The Manticore's Riddle

They were a blogger for a while, when they first got set on fire by the implied permission of the scene ~2013. The rapid and constant feedback made a certain kind of person a certain kind of way and they could definitely feel the Pavlovian pull away from provincial wildness into urban provocativeness and occasionally on through to mercantile tidiness. Luckily positive feedback loops made them queezy. They were a writer for a while and had so much energy for it that they still find complete manuscripts in weird places like messages in time travelling bottles. They mistook the writer energy and the blog socialisation as a sign that publishing was the thing to do. Scenes! Books! Writing! So they were a publisher for a while and that went well. They were in an uncommon sweetspot of accidental competence for most parts of the job of producing and promoting books they cared for. Then they became a manager and were very bad at it but no one else was willing to do something so dreadfully…