Book Twitter is a simulation and Taylor Brooke Barton is the computer

This one's coming straight off the dome.

I try to make it a policy to not comment on book drama events, especially not as they are 'breaking,' but I make this exception because it relates to my relationship to the bookish internet and, by extension, the book I've been (re)writing this year.

Yes, I take this chicanery personally. 

What chicanery? Here. 'Cause I am not explaining the timeline of this.

Also, you'll notice I use they/they pronouns throughout to refer to this cluster of identities. This isn't out of respect or disrespect as to their actual internal experience and identity, but because they have told so many lies and created so many personas that trying to deduce that is mind-rattling. I'm just skirting the entire question by referring to them, essentially, as a collective-shaped entity.

As of my writing this, the girlies on Twitter and its splintered clone sites have uncovered twelve confirmed alternate identities of Taylor Brooke Barton. Identities they used to build a series of fanbases within the queer publishing space through a combination of prolific production, underhanded masquerading as people of other marginalized identities, and extensive harassment campaigns.

Twelve indentities. And as I reviewed the material compiled by the mad detectives of queer romance Twitter, I was stunned to realize I recognized at least half of those names. It was a parade of jumpscares, just "Oh, THAT fucker," over and over again.

Book Twitter gets a bad rap, especially its queer and genre spheres. When people say it's a cesspit, what they mean is that there are roughly 30-50 accounts with large follower counts who will make your experience grating at best. 

What if 12 of those accounts, at a MINIMUM, were actually one person?

What if one person's brazen shittiness was setting the tone of an entire online space at a scale that defies belief? Behavior is contagious and chilling effects are real. If you believe Taylor Barton or Jupiter Wyse or Saint Harlow or Freydis Moon will be impressed by you if you behave a certain way, you might just do that. If you fear their wrath, you'll adjust your behavior and expression in different ways.

The internet's not dead, but the book side of it at least is smaller and less populous than we believe.

You may behave the way you do, make the creative and social choices you do, because a serial liar and harasser has poisoned the well. It's possible you - and I - are operating on assumptions informed largely by the social realities established by an actual supervillain.

Barton inhabits several of these entities - among them Harlow and Moon - concurrently, even playing their actions against one another to manipulate people. They impersonate and leverage identities they do not actually share to garner attention, sympathy, and grace that they believe they would not otherwise enjoy as Taylor Brooke Barton The Regular White Person. They're running a series of affinity frauds, and not even out of motivations I'd consider strictly professional.

See, people like these books. Barton has had (and burned, through their abominable behavior) at least two traditional publishing stints, with agents and everything. Even in the indie space, their books sell well and people - at least people who fall within the books' target audience - rate them highly. Their work, absent anything about them as a person, is evidently good enough to make a living off without the chicanery. I do not believe that enough people buying books off Amazon scour Twitter and Instagram for purity screenings to justify, in the mind of someone who'd ever consider doing what Barton has done, committing brownface just to make sure you have enough piss and vinegar threads about representation to gain clout among people buying your work. I just don't.

If you accept, as NPR and many other creators and organizations have begun to accept, that social media is nowhere near as important as advertised, this starts to feel a lot like an act of revenge.

It wasn't lying that lost Barton their first publishing deal, but overall repulsive behavior and an openly professed disdain for being made to apologize for said behavior. Before Barton was the many-headed-and-colored hydra throwing its weight around the bookish internet, they were a single racist, transphobic author with a publishing deal for their YA romance The Ninth Life. A deal they then lost because they couldn't stop acting like a complete monster, got called to the carpet for their bullshit, posted a coerced apology at the behest of their publishing team, had a public meltdown in which they assured everyone they weren't actually sorry, and subsequently lost their professional relationships. 

That the series of identities they proceeded to adopt were brown and more Gender than Barton and other concurrent personas had been feels... pointed.

What if, banished from a land of plenty, you could return in the guise of your enemy and destroy their peace without arousing suspicion?

What if you, in your disguise, could garner sympathy from those who would otherwise turn you out, and use this influence to play them against one another?

You can target your past detractors and their supporters without being accused of holding a grudge. You can strangle their careers in the cradle with bullying and rumor mongering. Just like you're convinced they strangled yours.

As someone who was motivated to leave Twitter and, for the most part, shelve his original writing practice up to January of this year, because of the toxic dynamics engaged in and perpetuated and entrenched by people like Barton, I've been rocked by the revelation that so many of these toxic freakazoids are just NPCs controlled by the same bitter, shitty person.

I have anxious memories tied to this entity's personas that date back to 2016. Taylor Brooke making my life more unpleasant predates Donald Trump making my life more unpleasant. That's WILD.

And this might not feel as momentous a revelation to me if I hadn't started rewriting a book that means a lot to me a couple months ago. Or if I could describe the book any other way than 'an occult detective story with a gay romance also present.' The filename on the first draft, now almost ten years old, was gayxfiles.doc, so like, yeah. Mysteries, and they don't always agree, but you know they're gonna do it.

Yeah, there's gonna be fucking. Lemme alone.

But in all seriousness: Being queer on the internet can be pretty unpleasant. Just like real life. Ditto sharing queer art. Triple ditto sharing queer art that's not cottagecore Booktok bait.

Oops.

Mean.

I guess, in a way, I'm feeling lost time. Time that Taylor Brooke has been using, I must admit, very effectively. For evil, but still. What do you do when the simulation is unveiled?