Q&A - Social Media, AI, and the Blight of Professional Sheen

What follows is a Q&A with the author of the Mrs. Quarterhorse stories. Included among the topics are familiar agonies of our times, including AI, obviously, and, less obviously, indiscriminate professional sheen.

Q. Why this ridiculous Blogger page instead of a proper website?

A. Because it's good enough.

Q. But it doesn't look professional.

A. It's simple, it's clear, what more do you want?

Q. Sheen.

A. Why?

Q. So it will be taken seriously.

A. Anyone unable to overlook a lack of sheen is not worth being treated seriously.

Q. Isn't your ultimate purpose here to sell the Mrs. Quarterhorse books?

A. Yes, I suppose so.

Q. Then you shouldn't alienate potential customers by denying them the professional sheen they expect. Do you not want their business?

A. People who judge content based on sheen are also the sort who buy books, read them, then return them for a refund.

Q. Fair enough.

A. Furthermore, I'm opposed to sheen for its own sake. I'm sick of sheen. Website templates, stock photo libraries, generative AI, all there to effortlessly give the same professional sheen to absolutely everything everywhere.

Q. Just because turds are now presented with professional sheen is no reason to dismiss sheen itself.

A. I disagree. I now fully associate professional sheen with turds. To be clear, I'm only dismissing professional sheen, not professional content or functionality. As I've already stated, this website, mere blog though it may be constructed upon, is simple and clean, qualities rare among sites with professional sheen. This website functions as it should, and the content, while meagre, is at very least interesting.

Q. You mentioned AI. I was just about to bring it up.

A. It does churn in the belly like an imminent puke, doesn't it?

Q. I take it you don't use AI?

A. I often pose questions to Copilot or Gemini. It can be very helpful.

Q. To do what?

A. I'm currently using it to navigate through marketing at Amazon. I have no head for that sort of thing, and am more than happy to be walked through it. (Edited to add: Gemini's step by step advice on this matter would prove to be polite, well-paced, carefully explained, and almost completely wrong! Wrong with such precision it took on a sort of grotesque beauty, this wrongness. I should have realised much sooner that I was being lead into a minefield by a psychopath. When I began questioning its instructions, Gemini fessed up immediately, pleaded for my forgiveness. And then without missing a beat, with no less confidence than before, encouraged me to continue along with it into oblivion. Long story short, if this is the same AI powering the world's infrastructure, the end is truly nigh! It had a good run, Earth, but I think we've all known deep inside that the planet had run its course. Hug your loved ones and make your peace with Eternity!)

Q. Do you use AI to improve your writing or artwork?

A. No!

Q. Not at all?

A. Not one dot, not one word! Look, I've been using grammar checkers for as far back as I can remember. I use them to find mistakes that I've overlooked, like a their instead of a there, an its instead of an it's, stuff like that. Sometimes, no matter how often you proofread a text, a mistake that should stand out is somehow invisible. So, I'm grateful for grammar checkers. I'm more than happy to have troublesome phrases pointed out. But that is all I want from a grammar checker, a simple prod. I have no interest in suggested changes. I have never, not once ever, used grammar suggested by AI, and I never will! If a writer is letting AI write for them, even just to tweak the wording of a single phrase, that writer has crossed a line!

Q. So you're saying that if I write a 300 page novel, but use a grammar checker's suggested rephrasing of a single sentence, I have crossed a line?

A. Yes.

Q. That's a bit extreme, don't you think?

A. No. Look, if your job is writing pointless memos, then by all means let AI write them for you. After all, the people you're sending them to will likely be using AI to read them. But if you're working as a creative professional for living breathing humans? Forget it! If AI writes one single word for you, you've crossed a line.

Q. AI is just a tool, isn't it? No different than a hammer.

A. Yes, a hammer that will build you a house entirely on its own. Furthermore, keep in mind that AI is just a big averaging machine. AI text that you judge good enough for your book is also being judged good enough for millions of other books the world over. Everything will soon look and sound exactly the same.

Q. It's not all the same, is it? Authors—human ones, that is—have argued that there's an art to writing good prompts for AI.

A. Here's one they should try: "Find me a line of work for which I'm actually suited."

Q. If an artist is at least open about using AI, that's okay, don't you think?

A. It might be if AI weren't trained on stolen data! AI isn't magic after all, and it's not sentient. It has no creative sense. Any creativity in its output is already there in the stolen input. So, an artist being open about using AI is only admitting they steal from other artists. Confession is good for the soul, I guess.

Q. Moving on. If this site's admitted purpose is to promote the author S. C. Marchere's novels, why no corresponding social media presence?

A. You mean, why are there no Georges Presse, Marchere or Mrs. Quarterhorse Facebook pages?

Q. Not just no Facebook, no nothing. Just this blog masquerading as a website.

A. Facebook and Twitter pages were set up once, I think, but never used.

Q. Why not?

A. Look, I'm sick of talking about myself in the third person. I'm Marchere, okay? I'm the one answering these questions. And the reason I'm not on Facebook, or X, or anywhere else is because I can't be. I can't do social media.

Q. Shy?

A. No, I'm the opposite of shy! I can't shut up is the problem! Long before Facebook I've chatted online in forums. I love talking to people. I could chat all day and all night. You know how conversations branch out. Furthermore, I carefully read every post and put as much care into my own, no different than if I were a proper Victorian lady at a desk with pen and paper, tending to my daily correspondences. I simply cannot use emojis or any sort of shorthand. Not even in messages with family and my closest friends! If I have to message someone that I'm going to be ten minutes late, for instance, I'll stop to work out a suitable phrase! Causing me to be twenty minutes late. Facebook would have killed me. I saw immediately how it consumed people in my circles, and knew that for me it would be infinitely worse. I'd love to spend every day just chatting with people all over the world, but if I want to ever get any work done, I can't. And since I am incapable of meeting social media halfway, I have had to exclude it from my life. Same with peanut butter. If there's a jar around, I'll empty it.

Q. Surely you could manage a simple Facebook page just to promote the Mrs. Quarterhorse books?

A. No, I couldn't. Notice that even the comments here are switched off. I've given myself no quarter.

Q. Aren't your family and friends inconvenienced by your refusal to use Facebook?

A. Constantly. Whenever they've done anything worth sharing, they have to email or message me about it, attach pictures, a lot of work they don't have to do for anyone else. I'm a nuisance, I know it.

Q. It surely also means you are out of the loop regarding the news of the day.

A. That I am okay with.

Q. Not to get you all worked up again by mentioning AI, but it seems one of the problems with having no social media presence is that you might be mistaken for being AI yourself.

A. AI doesn't use as many exclamation points.

Q. I hear it prefers em-dashes.

A. I use them, too! They're useful little things. Sometimes a comma, colon, or semi-colon just looks weird, don't you think? Em-dash to the rescue. And that reminds me of another legitimate use for AI. I once asked it to write me a macro so I could hotkey the em-dash.

Q. But back to my point, doesn't it bother you to be mistaken for a bot?

A. Just because I don't use Facebook?

Q. Or anything else.

A. I'm here, aren't I?

Q. So at least part of the reason for this interview is to demonstrate your corporeality?

A. Yes. I'm not overjoyed to be real, by the way.

Q. Let's talk about something real. The Mrs. Quarterhorse books. They're supposedly going to be for sale one day?

A. I'm aiming for the first two books to be ready some time this autumn. (Edited to correct: the first two books will be published January 13, 2026 at Amazon. The ebooks are available for pre-order now, but the paperbacks cannot be ordered until the publication date.)

Q. When did you start writing them?

A. The first version of the first book I began in 2019. As of today, five books are in various stages of completion. I've been exclusively reworking the first two for the last two years and finally consider them finished.

Q. And the other three?

A. Six months more work for each of them. I find it hard to believe five years ago I'd thought all these books were ready for publication. They weren't even close! Makes me cringe. I've explained this all in a bewildering essay titled Mrs. Quarterhorse's Beating Heart. Read it at your peril. And please don't make me explain it all again.

Q. You've recently written some short stories as well?

A. Yes, I've been writing them concurrently with the novels. I can only work on the same thing for a few hours straight, so having several projects going at the same time just makes sense.

Q. Will the short stories be published?

A. They all conform to a theme. One of two themes, actually. Eventually they'll be collected into two books of related short stories. In the meantime, I'm offering them one at a time to publications, entering them in contests, using them to perhaps direct traffic to this site. The best I'm hoping for is to make a shortlist or two. (Edited to add: one of these stories, A Lost World, has been posted here in its entirety.)

Q. So then, someone clicks on a link and arrives here.

A. Yes.

Q. And then what?

A. They'll learn about the Mrs. Quarterhorse stories and consider reading them.

Q. How hopeful are you?

A. Not very. The books are really good, I wouldn't publish them if they weren't. I don't lack that sort of confidence! But the amount of competing material out there is overwhelming. Never in human history has there been such a steady, heavy flow of new fiction. Add to that the unceasing bulldozer dumps of low-content dreck and the ever-thickening AI gas-clouds, and the odds of being noticed are next to nothing.

Q. And if you're never noticed? Do you have a plan-B?

A. I barely have a plan-A!

Click here to learn more about the Mrs. Quarterhorse Series

Visit The Mrs. Quarterhorse Series at Amazon

Visit S. C. Marchere's Amazon Author Page

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