Dispatches from the Lit Twitter Apocalypse

Lit Twitter can't die we're like the cockroaches

Lit Twitter melted down this week, although it’s still operational, so maybe it was just like a test of the nuclear systems or something. It’s a good reminder that our tenuous platforms and connections to the literary world could be nuked at any moment. And now here we are, sending dispatches from our fallout shelter on Substack.

It definitely felt apocalyptic. Or maybe it was more like the disturbance Obi-Wan felt in the force as thousands of writers cried out suddenly. Even the more established writers and editors stared into the searing white light, ominously using words like “uptoot” and “federated universe” like they were saying prayers.

Having shit collapse around you is kind of part of the writing life. Last year, I had a book proposal go out on submission that didn’t make it. Something I spent nearly a year on creatively and emotionally invested in simply died, leaving me with nothing but kind parting words that I hoped meant more, but I knew were only the careful constructions of writers trying to let each other down easy.

Creative writing makes you stare down death all the time. It would suck to lose the excitement and community of Lit Twitter that drives tens of thousands to the TBQ website. What would happen to reniassance of lit mags we’ve seen proliferate because of Lit Twitter? Where would writers gather to share their work and find community? Where would we discourse and fight and flirt with each other? Where do we go? Do we want to dance for our lives on TikTok or bleed everything out into a blog for three likes?

I choose the bloodletting. I’ve been traumatized by blogging enough times. I’ve been doing it since LiveJournal, when it felt like a revolutionary expansion of the AIM away message. Finally, I had a full canvas to express my artistic feelings of longing to my crushes and innocent bystanders. Especially the innocent bystanders. I wanted them to like me even more.

I banged it all out into the LiveJournal, recounting hook-ups with way too much cringe detail. I ruminated, posted selfies, and I sold myself to a disparate audience of friends, strangers, and randos I met in bars. Blogging always feels like more of a performance than it does actual writing. Real writing has editors and endings. Blogging is like an endless sandbox of self, forever in search of an audience.

I grew up. I settled down. I made it official with Wordpress. I blogged through life milestones like getting married and becoming a parent, alongside the reviews of snack foods and things I found in thrift stores. I never got to post the update I really wanted to share — the one where I didn’t have to blog anymore. The one where I got an agent and sold the book and got to be one of the real writers. The one where the crushes and innocent bystanders finally clapped for me.

Here I am again. Please clap. Okay, I’m about one page deep here. This has to be worth three likes by now. No wonder we abandoned this slog for the dopamine casino of Twitter. Combined with conciseness of AIM, it made performing our existential crisis feel less like screaming and more like a drug.

Maybe writers weren’t meant to be suspended in this purgatory of endlessly selling ourselves on social media. I think this is why lit mags are so important. Literary Magazines are the perfect place to perform your existential crisis as a writer. And this is why their renaissance on Lit Twitter is worth fighting for.

What do you even get when you submit to a literary magazine? Well, most of time, you get absolutely nothing except a little insulted. Some pay, most don’t. Some are ladders into cliques and publishing.  Most are deep ravines into obscurity. What’s the point? Lit mags are where someone lets you in. It’s true in both the larger gatekeeping sense where you get let into insular scenes, but also in the sense when you’re a nobody and another nobody lets you into the nobody scene and makes you feel like a writer.

Someone named Esther let me in. I was a baby poet sending out a painfully hopeful packet of poems to all the biggest magazines, as well as a few back-ups, announcing my arrival on the scene. One by one, the self-addressed stamped envelopes were returned for me to unceremoniously trash myself. I know it sounds like I’m 75 and recalling the ancient days, but I swear this was only like 2003.

Then one came back different. It wasn’t as lumpy and stuffed awkwardly. It wasn’t just another one of bloated corpses floating back. There was a handwritten note. It was an acceptance. And in true literary fashion, it’s in a magazine that no longer exists, from a writer no one has ever heard of. Thank you Esther, for letting me in and making me one of the writers.

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Speaking of acceptances and rejections, I paused sending rejections at 1000. I’ve been going backwards. If you haven’t recieved a reply it’s still in consideration! Just taking a breather as I catch up on reading through the low hundreds, although the volunteer readers have been way ahead of me. Looking to send acceptances in the coming weeks as well and planning to drop TBQ6 in the early new year.

This Substack will always be free. But if you want to subscribe, it’s cheaper than Twitter verification and it pays our contributors. We are nearly funded through TBQ8, and we’re dreaming of TBQ9 and TBQ10. Lit Mags are born to die, but we were born to live más!