i’ll scratch your back…

As I start thinking about how to eventually market myself as an author, I’ve set myself to actually participating in social media. In case you’re wondering how that’s going for me, a misanthrope, here is an actual excerpt from my diary this morning:

“It’s nice to see how engaging on social media begets engagement on my own content, though even as I write that I’m filled with anxiety about being sucked into a miasmic echo chamber in which no art can be produced because all artists are preoccupied by the endless cycle of quipping and liking and being liked and at the end of the day, all we’re left with is, effectively, a circle jerk.

Is this basically the same thing as the patronage system of yore [Ed.: Yes, I did use the word ‘yore’ in my diary], though? Is it better, since artists have more agency over who they engage with, or worse, since it’s not as if most of us (“us”) are on Twitter at the behest of someone who’s paying us, only on the strength of the collective delusion that this is the only way to eventually get published? (And because it’s a good way, speaking of delusions, to feel productive without having to actually produce anything?)

Anyway, I haven’t had to shower yet today, and it’s fun to have a famous author acknowledge your existence / feel like you’re on the same plane, so let me just truck along with these endorphins and I’ll be copacetic.”

And in case you were further wondering how my manuscript is going, rest assured that I’m far too busy thrilling over having been followed by the NYT bestselling author I @ mentioned yesterday to do anything as pedestrian as actually write. (I did remove all of the quotation marks from my novel-in-progress to see if it would make it seem more literary. It did, but it also made it incomprehensible, and made me look like a dick, so then I put them all back. #crushingit)

As an aside, participating in Twitter as an aspiring author kind of feels like getting in line for the slaughter. Is it time to get canceled yet?

(Related: I’ve been combing and organizing this blog’s archives and have been genuinely alarmed by some of the language I casually threw around in my very early twenties, in 2011. Yikes, past self! I always suspected that this blog would be one of many reasons I can never run for elected office, but boy howdy, did I traffic in some tired tropes not long enough ago for it to be cute. Woof. Is this what the rest of my life as a white lady is going to be like? One cringe-inducing trip down memory lane after another?)