Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Substack

Yazmin Bradley

Yazmin Bradley (she/her) is a writer and essayist on unceded Dharug Land, Western Sydney, where she has lived most of her life. She is currently pursuing her Masters of Creative Writing with Macquarie University and her work primarily explores class, the body, and absurd speculative fiction.

My inbox is bloated, strained, a tight belly stretched over a thing that festers. Uber receipts, unpaid bill reminders from my psych, such and such from this blog wants you to become a paid subscriber. In my zeal I signed up to one too many, but my inbox is a graveyard of good intentions and unopened mail and so they often go unread. I’m supposed to be reading my peers, learning from them, contributing to them, but I’m too busy being a mature, complex, fully fleshed-out writer. I’m paid lots of money. I have a lot of subscribers. So many, in fact, that I can’t keep up. So many, in fact, that I can quit my job. So many, in fact, that it turns out that the exhausted high school arts teacher who warned us we’d never make a living off it was wrong. Ha. I was special all along. My Substack is different from the other newsletters half-exhumed from their unread graves. I usually only get to the first paragraph before I lose interest. But I’m different. People hang off my every word.

            How should I begin?

I’m a red-eyed recipe developer chewing the end of a lead pencil: how to make yourself tastier? A sear, a rub, a marinade, an oil gone rancid—it’s all the same. Freelance writing is a misnomer: freedom has nothing to do with it. I do not have the capital to write whatever I want; I am governed by what gets the most hits. I’ve taken to posting the right amount of hot photos of myself interspersed with witty clever posts, so that I am curation distilled. One of those shit but topical cocktails you get at a bar that likes to sniff its own farts. My page is just a tincture of the algorithm, base notes of desperation before softening to the sweeter smells of delusion and self-aggrandisement.

            I’ve noticed that other writers have somehow commissioned special light to fill their mid-century interiors and artfully piled stacks of books. Their photos are crisp and sharp. They’ve got dainty wrists, faces hidden (artfully) behind endless indie covers plucked from fairs and secret book nooks in the Inner West.

            I know what’s happening, I’m not stupid, but I just want to know how they’re doing it. Whose money they’re using, where all their leisure time is hoarded away, how they have so much time to read and write. I publish my Substack articles secretly, shamefully, at the desk job where I’m meant to be paying attention. It’s as obscene as wanking in the office bathroom but when else am I meant to do it? My piles of to-be-read books go touch-starved. They’re begging to have me run a finger down their spine, make them shiver.

            The most I can manage are some contrived pictures of a book I’ll never read on my friend’s coffee table. Like a home porno.

I can’t help but worry about numbers. Initially, it was when my cold feet stepped off my tiled bathroom floor onto the scales—a certain sort of self-cannibalism. And I’m devouring myself again, but this time it’s my subscriptions. Ho ho, poor me. There’s a boring, unhinged white woman novel waiting to be excavated from this except I don’t have the money to sleep for a year.

            There’s a part of me that isn’t afraid of the AI revolution at all (controversial, I know), but I’m hoping some u-beaut ChatGPT with toilet paper and a hand attached to wipe my ass will become my social media manager, because thinking about marketing myself constantly is exhausting. I want someone or something else to do it for me since I don’t think I’m doing a great job. And apparently publishing houses want you to have a following these days, they want you to do the work for them. No worries, I say, not a problem. Add it to the list!

I don’t actually want to be relatable at all, but Meta has me in a chokehold. If a bear shits in the woods but no one was there to see it, did it even take a dump? How do you become a writer without being seen? There are lidless eyes inside my brain.

A mutual follower messaged me the other day lamenting their glacial growth, their low numbers, the pin drop silence that marked their (lack of) engagement. It’s hard to imagine, but no subscribers are loud. I replied instantly.

            ‘Nooo babe dw, it gets better, you just have to be urself. Just post what makes u happy and the right people will come!’

            When do I tell them that I’m still waiting on the right people to come?

            Maybe they got lost in the mail.

There’s this AI picture of me that I made one night last year. Pink background, translucent skin, faux oil paint brush strokes. I’m not looking at the camera, I’m staring off into the distance. My head is tilted to the side consideringly. Absently. I wonder what she’s thinking about because it’s a lie to say it’s me. She’s hacked my face off and she’s wearing it like a mask, but it looks different on her. It looks like distance. It looks like breathing space.

            Is it my duty as a writer to become synonymous with my online presence? With my work? When am I granted the luxury of becoming a character?

I want to say that I’m a Writer with the same misplaced confidence as a nepo baby. I haven’t actually been published yet but it’s fine because I’m manifesting. I love manifesting because it’s the kind of thing that will pay off one day. All I have to do is believe. Never mind class stratification or stagnating wages or my mum’s bowed back and the strata bill because one day angels with wings and harps and electric guitars will suddenly appear. You did it! they will sing. You worked hard enough! And another angel with a beige manifesting journal will tell me that all the YouTube videos I listened to have actually worked—

8 HOUR SLEEP MONEY AFFIRMATIONS HD SOUND BINAURAL BEATS, SUBLIMINAL, ATTRACT WEALTH, MEDITATION ABUNDANCE PURE TONE

—I repeated the mantras to myself enough times that they became true, like a wish, like in Pinocchio, like on a star—

I’M A WRITER I’M A WRITER I’M A WRITER I’M A WRITER I’M A WRITER I’M

—I don’t actually know how I managed it between full-time work, full-time study, private tutoring, full-time writing but that’s fine, God very kindly added more hours in the day for me to work harder—

I CAN MAKE A LIVING OFF MY WRITING I CAN MAKE A LIVING OFF MY WRITING I CAN MAKE A LIVING OFF MY WRITING I CAN MAKE A LIVING OFF

            —An angel snaps their fingers, Poof! I have intergenerational wealth now; I can write full time. Poof! I get my own apartment with my own room, no more sharing with family members. Poof! Mid-century furniture, new phone, new camera. Poof! I can take lots of Instagram pictures now and then get lots more followers and isn’t this all wonderful?

            The angel announces that my shit womb is also going to be replaced, huzzah! No more chronic pain. The electric guitar angel plays a sick riff as I’m floated up into the astral plane and fitted with a shiny new body—one that isn’t tired or hurts or collapses or misses out and I feel so much better. Amazing, even! It’s like the last decade and a half never happened, it’s like a distant memory.

            I ask the angel, hopefully, can I have one more wish?

            What is it, child?

            Can my mum have more money, too?

            And the angel laughs.

This is the part where I write something clever about the kind of ideas I’m subscribed to, how they don’t ‘serve me’ (as though they work in retail), how the ideas I’ve swallowed about success and art are fetid and foul, how the very act of privatising my creative work in the form of subscribers parcels me off like fertile field to be fallowed and exported, how neoliberalism has hulled my creative core, left only the hollow yawning of endless production of want, want, want, and more, more, more—but that would be trite.

I pick my stitches apart, skin myself like a burlesque dancer. There goes an arm, a leg, I’m flashing my spleen now, you hard yet? How much of myself am I meant to show you? How much of myself am I meant to liquify, inject into my work? If you are subscribing to me, to my work that is disjointed, work that isn’t tangible or cohesive, work that has my face attached to it, am I allowed separation? But distance requires silence which means not being seen which means less engagement and don’t I want to be relatable? Don’t I want to be touched, feel your fingers wiggling down right in between my gallbladder? How close can you get? (This isn’t rhetorical).

            I really want to write about my anxiety, my desperation, how I bite my nails to the quick, but Sad Cool Girls in novels don’t do that. They’re impenetrable, aloof. They swan from one room to another like boring Regency side characters. They take prescription drugs and lament their fucked-up relationships with their dads like they’re special.

If Substack is the answer, then why can’t I quit my job yet?

Don’t answer that question if you believe in trickle-down economics.

Note to self:

• Read Baudrillard, write something clever about it.
• Stop sharing a room with mum.
• Get rid of stuffed toys.
• Buy mid-century furniture. Also new iPhone. Ring light???
• Ask mum to fund me as a suffering artist.
• Mum doesn’t have any money. Ask grandma.
• Can’t ask grandma. She doesn’t have any either.
• Maybe I should invest in crypto.
  
  

Freelancing in the Time of Capitalism, a haiku

Writing fucking sucks
You can’t make money off it
So then what’s the point?

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