The Glendale Room, Glendale, Calif., 2005 | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
“Generally, my question for myself in life is pretty simple: Were you brave?” Subscribe to my newsletter here.
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A pink curtain at an art gallery, Los Angeles, Calif., 2024 | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
This is part 24 of Fuck You, Pay Me, an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.
July proved to be another busy month. Highlights include the announcement of my next book, an audition I’m doing for a well-known podcast, the latest from my newsletter, an upcoming public performance, and how my novel set in the San Fernando Valley’s adult movie industry is coming along. Let’s dive in, shall we?
The book
This month I was really delighted to share the news of my next book. It’s part of Bloomsbury’s 33 1/3 books series. If you’re not familiar with the beloved series, each book focuses on a single album. My book will focus on Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. I also wrote a bit about the process of pitching the book in my newsletter.
To be perfectly honest, when I proposed doing this book earlier this year, I didn’t think my proposal would be selected. Now that it has been, I’m really excited to be doing it. I spent a lot of time over the years listening to hip-hop so I hope I have something to add there, and I am a big fan of all things West Coast.
As I wrote in my book proposal:
“In the San Francisco Bay Area, I had come of age listening to hip-hop—from The Sugarhill Gang’s ‘Rapper’s Delight’ to Kurtis Blow’s ‘The Breaks,’ from Public Enemy’s ‘Bring the Noise’ to Gang Starr’s ‘Mass Appeal,’ from the Bay Area’s own Too $hort’s ‘Life is… Too Short’ to 2Pac’s ‘If My Homie Calls’—but this was something different.”
The audition
In other news, a couple months ago, I pitched a story to a popular podcast. The story had to do with one of the most extreme, out-there things I had seen as a journalist writing about the adult movie industry. While I had written about the subject in the past, I hadn’t told the full story of what I’d seen.
Once again, when I pitched this story, I wasn’t sure it would be picked. The subject matter is so beyond the pale, but this podcast has a history of doing stories that sit at the extreme end. When I got the email saying they were interested in a 10-minute audition of what the story might sound like, I went for it.
Actually, I really went down the rabbit hole. I re-researched everything I had created about this specific topic, reading stories, researching online, digging up old photos I’d taken that I hadn’t seen in several decades. I probably spend too much time feeling like my interests are too freaky for most people to be able to tolerate, but it felt validating to have someone else interested in hearing about it.
I’ll share what happens after I submit my audition.
The newsletter
This month over in my newsletter, I wrote about various things: my novel, my penchant for taking photos of people’s feet on adult movie sets, what a map of Porn Valley might look like. Over time I’ve learned with this newsletter to write about what interests me, and not worry about the rest. I read something someone wrote somewhere which is basically that newsletters are blog posts with an email function. That caused something for me to click. After all, I certainly know how to blog.
Upcoming subjects I’m thinking about writing about in my newsletter: an adult industry-related event taking place in L.A. soon, what happens when porn stars die, an idea I have for a group art gallery show that would pull back the curtain on the adult business.
Got a suggestion for what you’d like to read about in my newsletter? Email me here.
The stories
A few months ago, I started performing publicly again. First, I read an excerpt from a short story that I wrote that will be published in an online literary magazine later this fall at a bookstore in Echo Park. Next up, I read an essay I wrote about being a human lab rat at a basement bar in Atwater Village. This Sunday, I’ll be sharing a story about what I learned from hanging around adult movie sets as a journalist at Revealed at The Glendale Room.
I’m not sure why I’m doing these public storytelling experiments. So far I’ve learned my fiction is better read than read out loud, being entertaining is better than being boring, and I’m not sure I can tell a good story if I’m not reading something off a page. I guess I will find out! I tend to like to throw myself into new situations and see what happens. If I fail, no one will give a shit or remember.
Or so I like to think.
The novel
This morning, I finished writing the sixth chapter of my novel. I’m pretty proud of myself. Writing a novel isn’t easy. What a slog! What a test of endurance and will! I've reached the halfway point. There are only six chapters left.
Each chapter of this book takes place in a different city or community in the San Fernando Valley. The entire story takes place in a single day. The main character works in the adult movie business. Sometimes when I get stuck, I drive to the place where that chapter takes place. Inevitably, I get inspired.
What a joy and a pleasure and a gift to live in the Valley.
To quote Captain Willard in Apocalypse Now:
“When I was here, I wanted to be there. When I was there, all I could think of was getting back into the jungle. I'm here a week now. Waiting for a mission. Getting softer. Every minute I stay in this room, I get weaker. And every minute Charlie squats in the bush, he gets stronger. Each time I looked around, the walls moved in a little tighter.”
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I didn’t like Your Money or Your Life: 9 Steps to Transforming Your Relationship with Money and Achieving Financial Independence and mostly skimmed it. Feels dated. Not the way my brain works. Hard pass
.Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life, The Big Sleep, Eventually Everything Connects, Smutcutter, Shine Shine Shine, A Serial Killer’s Daughter, Confessions of a Serial Killer
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Library box, Monrovia, CA | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
This is part 12 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.
Thinking about applying for some writing residencies? This year, I applied to 14. That was … a lot. Now that we’re at the midway point of the year, I thought I’d consider what I’ve learned from the process thus far.
How It Started Back in January, I was updating and tidying my About page on this website, and as I did so I realized how impactful some writing residencies I’d done over the years were. So I thought, well, I should apply to some more this year. Would I get in? Who knows. Surely I wouldn’t if I didn’t try. I poked around on the internet and deduced I would probably apply to around 12 to 14. I’m the kind of person who is good at going full tilt rather than steadily doing something over time, and because the application deadlines for these various writing residencies were staggered over many months, this would also be a lesson in slow progress and sticking to a long-term process over time. By the way, if you don’t know what a writing residency is, you basically go somewhere and write. There are also residencies for artists. It’s a way to devote yourself fully to your project or escape your kids or see what happens when you create in a new space. Some charge money (I only applied to one of these), some pay you a stipend, and some feed you every meal and reimburse you for travel. In any case, over time I developed a list. I would apply to Ucross, Jentel, VCCA, MacDowell, I-Park, KHN, Millay, Monson Arts, Marble House, Headlands, Hedgebrook, Loghaven, Yaddo, and Mesa Refuge. I chose these residencies because they were the best of the best or they were somewhere interesting or they seemed cool.
How It Went There’s definitely a learning curve to applying to writing residencies. By the way, I should start out by saying that there’s a fee to apply to every residency to which I applied, but either all or most will wave that fee — it’s anywhere from I think the lowest was $25 and the highest was maybe $60 because that one was with a late fee and the average is probably $35 — if you ask or share that you have financial needs. At first, you don’t have all the things you need to apply. Without exception, you need some sort of material to submit. It’s pretty common for them to ask for 20 pages of your novel or nonfiction project or whatever thing you’re working on, but some asked for less (I think the most requested was 25 pages). Also, they often want an artist’s statement — like what your work in general as a writer is about — and oftentimes they also want a statement about the work itself — like this novel or what have you is about blah blah blah. I think all of them wanted a bio or some version of it. And then there are various other things like when you can come and if you have any special needs and if you have done other residencies what you have learned from them. Without exception, the ones I applied to do not ask for letters of recommendation but do want contact info for two to three people who can recommend you. Additionally, most of them use either Submittable or SlideRoom to manage the applications, and that makes it easy for you to see on your end what you’ve done and where it’s gone and what the status is.
How It Kept Going To be honest, at the beginning I didn’t do a lot of research on what I was “supposed” to do while applying because I kind of wanted to just figure out for myself. Over time, I did think more and do more research about what does and doesn’t work when applying for a writing residency. The big realization I had which is super obvious but wasn’t at the time was that as the writer applying for the thing you hope to get, you’re very me focused. Is my writing sample good enough? Is my bio impressive enough? Will these people think I suck as a writer and / or human being? Why am I doing this? But at some point I read something written by someone who, you know, reviews these types of applications, and I saw it more from their end. In a way, it’s a lot like applying for a job. It’s not just your skills or your resume, it’s also about whether or not you’re a fit — for their cohort, or their ideology, or their brand. So I tried to be a bit more me and a bit less saying what I thought they wanted me to say. Instead of trying to be perfect and impressive, I tried to show that I was creative and inventive and curious. You are going to be around other writers; I mean, they want to know who you are. Not just how you write.
How It Continues to Go Another thing I discovered that I hadn’t realized beforehand was that a fair amount of these applications are read blind. Which is to say they are read by people who are part of a review jury who are looking at your writing sample that doesn’t have your name on it and doesn’t include your bio. In a way, this is mortifying, like, why did I even spend all those years building out my bio only to have it not matter and what if my work on its own sucks? In another way, it’s great, because it levels the playing field (or makes it more level or at least seeks to do so), and it’s just your work out there, naked and free and exposed and waiting for the chips to fall where they may. I would also like to say that if you are LGBTQ+ or a person of color or are a writer with a disability, I would strongly encourage you to apply, as these writing residencies are very interested in diversifying their residency cohorts. Many of these places have pages on their websites where they show past residents, and you can see there is a wide range of experience levels and identities of all kinds. Writers. And poets. And composers. And artists. And interdisciplinarians.
Where It’s At Right Now As of today, I’ve applied to 14 residencies. I’ve gotten seven nos. Another one put me on a waiting list, and then I was pulled off the waiting list and got a residency. Yay! That made me feel like all the time and energy I had spent was worth it. I have yet to hear from the other six, and some I won’t hear from until the end of the year or maybe even early next year, and some are for residencies that aren’t until next year. The residency I got will take place later this year, and I’m really looking forward to it. I’m so glad I tried because it really helped me act like I believed in myself even when I didn’t feel like I should, it pushed me to position myself as a writer doing important work that says something about the world, and it made me remind myself of all the things I’ve done and have overcome. In any case, I’ll probably apply to more writing residencies next year, but half as many.
In closing, I would like to add that as I was readying to publish this post, I pulled my tea bag out of my mug, and the tag on the end of the tea bag read: “Relate to your greatness and not your weakness.” Nuff said.
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In January, I was updating my About page, and I realized how impactful doing various writing residencies and fellowships had been and how I’d made some great friends doing them. So I decided I would apply to some writing residencies this year. I did some research and estimated there were about twelve to fourteen to which I wanted to apply. The deadlines are staggered throughout the year, so I couldn’t do them all at once. Last weekend, six months later, I had applied to fourteen. So far, I was waitlisted by one that turned into an acceptance, I’ve been rejected by six, and there are seven more I haven’t heard from yet. Later this year, when I’ve heard back from all of them, I’ll write one of my Fuck You, Pay Me posts about it. Applying was a good exercise for a variety of reasons. It required perseverance. It demanded an investment with no guarantee of a return. It prompted me to think about my work as a whole and individually in a broader context. Next time, I’ll probably apply to half as many because fourteen was a lot! But I’m glad I did it. It taught me a lot.
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This is part 11 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.
Lately, I’ve been working on my novel-in-progress, which I’ve mentioned previously, and which is set in Porn Valley. Previously, I had published and was promoting my memoir, so this was a change of gears, from nonfiction to fiction. As a way of strengthening my fiction muscle, I created a project. Originally, it was called 30 Days of Smut, and the goal was to write 30 sex-related (not erotica) flash fictions in 30 days. Pretty quickly, I fell off that pace, but I continued to write anyway. Ultimately, I revised the project to 30 Days of Smut and generated 30 flash fictions in a couple of months. The exercise was helpful. Why? I’ll explain.
STRUCTURAL
I don’t believe in that whole idea that if you do something for 10,000 hours, you can master it. I mean, c’mon. But I do believe that doing something repeatedly can be beneficial and perhaps more importantly it can take you to places you wouldn’t go otherwise. So, as I stated in my introduction, I set up an informal structure within which I would be creating. I broke my project down into 30 bite-sized steps. All I had to do was churn out a flash fiction a day, and I had accomplished that day’s goal. That went along swimmingly for the first few days, but then something happened; life got in the way, as they say. I have no idea what it was, and it doesn’t matter. I thought about quitting as soon as I failed to meet my daily quota for the first time. But I didn’t. Instead, I kept at it. I changed the title of my project to cross out the 30 (as in days) part, and then I was no longer failing at the project I had intended. Instead, I was succeeding at the project as I had re-imagined it. The first 10 stories are about a porn addict, an adult store mannequin, a male porn star, a phone sex operator, a voyeur, that voyeur’s voyeur, a sex writer, a dominatrix, an autocannibalist, a fan of the autocannibalist, and a male stripper. None of those people, their internal lives, their curious thought processes would have existed if I had given up. Here is a line that I like, from “#6: The Sex Writer,” who has a challenging dating life because of her job: “No one wanted to take her home to their mother and say, here is my new girlfriend, the one who writes about bukkakes and gangbangs and CGI futanari.”
CRITICAL
How long did it take me to write each approximately 150 to 250 micro-fiction? Not long. I’m pretty sure it was maybe 15 minutes at the most. I mean, it was probably more like 10 minutes maximum. I wrote the story directly on the webpage I had dedicated to the project. I drafted it straight through without stopping or thinking. Then I published it. After that, I went back into the CMS and lightly revised the story, not really changing it so much as cleaning it up. If the story wasn’t perfect or not up to some standard in my head, oh, well! It was done. Finally, I added a photo to accompany the story (each story is paired with one of my photographs). Mission accomplished. With every story, I was one step closer to my goal. This uncensoring-the-self aspect of the project was the most important component and the most additive to what I was doing at the same time: working on my novel. I wasn’t so much exercising my fiction muscle, I was starting to realize, as I was shutting off the critical part of my brain and giving the creative part of my brain room to run around and kick up its heels and get a little wild. Stories 11 through 20 are about an avatar, a robot, a cougar (I was watching the second season of “MILF Manor,” which is totally insane, and which apparently deeply affected me or at least gave me a rabbit hole to go down), that cougar’s cub, that cougar’s cub’s ex-girlfriend, that cougar’s cub’s ex-girlfriend’s father, that cougar cub’s ex-girlfriend’s mother, that cougar’s son, a vagina, and a penis. Here is a line that I like from “#19: The Vagina (After Frank Kafka’s The Metamorphosis)”: “One morning, when the unidentified woman who may or may not have been a writer of stories about sex woke from troubled dreams, she found herself transformed in her bed into a vagina.”
MAGICAL
Is writing a little bit magical? Maybe. On the one hand, doing this project was easy. Bang out a few hundred words. Post it online. Do the same thing the next day. One the other hand, it was hard. In all likelihood, I suspected, no one was reading any of them. Why bother? Also, why was I sitting around writing weird short fictions about people who had curious fetishes and bizarre sexual desires? Wasn’t this whole thing sort of embarrassing? There was a chatty person in my head—let’s call her Susan—who thought the whole thing was pretty dumb and pointless. But Susan isn’t much fun, is she? And what did Susan ever do? Her job seems to consist of sitting on the sofa and criticizing what other people are doing. In any case, I was able to ignore Susan and keep writing. And my novel kept getting better. Because I was reminding myself that writing isn’t a job or a task or a list to be checked; it’s imaginative play, it’s the self on the page, it’s your unbridled mind running with the bit in its mouth. Stories 21 through 30 are about a sex club, a group of robots, a husband, an inflatable woman, a donor, a fetishist support group, a dating app for anglerfish, an AI wife, a woman who watches extreme pornography, and an ER murse who, well, it’s a little strange. Here is a line that I like from “#22: The Robots”: “Still, the nighttime bangings and clangings and humpings continued, a symphony of clashing steel and rubbing metals, a chorus of robot lovemaking.”
In any case, you can read all the stories here.
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I got these stickers a few months ago and use them on a regular basis. I don’t have a to do list, but I do nearly every day have a SUCCESSES list, which is where I write down what I’ve accomplished that day. I started adding these stickers at a certain point. Today’s is COULD USE A HUG. They’re fun and ridiculous.
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A Memphis strip club employee counts money, Memphis, TN | Photo credit: Susannah Breslin
This is part 5 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.
There’s been a lot of talk lately about the death of journalism. Reporters are being laid off. Journalists are out of work. I’ve been a writer for over 20 years. Throughout, I’ve been able to sustain my writing career by diversifying my talents. Here are some of the ways that I’ve made money by using my writer skills.
Copywriter. As I have written on this blog, I got paid $100 an hour pretending to be the personality of Pepto-Bismol on social media. This was a fun job. Sometimes I wish that I could do it again. According to my notes: “social media engagement [increased] by 500% and market share [grew] by 11%” during the time period in which I was pretending to be Pepto.
Journalist. Reporter. Journalist. Investigative whatever you want to call it. I’ve done pretty much every type of journalism there is. People say journalism dying. Maybe they’re right, but I doubt it. I’m probably best known for “They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They?,” an investigation of the Great Recession’s impact on the adult film industry. My reporting has been described as “unflinching and devastating.”
Author. Last year, I published a memoir: Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. Twenty years earlier, I published a short story collection: You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You? I got an advance for the former; I didn’t get an advance for the latter. Books are a long game hustle. They may pay more money, but they may cost you a great deal of time.
Editor. I’ve been an editor for from Forbes.com, where I was the founding editor of the Vices section, and The Frisky, a site for women that was owned by Turner. These roles involved interfacing with other writers and editing their work, so if you’re incapable of those things, don’t be an editor. These days, sometimes someone who has an “editor” title is really just a writer; why this is, I have no idea.
Publicist. One of my first jobs after graduate school was doing PR for a book publisher. Being a publicist is a tough job because you do a lot of pitching, and oftentimes your pitches are ignored or declined. But being a publicist is one of the most important jobs I’ve ever had because I learned how to publicize myself. That skill came in handy when my memoir came out, and I worked hard to promote it.
Traffic driver. I’m not sure what to call this gig, even though I’ve done it for big companies. Organizations hire me to drive traffic to their digital platforms. I’ve found I obtain the best results when I function as both an editor and / or content creator in addition to driving traffic. For example, when I was at The Frisky, I grew the site from startup to 4M+ unique visitors and 22M+ page views a month.
Consultant. My consulting work as The Fixer is my highest-paid work. Typically my client is a CEO / founder / venture capitalist. They have a problem, and they hire me to fix it. This covers a range of issues, from getting media coverage to assisting in business development to strategic growth. Truth be told, I am better at this than anything else and have added millions of dollars to clients’ portfolios.
Essayist. I wrote “I Spent My Childhood as a Guinea Pig for Science. It Was … Great?” — on spec. I avoid writing on spec, because it sucks, but I knew the essay would help me promote my memoir. Once I was done, I shopped the essay around to a dozen outlets. Two were interested. I went back and forth on contract terms with the first, and we were unable to resolve them. The essay ended up at Slate, where I had a great editor, it got an excellent title, and I was happy.
Fiction writer. I write short stories, and I have had many of them published. I was paid for some of the short stories that were published, and I was not paid for others. Currently, I’m writing a novel that is set in the San Fernando Valley’s adult film industry, and I’m really excited about that.
Screenwriter / Producer. I’ve done some writing and producing for TV. This includes developing documentary and scripted TV series, including true crime, outdoor adventure, and miniseries. I was also a consultant for a movie directed by an Oscar-winning director. The TV business is not for the faint of heart. If you’re writing your own TV or movie project, please register it with the WGA.
Fellow. From 2018 to 2019, I was the Lawrence Grauman Jr. Post-graduate Fellow at the Investigative Reporting Program at the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley. This was a salaried role with benefits. At the time, the IRP’s leadership was in flux, but that has since changed for the better. I used my time as a fellow there to work on my memoir, which includes investigative reporting.
Teacher. When I was in grad school, I had a fellowship. My tuition was waived, I received a stipend, and I taught one undergraduate course per semester. I taught freshman composition and writing the research paper. After I graduated, I taught at various community colleges around the Bay Area (aka a gypsy scholar). Sometimes I think about getting my doctorate but haven’t decided yet.
Photographer. Over the course of my career, I have had some of my photos published in media outlets. These include Men’s Health, Forbes.com, Le Journale de la Photographie, mashKULTURE, Nerve, and Arthur. I can’t recall if I was paid for any of these photos, but I do enjoy taking pictures.
Ghost. I’ve been a ghostwriter in various incarnations, from ghostwriting tweets for celebrities to ghostwriting speeches for CEOs. I haven’t ghostwritten a book, although I imagine at some point I will. Everyone wants to be an author nowadays. They just don’t want to write the book. Recently, I enjoyed reading a story about a ghostwriter conference: “Ghostwriters Emerge From the Shadows.”
Blogger. I started blogging in 2002. I had a very popular blog called The Reverse Cowgirl. It was one of the internet’s first sex blogs. In 2008, Time.com named it one of the best blogs of the year. These days The Reverse Cowgirl is the name of my Substack newsletter, which I plan to monetize.
Project-er. I create independent projects. The Letters Project series was conducted over five years. I shared anonymous letters sent to me from johns, working girls, strip club patrons, cheaters, and porn-watchers. These projects were covered by Salon, Newsweek, and CBC Radio, among other outlets.
Talker. I’ve been a speaker on various panels, presented my work at conferences, and read my writing at literary events. Some of these events have been paid; some of them have not. Quite a few of them have connected me with other writers, and that experience has been invaluable.
Seller. This is a sector to which I hope to devote more attention moving forward. I have a Gumroad store where I sell a short story that I self-published, signed copies of my memoir, and my consulting services. Gumroad is a very simple, easy platform to use, and I highly recommend it.
On camera reporter. Years ago, I was an on camera reporter for Playboy TV’s “Sexcetera.” I did this gig for five years, I got paid well for my time, and I traveled the world. I saw very wild things, and I wrote some of my own scripts, and I got to visit the Playboy Mansion three times. Being on camera taught me a lot about myself. It also boosted my confidence. And for that I have Hef to thank.
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This is part 4 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.
I want to say the first memoir I read was Silvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which, of course, is not a memoir at all but a novel. I want to say my favorite memoir is Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, which is maybe true and maybe not. I want to say my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, is not a memoir but a literary interrogation, and that might be right.
My general feeling about memoirs is that I do not like them. The memoirs of which I am thinking are written by women for women, are not concerned with the world at large but with the world of the interior (as if women have nothing to say about the world and must relegate themselves to writing about their interiors), are books of feelings that occupy a literary pink ghetto created by the publishing business that limits women to a silo of what is acceptable to write about and does so in order to mass produce books, regardless of what these books do or do not say or how they say it.
When people ask me for examples of the kind of memoirs I am talking about when I say I don’t like memoirs, I might say Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert or Untamed by Glennon Doyle. I’d like to believe these types of memoirs are on their way out, because surely women readers are getting exhausted from reading stories about women who go on personal journeys of great discovery that just so happen to take place in neat three-act structures and mostly have happy endings. The thing I dislike most about these sorts of memoirs is that they start from a shared premise. A woman is a broken thing. A woman is a thing that must be fixed. A woman must become some thing other than who she is in order to be happy. This the same lie the beauty industry sells: You, a woman, are not, are never enough.
Obviously, there are memoirs that do not follow these limiting definitions of what a memoir is. To name a few: The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston (who surely influenced me as one of my professors at U.C. Berkeley), In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson. As Megan O’Grady writes astutely in “These Literary Memoirs Take a Different Tack”: “Memory is also identity, and for those historically cast to the margins of our national stories, or those who grew up as the silent daughters or queer kids at the family dinner table, seizing control of one’s narrative has a particular power.” To write within the confines of someone else’s definitions of writing is to disappear oneself.
Memoirs are very popular these days. Prince Harry’s Spare was one of the best-selling books of 2023. Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me has sold over 2 million copies. Matthew Perry’s Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing was an “INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER” and a “#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER.” Did these celebrities write these books on their own? Regardless of what they may or may not say or have said, that is probably not very likely. In “Notes From Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter,” J. R. Moehringer shares that “memoir isn’t about you. It’s not even the story of your life. It’s a story carved from your life, a particular series of events chosen because they have the greatest resonance for the widest range of people.” He is not lying.
As I have written in this series previously, I sold my book to one of the Big Five publishers on proposal, and it was stipulated in the contract that I would write it as a memoir. I had not pitched the book I imagined I would write as a memoir but as a book that would interweave memoir, narrative nonfiction, and investigative reporting. I have a history, professionally speaking, of coloring outside of the lines, and I envisioned I would do the same thing with my book. Why be one thing when you can be, say, three? After all, what I was proposing wasn’t so, well, novel. Kingston’s memoir had been published in 1976. Didn’t the world want something … original?
Apparently not. The publishing industrial complex had other concerns. A way to market the book that was simple, obvious. A mode by which my book could be lumped in with other books that were supposedly like it. A formula by which the all-seeing-but-never-seen algorithm would sell a book-shaped product with my name on it. This was smoke and mirrors, a game of charades, a grim routine of The Hokey Pokey. I had worked in publicity and marketing but I could not see the sense in the squandering of an opportunity for a unique value proposition. Yet I had already signed on the dotted line. And what did I know? I wasn’t a publisher or a bookseller. I was a writer.
Generally speaking, I don’t like being told what to do. I find it constraining, like a personal violation. Because that is what it is. At a certain point in my writing career, when people younger than me asked me why I became a writer, I started saying: Because it is the only thing I do well. So to have my writing restricted, limited, or dictated in such a way—let’s be honest: in any way—was like being on a leash and the leash was tied to a stake and I kept spinning around until I was wholly tangled up in the lead. Ultimately, I wrote about some of these very issues in my book, and I would argue the book is not a memoir at all but a literary interrogation pretending to be a memoir to interrogate memoir itself, but I guess that’s for the reader to decide.
Recently I thought about some of these ideas as I read a review of my memoir in The Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism written by Surina Venkat. “Her memoir, a reordering of her eventful life, constructs a narrative of her own design — one with handpicked data points and where the data points are memory, resisting the depersonalizing role of the ‘studied’ that Breslin occupied for decades of her life,” Venkat observes insightfully. “Susannah Breslin was indeed a data baby — twice, even. And her second time, she flaunts the role, resisting its implications and asserting her own control over it.” The only way I could tell the curious story of my life was by wresting the narrative from others: my parents, my publisher, my own preconceived notions of what a memoir should or should not be. By seizing authorship, I assumed the role of author, which, per Merriam-Webster, does not conform to deal terms but is “one that originates or creates something.” And that, to put it frankly, is the entire fucking point.
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This is part 3 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.
I’ve been working on what I refer to as my porn novel, and it’s been going pretty well. I thought I’d share a few things I’ve learned so far. If the novel keeps moving forward, there will be more posts like this to come. By the way, my novel isn’t porn, or smut, or romance. It’s literary. I call it my porn novel for the sake of shorthand.
Do the math. There is nothing more daunting than writing a novel, so sometimes when I get overwhelmed, or stuck, or unsure, I quantify something that seems unquantifiable. You know, like a novel. So pretty early, I converted the project into numbers. The novel would be approximately 60,000 words long. It would consist of 12 chapters. Each chapter would be approximately 5,000 words long. Each chapter would consist of 10 sections. Each section would be approximately 500 words long. In this way, when I sit down to write, I’m writing another 500-word section of my novel, not attempting to write a novel that is 60,000-words long. Capiche?
Do it your way. Last year, I went to an estate sale at a Hollywood art gallery. Some of what was being sold was vintage adult movie posters. I bought a poster for a porn movie called “She Did It Her Way.” In case you can’t read between the lines, I did not feel while writing a memoir while under contract to a major publisher that I was doing it my way, so in a way the writing of this novel is an effort to go back to what I used to do, which is to write what I want to write how I want to write it, not write what I think someone else wants me to write because that is what I feel I am contractually obligated to do. This novel is all about doing it my way. The other way is bullshit.
Do weird shit. This novel is weird. I mean it’s written in English, but it certainly is very different. I don’t think it has any obvious comparisons in the world of novels, so I guess you could say it is quite original. Also, it has really weird stuff in it, like weird dreams, and a weird main character, and a weird kind of relentless focus on the life of a person in extreme detail to the point of being a little “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles”-esque. Do you know how many new books are published every year? I don’t either. But a lot. Secret: Most of them are garbage. Garbage or not, the only way to stand out from the crowd is to be weird.
Don’t overthink it. One thing I’m having a fair amount of success with in regards to this novel is not overthinking it. In fact, I don’t even think about it that much when I’m not working on it. I bang out these 500-word sections in about an hour, and I try not to do more than one of them a day. I allowed myself to create a draft of the first chapter that was a little messy but not overly so, and I paid a lot of attention to not dwelling on it, not sitting at the computer for a long period of time, and not spending hours of my life wondering whether or not it’s any good. I mean, it’s about the porn industry. How bad could it be? Ha-ha.
Don’t over revise. When I was done drafting the first chapter, which, I don’t know was done over the course of maybe a couple of weeks or a month or something, who knows, I can’t remember anymore, but not super long, I set it aside for a little bit. Then I decided I would go back and revise the first chapter. Revising my memoir was a bit of a nightmare, for reasons you may or may not be able to intuit, and I wasn’t sure when I went to revise this first chapter of my porn novel if that would be a nightmare, too. Thankfully, it wasn’t. I identified the issues pretty quickly and resolved them relatively easily. There are some things that need to be figured out and tweaked that have to do with the overall unspooling of the book, but I don’t think it will be some massive reinvention of the text. The only part I struggled a bit with was the last section of the first chapter. I’m not sure why. I’ll figure it out later.
Don’t stop trying. Awhile back, I wrote this post about the story of my life as a writer, and I realized as I was writing it how impactful certain events had been. Not obvious life shit, but writer shit. Like the writing residency I did in upstate New York, and the fellowship I did at U.C. Berkeley, and the seminar I did in a Philip Johnson building in Manhattan. And as I was writing the post, I recalled very clearly that for every single one of those things I applied for I was very cognizant of the fact that I didn’t think I was going to get it. But then I did. So I thought, you know, I should apply for some writing residencies for my porn novel. And then I thought, Oh, no, they’ll never pick me because this novel is literary but it is also about porn, and sometimes porn makes people twitchy. Anyway, I applied to one and more to come. Because you gotta try.
Decide to be transparent. If you have any awareness of me and my writing, you’ll know that I’ve tried to write this porn novel many times before, although always in different ways. This way feels different. I debated whether or not to share how it’s going at all, seeing as maybe I’ll just fail at it again, like all those other times. But then I thought, Fuck it. Who cares. One great thing about blogging is no one ever reads blogs anyway. This will be me, writing for me, about me. It will stand as a record of the point where I was now, and maybe at some point in the not-so-distant future I’ll look back on this and think: You go, girl.
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This is part 2 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.
INTRODUCTION
Twenty years ago, in 2003, I published a short story collection (fiction), You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You?, through an independent small press book publisher. This year, in 2023, I published a memoir (nonfiction), Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, through one of the Big Five traditional book publishers. What was the difference? Here I explore the pros and cons of each. (Note: For the sake of this post, I’m considering indie publishing to include small presses and traditional publishing to include the Big Five; these days, some people define indie publishing as only self-publishing, but that is not the case in this post.)
1. CONTROL
Indie: As I recall it, some time in 2003, I believe, I reached out to the founder of a small publisher of quirky books. By that point, I had been publishing weird short stories in print and online literary outlets, and I had amassed a decent sized pile of such over time. Enough for a collection. I reached out to the small press publisher, sent him my stories, and after awhile he responded, yes, he wanted to publish them as a small collection. In my memory, there was not a lot of editing, which was something that made me happy. A manuscript was created. I guess I reviewed it? I can’t really remember. The title of the book is the title of one of the stories. I seem to recall there was an earlier version of the cover I didn’t like, but then I think the same cover artist came up with the one you see in the photo above, which I liked. Eventually, the book was published. I was happy with how it turned out. I was proud. The book represented who I was.
Traditional: One thing about traditional book publishing that stands out in marked contrast to my previous experience with an independent publisher was that a large number of people were involved in the former. This time, there was an agent and the shopping of a book proposal to editors and meetings with people. There was a contract, an attorney, a team. I sold the book on proposal, and then I had to write it. I am not a team player; I do best creating on my own. The weight of being under contract to write a book that a publisher wanted me to write was considerable. This pressure caused a log-jam in the creative process in my head. Time dragged on. Finally, I hired a freelance editor who helped me finish the book. Did I write the book I wanted to write? That’s hard to say. Did I feel like I was in control of the creative process? Not all the time. Did I feel happy that I was done with the book? Yes, but I wasn’t so sure the book was me. A friend called it “Susannah light.”
2. MARKETING
Indie: Maybe my short story collection came out in September or thereabouts of 2003. Right around that time, I moved from Los Angeles to New Orleans, which in terms of the book was probably a stupid thing to do. I seem to remember having a profile written about me in the New Orleans weekly and I think there were some positive reviews and some guy who lived in Portland or something reviewed it and said reading my book was like being trapped next to an old woman drunk in a dive bar who would not shut up and the fact that I still remember that is a real testament to the negativity bias. I’d had a popular blog, but I think I had torn it down at that point, as I like to think of a life well lived as a let the bridges I burn light my way kind of a performance piece, and social media wasn’t a thing yet. The book came out, and I was pleased with it. By that point, I was working on a novel set in the porn industry, and I had, you know, as writers do, kind of moved on.
Traditional: Depending on who you ask, you may be told that either the big publishers no longer have the money to market every book or the big publishers are no longer interested in marketing books unless you are Stephen King or James Patterson or Colleen Hoover. I understood that for my memoir, I would be doing a fair amount of self-promotion. This was to be done mostly on social media or on a platform owned by someone else or in some other public forum. The idea was to flog the book by any means necessary. So I did. A long time ago I was a publicist, so I did all the things I could do to promote the book. The publisher did what they did, and I did what I did, and some good things came out of it, which are all here, but include a New York Post profile and a Slate essay I wrote and a starred review in Publishers Weekly and being a celebrity book club pick and I think there’s something else I’m forgetting. It was like being a busker: It was exhausting.
3. BUSINESS
Indie: I have no idea how the money worked with my short story collection, which is exactly as it should have been because I didn’t really care. The fictional short stories I wrote were strange and filthy and twisted. They featured pornographers gone wild and a woman who pretended be a lamp to sate the sexual desire of her partner and one guy who wanted to eat a woman. That’s all I cared about: the writing, the literary-iness, the creative expression. I don’t think I particularly cared who read it or why or what they thought about it. I do know that at a certain point the book sold out, and if you want to buy a copy today you’ll have to pay $1,085.62. As an enterprise, this was an exercise in privileging art over commerce. I did not regret it.
Traditional: When I signed the contract with my publisher, I got an advance. That advance was chopped up into multiple smaller amount payments. I also spent money during the course of working on the book: on the freelance editor, on messing around with boosting some posts about the book on Instagram, and on sending copies to various people. The book itself as a product is very pretty; of this, I am very sure. It has a lovely cover, and it feels nice to the touch. This book is very much an object; that’s how I see it. This object was created by a capitalist machine that spits out books the way a tuna canning factory spits out cans of tuna. Is my memoir a book or a can of tuna? Am I book or a can of tuna? Some days, I am not entirely sure of the answers.
CONCLUSION
I guess what I have found is that distinctions between different types of book publishing are by and large arbitrary and mostly wrong and generally manufactured. I have come to believe that independent book publishing and traditional book publishing and self-publishing are mostly all the same. I am of the mind that a book is not a book or a can of tuna but a mirror, that people do not write books for no one but to be read, and that the person who the author writes the book for is the author. Comparing and contrasting distribution models and marketing budgets and jacket design is mostly irrelevant. Because in the end the only thing that matters is when you hold up your book, do you see yourself—or do you see someone else?
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The writer at 4
This is part 1 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.
1. Get lucky. Be born. Have English professor parents. Be read to a lot. Learn to read. Read a lot. Go to a weird kindergarten that lets you sit in a box all day, reading books. Be taken to the library. Be taken to bookstores. Watch your father write books. Spend a lot of time on your own in your room, reading books. Cultivate an expansive imagination. Make up stories in your head. Listen to your father crouched down on the floor next to your bed making up bedtime stories that you’ll wish you could remember as an adult but can’t. Decide books are your friends.
2. Look for the helpers. Go to grade school. Go to high school. Bond with various English teachers along the way who tell you or suggest to you or make you feel like you are a good writer and think to yourself: Maybe I am. Drop out of high school in your senior year to the disappointment of pretty much everyone. Attend community college. Transfer to U.C. Berkeley as a junior. Major in English at the same university where your father is a professor. Fall in love with James Joyce. Fall in love with William Faulkner. Fall in love with Jacques Lacan. Consider becoming a writer.
The writer in Austin, Texas
3. Write a lot. Get accepted to a graduate school master’s degree program that is 50% literature and 50% creative writing. Move to Chicago. Make friends with other writers. Read more. Write more. Pen academic essays and short stories in which strange things happen. Graduate. Return to the Bay Area. Have your father die. Realize that you want to be a writer, now that your father (the writer) is dead. Start an online magazine about post-feminism with your friends from graduate school. Interview a porn star. Get invited to a porn set in Los Angeles. Move to L.A.
4. Find a niche. Become a sex writer. Write about the porn business. Appear on TV. Write for glossy magazines. Get hired to be a reporter on a Playboy TV show that’s basically “60 Minutes” on Viagra, a gig that takes you around the world and results in you visiting the Playboy Mansion three times. Date a famous comedian who dumps you. Date an artist who makes fire-breathing robots. Start one of the first sex blogs, which is called The Reverse Cowgirl; the tagline is: “In which a writer attempts to justify the enormity of her porn collection.”
5. Sell out. Leave L.A. for reasons you’ll be unable to understand later. Move to New Orleans, Louisiana. Publish a collection of short stories with a small publisher. Identify Hurricane Katrina is on its way to where you live and leave. Move to Norfolk, Virginia. Sell freelance articles, generate blog posts, and try to write a novel about the porn business but fail repeatedly. Move to Austin, Texas. Become a copywriter. Get hired to be the voice of Pepto-Bismol on social media, something at which you are good. Wonder what you’re doing with your life. Feel unsure.
The writer in Naples, Florida
6. Give up. Move to Chicago, Illinois. Get married. Get breast cancer. Feel like maybe you’re going to die, or maybe you’re not going to die, but either way the chemo makes you feel like you’re dying so what’s the difference. Survive. Write for the Forbes website. Try intermittently to stop writing about sex because you’re married and it seems unseemly. Keep writing about sex anyway. Move to Naples, Florida. Become extremely unsure who you are or what your life has become or what you’re going to do next. Get divorced. Move back to L.A.
7. Try again. Pick up the pieces of your life, attempt to arrange them into something else, and identify it looks like a mess. Start a strategic communications consulting business that you describe as “I tell C-suite guys what to do.” Decide that you’re going to write the memoir that you were trying to write when you were married, which is about how you were a human lab rat in a 30-year longitudinal study of personality starting when you were a kid. Apply for an investigative reporting fellowship at U.C. Berkeley, which is where the study was conducted, so you can research the book. Tell everyone you’ll never get the fellowship. Get the fellowship.
The writer in an experiment room
8. Face your fears. Move back to your hometown. Rent an in-law apartment in a house that’s less than a mile from the house in which you were raised. Start your investigating. Visit the preschool where you were studied. Explore the building in which you were studied. Take a selfie in one of the one-way mirrors through which you were spied on in an experiment room. Begin to wonder how this experience of being studied shaped the person you became. Wonder if people are who they are or if life changes people and if the latter is true, can writing the story or your life change you, too?
9. Write a book. Return to L.A. after the fellowship ends. Craft a book proposal about your human lab rat life. Acquire a literary agent. Sell the book on proposal to one of the big publishing houses on the other side of the country. Watch as the pandemic descends on the globe. Debate the point of writing anything, seeing as the world is coming to an end. Spend a long time writing the book. Have your mother die. Write your mother dying into your manuscript. Hire a freelance editor who helps you finish the book and whom you refer to as your “book doula.” Wait for the book to be published.
10. Believe in yourself. Get the book published. Appear on some book lists. Get some good book reviews. Have an article about you and your book published in a newspaper in which your photograph appears. Promote your book on social media. Do some interviews about your book. See your book in some bookstores. Thank people for buying your book. Hold your book in your hands and experience a mix of pride at your hard-won accomplishment and the clarity that it is far too late for either of your now dead parents to acknowledge it. Put the book on the shelf in your living room. Consider what to do next.
The writer in The New York Post
11. Question everything. Turn into the living embodiment of that meme in which a dog is sitting in a room that is afire and the words say: “This is fine.” If this is a midlife crisis or an existential crisis or some other sort of crisis, it is the quietest crisis ever, a kind of imploding. Who are you and what are you doing and is this who you are supposed to be? These are the same questions you have been asking yourself for a long time, and you still don’t have the answers. Interviewers want you to give them a happy ending to the story of your life when they ask you about your book, but this is your reality. Life goes on.
12. Start all over. Think about how over two decades earlier, you stood on the set of a porn movie and thought: I should write a novel about this. Think about all the times you have tried to write it and failed. Try to write it again. Fail again. Try writing it another way. Fail again for a second time. Think of another way to write it that is new, an idea that sounds like a terrible idea because maybe no one will read it because it’s so totally out there. Think about how the way you shouldn’t do things is exactly how you should do things. Try writing the novel that way. Love it. Keep writing it. Feel better. Keep going. You’re a writer now, after all.
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Here’s my advice on writing a memoir:
Write about something more than just yourself. Navel gazing is boring.
Expand the genre. Incorporate narrative nonfiction, investigative journalism, images, drawings, experimental prose, data analyses, etc.
Divide it into pieces. Every brick wall was laid brick by brick.
Ignore gender stereotypes. Eat Pray Love is pablum. Angela’s Ashes is steak.
Good may be the enemy of great, but who wants to settle for good?
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Best career advice that I can give: Don't ever attach yourself to a person, a place, a company, an organization or a project. Attach yourself to a mission, a calling, a purpose ONLY. That's how you keep your power & your peace. It's worked pretty well for me thus far.
— erica williams simon (@missewill) June 6, 2018
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In this week's newsletter, I try to remember how I ended up on Playboy TV, share how to recognize Your 22 Minutes, and reveal the famous men you encounter on dating apps when you live in LA. Read it here. Subscribe here.
An excerpt:
Last week I mentioned that one of Hollywood’s most famous (and shortest) TV executive producers hit me up on Tinder. When you live in L.A., dating apps are sprinkled with folks you’ve seen on the screen. Among those I’ve spotted in Swipeland: Mike Judge, The Allstate Guy, Stuttering John, Todd Bridges, and a porn director who shall remain nameless. I’ve since quit Tinder—again.
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In April, I launched my first newsletter. (Read it here. Subscribe here.) Since it’s been a few months, and I've been enjoying the process, I thought I’d share what I’ve learned about newslettering thus far.
It’s fun
Like blogging in the early days, when the medium hadn’t been co-opted by corporations, blogging felt like a radical act. Newsletters feel that way now. In this space, there aren’t a ton of supposed-to’s, and the energy is a bit more wild, wild west. That’s inspiring and refreshing.
It’s easy
I use Substack as a platform for my newsletter, and it really couldn’t be easier. If you’re thinking about doing a newsletter, I recommend Substack. It’s easy to post, it’s easy to see your stats, and it’s easy to deliver to your audience. Also, it’s not in a silo. Depending on how your settings are set, your newsletter can also appear online for non-subscribers to read, in addition to arriving in your subscribers’ email in-boxes.
It’s pivotable
If you decide you want to change how you’re newslettering, you can do so relatively easily. At first, my Substack domain had my name in it, which wasn’t a very good idea, because my name is too hard to spell. Then I changed it to Valleywood, which is a compound word that combines the San Fernando Valley, where I live, and Hollywood, which is the predominant LA culture. Maybe I should’ve named it The Reverse Cowgirl, or maybe that would have sent it into people’s spam folders. Who knows. Also, initially, I was writing them more like essays. Then I started writing them like listicles. I like the latter format better.
It’s slow to grow
At least for me, my newsletter audience has been pretty slow to grow. I’m approaching 200 non-paying subscribers. My click-through rate, which is how many people open the newsletter to read it, is pretty high: around 64%. Judging by the feedback I’ve gotten, on social media and in emails, people are enjoying it. Here’s one review: “One of the most intelligent and entertaining newsletter you will ever read!”
It’s cheap
There’s no overhead to do my newsletter, except for the time that I put into it. I don’t think I have the reach yet to go paid. But one day, I may. Or perhaps it will always be free. We’ll just have to wait and see.
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A month or so ago, I stopped writing to-do lists and started writing successes lists. Instead of writing a list of what I was supposed to do, I started doing the things that I knew I needed to do, and then, as I completed them throughout the day, I wrote a successes list. Everything and anything that was positive and or productive went on the successes list, from doing Pilates to finishing a draft to creating a blog post. I found this to be a helpful trick that converted the day’s “musts” into the day’s “mission accomplisheds.”
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Check out my new newsletter: TheFixer. The latest installment is live: “The Shotgun Effect.” Subscribe here.
Here’s an excerpt:
I sent my resume to men and women. Quickly, I noticed there were two types of responses. Women tended to offer emotional support. Men tended to offer strategic support. Every single potential lead I got was from a man. None was from a woman.
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I shared some of what I’ve learned as a consultant to male C-suite executives in Victoria Pynchon’s newsletter. You can read the whole thing here, and you can sign up for her newsletter here.
An excerpt:
“When women get locked into imposter syndrome, men dive into the unknown of presuming they’ll figure it out along the way. Take a page from the guy who landed the corner office by faking it until he made it. He isn’t any more capable than you. He’s just more capable at pretending that he’s more capable than you.”
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