{"id":4458,"date":"2022-03-29T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-03-29T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/?p=4458"},"modified":"2022-03-28T13:07:04","modified_gmt":"2022-03-28T17:07:04","slug":"gator-pit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/gator-pit\/","title":{"rendered":"GATOR PIT"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\u201cWhat do we do with trespassers?\u201d Gabriel Hart asks the gathered group in the back storeroom at the plantation. Its walls are hung with curing tobacco plants. They had kept me in the freezing locker overnight and I think I\u2019m going to lose part of my ear to frostbite. Hart clicks a pen over and over, staring at me. He looks impatient, like he\u2019s been dragged away from writing a record review that\u2019s due in 24 hours.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI say we feed this motherfucker to the gators,\u201d Jake Blackwood says. \u201cShorty and Lucinda haven\u2019t had writer meat in, I don\u2019t know, months.\u201d He\u2019s taller than I had even imagined him. He\u2019s wearing firing range eye protection and a Ruger GP100 on his hip. He looks like he could rip a copy of Ducks, Newburyport in half with his bare hands.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cRemember that investigative reporter who came around wanting to do a story on the disappearances?\u201d Sybil Rain says. She\u2019s done up in a cherry red cheerleader outfit and sucks on a blue lollipop, and her hair has matching streaks of azure in it.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cHow much money do you have on you?\u201d Derek Maine asks me. He\u2019s sitting in a scraped-up wooden chair that is backwards, like he\u2019s a corrupt cop four hours into a weary interrogation.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ve got about $45 in my wallet,\u201d I say. \u201cYou can have it.\u201d I hold out the wallet to Maine. He snatches it out of my hand and begins thumbing through the contents. \u201cPlus there\u2019s a gift card to Southside Mall Cinemas that has about $25 dollars left on it,\u201d I add, my voice quaking.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019ll take that, thank you very much.\u201d Sybil Rain strides forward and plucks the card out of Derek\u2019s fingers. \u201cBlack Panther: Wakanda Forever is coming out and I love me some Milk Duds.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat are you going to do with me?\u201d I say.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cSee you later, alligator,\u201d Stuart Buck says. His eyes look more cruel and malign than they did on the screen.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAfter a while, crocodile,\u201d Sybil Rain says after taking out her lollipop, finishing the sing song.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

All of their expressions look more cruel and malign. They look like a cross between the family in those horror movies where Instagram influencers go off the beaten path looking for quaint locales to shoot photos in and find chainsaw death, that and Mad Max supporting characters who in a chaotic laughing frenzy would rape and murder fleeing citizens, civilization crumbling at the edges of mankind. The Last Estate plantation is near a swamp that is notorious for tourists getting lost in, no cell signal. Later skeletons turn up with bones clean of all meat, \u201cswamp accidents,\u201d they say.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Minutes later I find myself in a specially made harness dangling upside down above a gator pit. Gators lash the dark water underneath me with their tails, impatient. I have to think fast. I can\u2019t believe I\u2019m going to buy it in the power-grip jaws of some monster reptiles.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat\u2019s going on here?\u201d I hear a voice above me inquiring, bored. It\u2019s William Duryea and he looks down at me squirming for my life. \u201cOh, another one.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat do you need, right now?\u201d I shout.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat we need is a whole lot of money,\u201d Jake Blackwood says.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI can get it to you,\u201d I say.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cStart talking.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve always been a lousy salesman, can\u2019t close the deal, can\u2019t even get people to look my way. But now I had to tap into the inner car dealer inside me, because I was wheeling and dealing for my life.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI know a sure-fire way to make some easy money,\u201d I say.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cLet\u2019s hear it,\u201d Gabriel Hart says. Each one sounds more bored and less troubled at the thought of lowering a man into a pit of death than the last. \u201cAnd make it fast, I have to write 3,000 words on mic placement in Jad Fair and Daniel Johnston\u2019s 1989 collab album\u00a0<\/span>It\u2019s Spooky.<\/span><\/i>\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAmazon,\u201d I say.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat about it? We hate Amazon.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cDo you know a guy named Peter Rook?\u201d\u00a0I say.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cNever heard of him,\u201d says William Duryea.<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWell you should. He\u2019s an outsider writer from Canada and he taught me some secrets of how to punk Amazon in self-publishing.\u201d I had interviewed Rook months before, since I had some half-assed idea about writing a book about writers in \u201coutsider lit\u201d in the Twittersphere, but then like most things with me the book had an ambitious first few chapters, moderate applause, quotation on Radio Panik 105.4 FM out of Brussels, then collapsed into confused mumbling. Now Rook could be my ticket out of this mess. I hope he doesn\u2019t mind.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat did he say?\u201d Sybil Rain asks. She sounds slightly curious but like it would just take one boring reply from me for her to lose interest and toss me fully to the reptiles.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cGet me away from these alligators and I\u2019ll tell you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

They all look at each other, weighing the options. They decide to haul me up and toss me into a chair with the harness still on me, a stark reminder that I could be right back down there in an instant. Blackwood, sending a clear signal, sits down across from me at a table and puts his Ruger down on it with a clunk. The silent inquisitor. \u201cStart talking.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

I gulp. \u201cOk, Rook told me about his experiences writing niche erotica and manipulating the Algorithm at Amazon to maximize sales. He didn\u2019t tell me any of his pen names, and I didn\u2019t push him. He told me about how you could analyze the sales rank information of erotic novels and stories in various niche and sub-niche markets, figure out what keywords were visible on the covers and in the titles and blurbs of these best-selling novels\u2014their sales page\u2014and exploit those. He said, \u2018I geared everything I did, not just towards cramming those keywords in, but finding out which ones had the most visibility in search engines.\u2019 He told me he had a background in studying formal logic and computer sciences at university, and that he used this in studying the sales of books on Amazon. Ever heard of hucows?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Before anyone speaks Blackwood nods and says: \u201cHucows, oh yeah, lemme tell you. Milk of a different ilk? It\u2019s lactation erotica. Ulrika Udderson, Sinistre Ange. Hucow BDSM, \u2018how I became a hucow at the farm.\u2019 That\u2019s pure 100% sexual calcium, boy. Hard bones.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cRook said that some of these hucow books would sell two or three copies\u00a0<\/span>every day<\/span><\/i>,\u201d I say. \u201cHe said he would examine the sales rank of books that had the keyword \u2018hucow\u2019 in the title and compare it with another book of the same genre, maybe with the big breasts on the cover, but\u00a0<\/span>without<\/span><\/i>\u00a0the keyword in the title, to conclude what it was about the first book that was selling vs. the second book.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

During our phone interview Rook had said that Amazon\u2019s search engine at the time had been like the \u201cancient pre-Panda Google SEO,\u201d and now Amazon\u2019s search engine is more closely like Google\u2019s in that the best spots are now sponsored ads. There had been a perturbation of the Algorithm, like to that caused by Google\u2019s new filtering system of 2011 to combat content farms. \u201cThe Algorithm\u201d: a supernatural entity which people speak about as if it is a cross between Adam Smith\u2019s invisible hand and the oppressive, omnipotent eyes of Quetzalcoatl\u2019s techno-shaman elite, in need of propitiating human sacrifices.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s even gay lactation fantasies like Henry the Hucow,\u201d I go on, \u201cwhich boggles the mind, but somebody is paying for that. Rook told me that he had gotten into this strategy to phreak Amazon via Something Awful.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Here as I sit in the chair I feel the floor slipping out from under me to a degree. I know next to nothing about any of this Internet history, I\u2019m just talking to keep a last fingertip\u2019s grip on life. Something Awful started out as a comedy website for nerds in 1999 but eventually became a larger-than-life Internet phenomenon with bustling forums full of nefarious activity. In 2018, Gizmodo ranked Something Awful as 89th in its \u201cTop 100 Websites That Shaped The Internet As We Know It.\u201d The forums at Something Awful spawned, among other things, Weird Twitter, 4chan, and the Slender Man urban legend that those poor girls believed was true which led to murder. It was at a Something Awful forum on business and careers that Rook told me he had gotten wind of a woman who had been selling erotica on Amazon, and he got hooked up with a community of people who were exchanging notes and best practices for publishing it\u2014critiques, encouragement, project management. He told me about how writers were selling off whole catalogues of erotica stories to each other for ten cents on the dollar, selling the worldwide rights, which the buyers would repackage and change a few things, like cover design, then republish.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAnother example of this niche erotica is Adult Baby Diaper Lover (ABDL) erotica,\u201d I say. \u201cArrogant domineering millionaires turned into infants by dominating \u2018mommy figures\u2019 who literally put them in diapers. Rook didn\u2019t tell me about this one, I learned it from Mark McGurl in his book\u00a0<\/span>Everything and Less: The Novel in the Age of Amazon<\/span><\/i>, where he highlighted this subgenre as an example of the way Amazon acts as a sophisticated mechanism to serve highly specified genre fiction up to consumers. ABDL is just another example of this phenomenon. And authors are making bank. I guess people like reading about guys in diapers.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThat\u2019s sick,\u201d Stuart Buck says.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cYeah,\u201d I say. \u201cBut Amazon is selling these novels like Snickers bars, and you could too!\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

William Duryea, clearly the alpha male in the room, waves his hands as if to silence the room. \u201cWho says we need money?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWell, by the looks of it\u2026,\u201d I say, turning my head to look at the dicey surroundings.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cWe don\u2019t need interior decorator advice from you,\u201d Blackwood says, picking up the Ruger and calmly rotating the seven-bullet cylinder.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m just saying, if you ever wanted to pick up a few extra bucks, you could turn this place into a factory for smut. You\u2019ve got some writers here, no?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Derek Maine and Gabriel Hart look at each other. Just then I hear a loud creak and a door opens. Everyone\u2019s heads turn to look. A large object rolls into the room, what I can only describe as an archaic wheelchair running off steam power, with a figure dressed in black sitting in it. Its head is obscured by a cube of black glass; it looks like a person with a head inside an aquarium full of black water is sitting there.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

William Duryea looks terrified. It\u2019s destabilizing because like I said, this is the alpha male of the group. If he\u2019s scared, what does that spell for the rest of us?\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cRudy, I hope we didn\u2019t wake you up,\u201d William says.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The figure in the wheelchair, like a 3rd stage Guild Navigator in a royal court, takes a microphone from its armrest, holds it up to the black aquarium head and speaks into it garbled static which the microphone translates as the sentence: \u201cThere\u2019s writing for money, and then there\u2019s writing for money.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a tense pause. I figure I\u2019m dead anyway so I just say, \u201cOh I agree. I know it\u2019s beneath a lot of people. This was part of my conversation with Rook. He talked about how he would rather be completely invisible and unknown and be able to pay the rent, than to go for Twitter followers. In fact, he implied to me that writers who avoided the grubbiness of things like commercially viable genre fiction were showing a form of \u2018privilege.\u2019 He also told me that social media such as Twitter does not sell books at all, that a newsletter sent out to people who\u2019ve already bought one of your books is a better form of promotion since that group has already demonstrated an interest and a willingness to spend money on your writing. Ross was a goldmine of advice on matters literary and commercial that I would love to share more of with you.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Rudy waits for the others to show some sign of life, which they do, nervously, so he takes up his microphone and says, static translated into an imperial decree, \u201cTake a vote. Get rid of him\u2014or put the trespasser to work for us, writing erotica and pulling in the dollars.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

The votes on my fate, some of which they get from other hidden rooms at the Last Estate and via text, were chilling:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

William Duryea – die<\/span><\/p>\n

Gabriel Hart – die<\/span><\/p>\n

Derek Maine – die<\/span><\/p>\n

Jake Blackwood – die<\/span><\/p>\n

Stuart Buck – live<\/span><\/p>\n

Sybil Rain – live<\/span><\/p>\n

Miss Unity – live<\/span><\/p>\n

Pat Dry – live<\/span><\/p>\n

Rudy Johnson – live<\/span><\/p>\n

Sofia Haugen – die<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s a tie. It\u2019s decided by a flipping a coin \u2014 a wooden nickel marked \u201cRedeemable at the [REDACTED] Mississippi Homecoming July 1973\u201d \u2014 that I am to live.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

Like the bursting hucow hooked up to the teat cups of the milking machine, I am here connected to this iPhone and this laptop. I\u2019m handcuffed to this desk in the basement of the Last Estate, ever aware of Shorty and Lucinda the alligators, caught between my captors and Jeff Bezos, cranking out the words. I write erotica and other Kindle Publishing fare to benefit the Last Estate coffers.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

One last note on the subject of money and literature: The Romantic poet Lord Byron insisted that he was a Gentleman and that Gentlemen do not accept payment for their poetry. Centuries later some certain analogous prejudices still linger in various subtle forms: \u201cGentlemen do not do business with Amazon.\u201d Even before I was under the care of the Last Estate, with its gulag-quality room and board, I was on disability. I was on food stamps and did the EBT dance at the supermarket checkout lane, jumped through bureaucratic hoops to qualify. I don\u2019t know Peter Rook that well but I might say that Rook and I have this in common: we are not Gentleman authors, and that unlike some of the literati on Twitter we must sully our fingers with tacky banknotes, filthy lucre, the ink of commerce. Such is the reality of the Algorithm, the Big Algorithm which governs material life on this planet.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cWhat do we do with trespassers?\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10,"featured_media":4461,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"gallery","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4458","post","type-post","status-publish","format-gallery","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-articles","post_format-post-format-gallery"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4458","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4458"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4458\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4461"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4458"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4458"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/beyondthelastestate.com\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4458"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}