man-boy billionaire who I think instantly turned it into an antisemitic NFT or something, and so Twitter stopped being a thing. But that’s fine, because now there are a hundred different little online fiefdoms, several of which are governed by the same callous, insane algorithms that have long governed readers’ absolute inability to find what they’re looking for at Amazon, right? Which is fun because, you know, if you have 10,000 followers, any post you do is probably only going to see, max, 1000 of those people, which is — which is really just perfect, it’s exactly what you want. You don’t wanna reach everybody who follows you, that’s fucked up, I mean, haven’t you ever heard of the Scarcity Model? Bingo, yeah. You need to be scarce as an author — just, like, a secret presence, a shadow on the wall, a whisper in the ear as if from The One Ring. If everybody who subscribes to you actually has to hear from you, that’s too much, just way too much. This way it feels special when they do see something you post! It’s like Christmas. But Christmas can’t be every day or it isn’t fucking Christmas anymore, yanno?

But whoa, here’s the real corker, right — so the people, the humans, they’re having a harder and harder time seeing you, right? And you, the also human author, are having a harder and harder time reaching them, yeah? What’s cool is, though, you still get to reach the robots. And the robots, they’re fucking everywhere, man, they’re crawling the internet like bugs, and they’re just gobbling up content left and right, just chewing it up like termites. Then everything the robots chew up gets turned into this paste, yeah? Like, a spackle? A content spackle? And they fuckin’ barf it back up in different places, so that’s cool because I guess they call that exposure or something. The molecular material of your writing and art is kind of in everything, then, like how we’re all made of stardust and shit? Yeah. Yeah. It’s cool, it’s great, and no, no, there’s no attribution or anything and no, nobody is paying us for that — ha ha, yeah, they’re just stealing it, but it’s not really stealing so much as it is like, being inspired by, because robots can totally be inspired, right? Probably? I think it’s nice. It’s all just glue for the internet–

Oh! That reminds me, the other cool thing about the robots is that, speaking of inspiration, they’ve been super inspired to just grab hold of all your informational searches across Google and make up their own creative writing answers to real questions. Like, someone asked how you stop the cheese from sliding off your pizza and the new Google Robots were like, “We got this, you put non-toxic glue on the pizza,” and it was like, what? Whoa. That’s wild, just fucking wild, and if you try to figure out why it said that, you can track back its inspiration to one person, a guy on Reddit named Fucksmith, and that’s pretty awesome. For so long we’ve been told in all our pop culture how even just one person can change the world, and look no further than this very situation — the robots were like, “Hey, you got a question, we got our main man Fucksmith to answer that for you — we dug a decade deep and found him in our brain vaults and we just scooped him up and now he’s the go-to guy for all the information. Fucksmith says you should eat yard mushrooms and give sick raccoons big sloppy open mouth kisses to cure them and that the best kind of condom is the kind you make at home with arts and crafts, probably. Who knows what wisdom Fucksmith’s ancient words can offer us? The Fucksmith Scrolls are gonna save us all.” And that’s why it’s like, really cool that the artbarf robots are hoovering up all our shit because one day someone’s gonna ask the robots to tell them a story and the robots will just tell them your story, like, word for fuckin’ word. We’re living immortal on the fury road, man, welcome to valhalla, buddy.

Plus, the Fucksmith AI is out there also ready to answer our questions, too, because us writers need the internet for more than just marketing. We ask it questions for research and now we have all the best research available — it’s been masticated and regurgitated by the termites, all of it tinged with the wisdom of Fucksmith. It’s great. Nothing can go wrong there. The other day I was like, “How does gravity work?” and Google was like, “elf piss,” and I’m like, great, that’s exactly what I figured. And I put it in a book.

I mean it won’t matter eventually anyway because nobody is hiring writers, they’re just paying for the robot sauce, and then hiring ‘editors’ at a cut rate to scoop up the robot sauce with their bare hands and try to sculpt something out of the raw slurry, but for now, yeah, I got my new space opera coming out with the elf piss ships, I just hope people read it, yanno?

Oh, yup, no doubt, we still need the net for marketing, sure, sure. Yup. And it’s like, that’s fine, because Twitter died, and then the publishers are like, “It’s fine, we have a plan, our plan definitely wasn’t just Twitter,” and I believe them even though they kinda winked at me? Like a little secret wink? Like someone who says, “It’s okay, I didn’t just poop a little poo lump in your Cheerios,” and you’re like, “what?” and they wink a little at you? It’s like that.

Still, though — yeah, no, yeah, due diligence, and it’s like, “I def believe you, publishers, but like, what plan?” And they muttered “TikTok,” and then said something about “reels,” and I said, anything else, and they were like, “nah,” and that’s good enough for me, so I guess now I have to make video content if anyone wants to see me. Which is fine. I mean, right, yeah, I’ve trained to write books, with words, and my ideal state is actually hiding in the darkness like an eyeless cave squirrel but if they say I gotta get on the AI-gobbling Tokstagrams and do a little dance or be a fun comedian and also learn video editing to make movies, then, sure, yes, I’m going to do that, because I am informed that the alternative is to — *checks notes* — starve.

I mean, ha ha, yeah, no, I’m 48, this is the ideal time to start doing Fornite dances online so people will buy my books. No, I know! I didn’t think I could get more cringe but I can definitely get more cringe, turns out.

Anyway! It’s great, it’s going great, I’m not worried about any of that. Sales are down, sure, sure, and okay, yes, paper prices are up, and I think advances are going back down again and oh right it’s an election year where it’ll just be even harder to get heard over the din of poisonous noise, not to mention Fucksmith’s increasingly loud instructions to slather our smashburgers with poison ivy and rubber cement, oh and also if we make one wrong move online the parasocial relationships we’ve been inadvertently cultivating will suddenly flip over on us like a janky four-wheeler, crushing us underneath even as its engine revs louder and louder, ha ha, oh man, it’s fine, it’s definitely fine. Nobody ever says anything wrong online where it’ll haunt them eternally. Plus I think the internet is straight-up breaking? So whatevs. Anyway, I gotta head out, good chat — what’s that? Oh yeah I got a meeting with myself, just to be alone with my own endlessly unspooling loops of intrusive thinking about my future and how one wrong step will doom us all and how it doesn’t matter anyway because soon every last one of us including our children will be drowning in a boiling ocean of microplastics and bird-flu, so yeah, let’s do this again. Have a good one. Okay. Okay. Witness me. Ha ha. Yeah. Cool, talk to you later.