Who Put a Quarter in Pearl?
The Reign of the Trollpinion Aggregator Word-Typing Android
I don’t have a problem with Just Pearly Things’s opinions so much as the fact that none of them are her own.
Granted, I can only stand her screechy squeaky voice for about the length of a sound byte.
But what I hear when she opens her yap—aside from the creaking, tinny screech of a Ray Bradbury-esque automaton—is generally:
A radicalised, cartoonified, monetisable and silly echo of observations I made in a blog post 20 frickin’ years ago; stirred in with
Another subconscious attempt to get in a three-way with Fresh and Fit.
(I suspect I’m no different from the rest of her detractors who are not feminist “whales” —
Interviewer: “Are you saying the things you’re saying because you know they’ll get attention?”
Just Pearly Things: “Hm ha ha ha ha hm ha ha ha ha ha ho. … Can you guys stop asking me about this?”
I don’t spend much time or effort thinking about this kind of low-effort, high-troll content anymore, thank the gods.
But it bears a mention because—as far as universal human bullshit that seems to be getting amplified to giant combined Decepti-con-like proportions by the firehose-of-bullshit age goes—the Human Troll Content Aggregator type that Just Pearly Things represents ties in with an annoying type that already seems determined to turn Substack into Medium all over again…
I’m not naming any names, because Jesus Christ, these people LIVE for that.
But if you’ve ever been on Medium, you know the type: the self-defined “successful writer” who sells posts which are ostensibly packed with tough-love-type advice to other aspiring “successful writers”—and, indeed, these posts do quite well, especially on a site where everybody is trying to be a successful writer…
…except this guru doesn’t seem to have written anything that isn’t about writing—or, more often, about marketing writing.
And the “tough love” reads as a slimy stew of underhanded justifications for the fact that online media reward marketers rather than writers, with a nasty undercurrent of underhanded nudges to ensure that it stays that way, and dissenters are branded as…
Well, we can’t release our white-knuckled grasp on our commitment to toxic positivity, but let’s brand people who prefer writing to marketing as something… vaguely undesirable.
It’s the 21-century version of the Creative Writing/Master of Fine Arts in professor—you know, the one who makes you buy his book about writing to take his class, but he’s only written a couple crappy novels and a book of poems, and as many people as he’s forced to read his best short story, no one liked it. He’s a complete loser except for his university position, but because of that position, everyone follows his advice anyway.
Nobody likes a clickbait headline with nothing useful inside.
But worse: We all have had these precious “hard truths” shoved down our throats to gagging already—yeah, marketing is necessary, but the fact that marketing about marketing about marketing in articles that are utterly unreadable save the clickbait headline is this guru’s claim to fame… well, it’s a shaky-ass claim if I ever saw one.
My dear genuine writers, particularly fiction writers: these opportunists are not on your side.
No more than Pearl is on men’s side.
The opportunists are on the side of opportunity; Pearl is on the side of whatever bored proto-consciousness you want to ascribe to whatever AI it was that seems to have put a quarter in her.
The automaton will eventually wind down and run out of disjointed cries for attention to spew, but not before it tears up the fabric of whatever is left of our literary culture.
Kinda like Pearl’s voice puts one off sex.
Too many people who “want” to be “writers” DON’T LIKE WRITING—nor do they take particular pleasure in reading anything literary or fictional, so they have no idea how, or even why, to present gifts to their readers of enlightenment, wit, suspense, and fun.
They “want” to be “writers” because of what that “writer” word represents:
Not only attention, but a feeling of importance, an escape from real jobs, the idea that they are better, wiser, and more worthy of my ear than, say, an ordinary Joe who tells brilliantly funny stories, but who is too naive and bumpkin-y to make it pop on the Insta.
There are dozens of articles on here about how to get over your writer’s block, then how to get paid for your herculean, tedious, miserable, heart-wrenching efforts to take that horrid blank page and turn it into an article, a-ha, finished at last, respect my suffering!
You could try to take their advice, get through the misery and toil of writing some jagshit article so you can get back to the real, fun work that you actually enjoy: Marketing yourself.
OR—much better—you could fuck off.
There are many other ways you can exercise your marketing skills. You could help me find soft yak-wool yarn at a fair price. You could help me find women’s boots that work with smaller legs in 2023 without letting my ankles flop around till I hurt myself. You can help tout the benefits of fancy vinegar products for health-conscious home disinfection.
For good or for evil, the world needs marketers who admit they are marketers who love marketing.
The world needs ZERO more writers.
The world needs LESS THAN ZERO more writers who are bad at writing and great at marketing.
We as a vile species publish FOUR MILLION BOOKS PER YEAR.
Do you really think there are four million monkey thoughts that are worth giving a chance? Even if that were possible?—because it isn’t. (So even if something that does deserve a chance gets one, it’s a matter of pure luck—but that’s a different issue for another day.)
As a reader, my problem isn’t having enough stuff to read—it’s finding the good stuff in this massive pile of CRAP you’ve shat out as fast as you can BECAUSE ALGORITHMS.
The world especially doesn’t need writers who resent the act of writing, who want to fast-forward to grubbing for the fame and attention they deserve because they want it .
I write because I love doing it. Are you envious? Imagine how I feel about your love for self-marketing!
I’ve recently recovered from a ten-year spell in hell which included highlights such as being robbed by my business/writing partner in a way which razed my reputation to the ground and erased 20 years of work; being attacked from behind while I was working and sexually assaulted in my own apartment by a stranger; and coming hair-raisingly close to dying of a combination of starvation and fever during a highly unlikely plague of typhus in Los Angles…
… and this was all BEFORE Covid hit while I was out of the country, so LA County could arrange for my catsitter to steal my apartment before I got home. You know, amongst all the ordinary inconveniences of Covid which everyone else found so arduous.
After all of these events, I began to have a difficult time finishing a book and deciding to finally release it, whether through self-publishing or sending it to an editor.
It’s weird how getting attacked by a random stranger can affect your self-belief; it seems so impersonal, but months or even years later you find yourself doubting yourself in ways you never thought you would.
Even after I slowly learned to do serious work again, to focus my mind on anything but the most menial jobs without my brain flipping a shitty every thirty seconds to make sure nobody was sneaking up on us—even after the worst of the PTSD passed, I could not pull the trigger and publish.
“This book is no good, it isn’t finished, it will never be finished…”
I used all my writing to rewrite and edit and rewrite et cetera.
The longer it took for me to decide to release anything, the more depressed I became. I wandered off into working as a movie extra, an academic-materials writer, and the sort of odd jobs in LA you don’t want to write home about—nothing that made me feel particularly accomplished, but more important, nothing I felt any pleasure in doing. (Finally I got into a situation where I wasn’t allowed to work at all—another long story—and suddenly all my attention was absorbed by the scrubbing and cleaning of being a housewife. I had never even experimented with marriage before, so falling in at the deep end was something else.) I had worked for decades to be able to take pleasure in my work, but suddenly I had no confidence in anything I did that wasn’t menial.
So when the depression got so bad I couldn’t record a video about it because I could no longer speak, I finally decided to say fuck it to traditional book releases: I’m gonna release my work chapter-by-chapter on Substack.
So that’s what I did.
And before a week had gone by, I remembered why I keep writing—because I love it.
I loved to read novels before most people my age could recite the alphabet. I started writing them as soon as I could work the crayon, then the pen. It’s a permanent calling. It is the only thing that could have pulled me out of that pit.
It’s astounding—before I began Nuisance Online Distributor, only a couple of weeks ago, the depression was so immense it felt like a physical pain and weight, like someone had barely sharpened a giant log into a battering ram and lodged it in my chest.
So far, I’ve done little marketing, and haven’t gotten the massive audience that the marketing-writers promise ye shall receive if you follow their advice—never mind that after the headline, there is no real advice; the advice is implicit: Do something that will fool the next guy into clicking on your headline, full of hope.
(Hope for what? I thought this was a chore for you?)
So what have I gotten? What have I acquired?
The depression is gone. Poof.
After about three days of posting every day—of editing and polishing a small piece of my work when I lacked the self-belief to let go of a large one—I woke up in the morning and the log was completely gone. I felt lighter than air. Because I’m not performing an awful chore. I’m doing a thing I love to do.
I didn’t enjoy writing fiction when I was bad at it, when I was learning as a kid and a young adult, but that’s because I was writing things that were boring and bad. It was a chore but I knew that wasn’t the end game—I wasn’t trying to shit out a raisin every day to hear the other rabbits cheer. I was working for what I have now.
I don’t write things that bore me anymore, because I’m capable of writing things that delight me.
You don’t learn to do that from A/B testing.
I write things that are painful, but they must be cathartic.
I write things that are cathartic, because that is the point.
This is why I can go on writing for years and years and years, even when the market is not only against me, but incomprehensible—and sometimes, the market for fiction doesn’t even seem to exist, except as a social club for other fiction writers.
If the only pleasure writing gives you is numerical, you don’t belong here. Your short-term success is the equivalent of an old-lady driver who causes a ten-car pileup and drives away unscathed.
If other people need to compensate you for your suffering, stop suffering. You can pause posting, stop the empty bragging, learn to write things that are intrinsically pleasurable—or you can stay here annoying yourself and everyone else.
OR: Instagram is that-a-way.
Fucking off has always been an option.