Fuck You, Pay Me #16: An Excerpt From My Memoir

This is part 16 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing. Read the rest of the series: Part 1: How To Become a Writer in 12 Easy Steps, Part 2: The Pros and Cons of Traditional vs. Indie Publishing, Part 3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel, Part 4: Why I Hate Memoirs (but Wrote One Anyway), Part 5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer, Part 6: Letters From Johns Revisited, Part 7: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Journalism Edition), Part 8: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Fiction Edition), Part 9: How to Promote Your Book Without Going Crazy, Part 10: The Pornification of My Life, Part 11: How to Be More Creative, Part 12: The Fine Art of Applying to Writing Residencies, Part 13: How to Be a Consultant, Part 14: Cranking the Flywheel, Part 15: Why You Should Have a Newsletter, Part 16: An Excerpt From My Memoir.

For this installment of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” I’m sharing an excerpt from my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. This is the beginning of the book, where I become a human lab rat. If you like what you read here, you can buy it on Amazon or wherever fine books are sold.

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As I understood it, my life in a psychological experiment began on the day I was born. At 1:38 a.m., on April 10, 1968, I was delivered in the maternity ward of an Oakland, California, hospital. According to my mother, I was a hideous baby. Instead of having two distinct eyebrows, my eyebrows met in the middle to form one long horizontal brow, otherwise known as a mono-brow, which, while flattering on the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo or the basketball player Anthony Davis, was unsettling on a newborn. Due to a severe case of jaundice, my skin and the whites of my eyes were a curious shade of yellow, giving me a radioactive glow. And my skull was grossly misshapen, the result of the compression my cranium had undergone as I journeyed down my mother’s vaginal canal. Unsure what to do (as if there was anything to be done) or say (as if there was anything to say) about my unfortunate countenance, the obstetrician cut the umbilical cord and thrust me in the direction of my mother.

At the time, my father—handsome, athletic, thirty-three, six-foot-four, from Brooklyn, New York—was a poetry professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and my mother—attractive (in a nerdy sort of way), svelte (when not pregnant), thirty (coincidentally, I had arrived on her birthday), five-foot-eleven, from Allentown, Pennsylvania—was an English instructor at UC Extension. They had met while pursuing their respective doctorates at the University of Minnesota and had relocated to the San Francisco Bay Area after my father had secured a tenure-track faculty position in the English department at UC Berkeley. While they intended to start a family eventually, my sister, who was born three and a half years earlier, had been an accident. I had been planned.

In those days, doctors believed that if a husband (say, my father) were to witness his wife (say, my mother) laboring to eject a small human being (say, me) from her vagina as she sprawled on a delivery table awash in a mess of her sweat, urine, and fecal matter, it could ruin a couple’s sex life. As a result, my father had been banished to a waiting room down the hall (such rooms were known as Stork Clubs), where he had spent the last several hours pacing, smoking, and eyeing the wall clock, alongside the other stressed-out, impatient, flustered fathers-to-be. Finally, the waiting room door opened, the nurse called my father’s name, and he was informed that both mother and child were resting comfortably and could be seen shortly. One of the other men offered him a cigar. Another man clapped him on the back. Thank god, my father, who was an atheist, thought.

“She’ll be tall,” he observed some time later, standing sentinel next to a hospital bed occupied by my mother. A nurse had propped her up with pillows and tucked me into the nook of her arm. He was relieved that I was healthy, that I had all of my fingers and toes, and that I was mostly shaped like a normal baby, but he had been hoping for a boy. He had wanted a son to teach how to play basketball. Given my height, which he projected would be exceptional, I could be taught to play basketball, he hypothesized. He started planning how to teach me layups.

My mother, whose long wavy red hair was tied loosely back and who was wearing a white hospital gown with a cornflower pattern, didn’t respond. As a post-delivery flood of oxytocin and endorphins coursed through her system, she scrutinized my visage, seeking to divine my future. Trying to ignore my unpleasant eyebrows (eyebrow? she corrected herself), yellowish hue, and oddly shaped head, she surveyed my large forehead, long eyelashes, and round face that reminded her of Richard M. Nixon, who was then campaigning to be the next president of the United States. It was hard to tell at this stage. Perhaps I would be a teacher, or a writer, or some other thing having to do with language, or words, or books (like my parents), she speculated hopefully.

“Have you got it?”

My father nodded and patted the pocket of his green army coat, which he had bought at a secondhand store. It had previously belonged to a soldier who had fought in a war that my father had no interest in fighting and into which he was exempted from being drafted.

“I should get going. I don’t want to be late.” He patted my mother’s left leg, which was sticking out from underneath the sheet, presuming that would suffice. “Will you be all right while I’m gone? I shouldn’t be longer than an hour.”

“We’ll be here.”

He brushed my mother’s cheek with a perfunctory kiss.

In the parking lot, he slid behind the steering wheel of a beige four-door 1967 Dodge Dart. He started the engine and drove out of the lot, heading north. He crossed the city border and entered Berkeley. Two blocks south of the university, he parked on the west side of a predominantly residential street. In the distance, he could see, the Berkeley Hills were shrouded in fog, the white tendrils curling around the tops of the redwood, pine, and eucalyptus trees.

He was early, so he settled in to wait. His light-brown hair was thinning at the top. He had circles under his green eyes, due to genetics and his propensity for worrying. Under his jacket, he wore a long-sleeved denim shirt; my mother had sewn a name patch over the left breast pocket that read JIM in red cursive and made him look more like a gas station attendant than a college professor, which was how he preferred it. My mother had sewn purple-and-gold ribbon to the bottom hem of his bell-bottom jeans, elongating them to accommodate his long legs. On his size 14, extra-wide feet he wore a pair of brown leather lace-up ankle boots with white rubber soles.

From the driver’s seat my father eyed the low-lying complex across the street, which consumed most of the block. It comprised two single-story, flat-roofed, warm-orange stucco structures with dark redwood piping that had been rendered in the Bay Area modernist style. The rectangular building to the north held the administrative offices; the T-shaped building to the south contained the classrooms.

On the right-hand side, a tall, dark redwood fence extended to the corner and obscured the outdoor play yards from view by any curious passersby. In front, a natural wood sign with white painted letters planted in a bed of ivy and framed by purple plum trees read:

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA

HAROLD E. JONES

CHILD STUDY CENTER

2425 ATHERTON STREET

Four decades earlier, a pioneering initiative led by the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial had funded the establishment of child studies institutes at half dozen universities across North America: Yale University, Columbia University, the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, the University of Toronto, and UC Berkeley, the only Rockefeller-funded research institute in the West. At UC Berkeley, the Institute of Child Welfare planned to “study the factors that affect human development from the earliest stages of life.” But its researchers had needed children to study. An exclusive laboratory preschool had offered a win-win solution: The university’s faculty and staff got convenient, affordable, quality childcare and its researchers and students got young human subjects.

Originally, the preschool had been housed in a large, rambling wood house on the south side of campus, where a screened pavilion allowed researchers to observe the children while they played in the yard. From the beginning, it had been of the utmost importance that the children not know that they were being studied; if the children had realized someone was watching them, they might have changed their behavior, due to “the observer effect,” the phenomenon by which the act of observing something changes that which is being observed.

By the late 1950s, the Institute of Child Welfare had been renamed the Institute of Human Development, and the preschool’s ad hoc home had fallen into disrepair and been condemned. The university had enlisted Joseph Esherick, a tall, laconic UC Berkeley architecture professor, to design a new building. Esherick—who went on to design The Cannery, a shopping center in San Francisco, the demonstration houses at Sea Ranch up the coast in Sonoma County, and the Monterey Bay Aquarium down the coast in Monterey; who, in 1989, was awarded a gold medal by the American Institute of Architects, putting him in the company of Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and I. M. Pei; and who liked to say, “The ideal kind of building is one you don’t see”—had never designed a preschool before, much less one made for spying on children. In 1960, the Harold E. Jones Child Study Center, which had been named for the Institute of Human Development’s late director, had opened its doors to great fanfare.

My father checked his watch. It was almost eight o’clock. Moving determinedly, he pushed open the driver’s- side door, stepped out of the vehicle, and strode purposefully across the street. From the sidewalk, he made his way up the zigzagging entrance ramp. At the top of the ramp, he turned right, tracking east between the buildings along a concrete walkway under a dark redwood trellis canopied with translucent plastic panels in bright colors—ruby, tangerine, lemon, and turquoise—which on sunny days cast Technicolor shadows across the walls, windows, and walkways below. Three-quarters of the way down the path, he turned left. Moments later, he walked into the main office.

“Hello,” a woman said from behind the front desk.

“Good morning.” My father reached into his jacket pocket, from which he produced an envelope that contained an application for my enrollment. He handed it to her. “This is an application for my daughter.”

She took the envelope.

“She’s six and a half hours old,” he said.

“Congratulations,” she said, seemingly unsurprised.

“This is what we were told to do. Because of the waiting list.”

“We appreciate your interest,” she said and smiled enigmatically.

As my father retraced his steps, he picked up his pace. He had taken the day off from work, and now he had completed his mission. Tomorrow, he would drive to campus, where he had an office on the fourth floor of Wheeler Hall, a gray stone Classical Revival building. From the balcony, he would admire the view of Berkeley, the Bay, and the Golden Gate Bridge. Then he would go inside, sit down at his typewriter, and get back to writing his book.

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Fuck You, Pay Me #15: Why You Should Have a Newsletter

This is part 15 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing. Read the rest of the series: Part 1: How To Become a Writer in 12 Easy Steps, Part 2: The Pros and Cons of Traditional vs. Indie Publishing, Part 3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel, Part 4: Why I Hate Memoirs (but Wrote One Anyway), Part 5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer, Part 6: Letters From Johns Revisited, Part 7: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Journalism Edition), Part 8: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Fiction Edition), Part 9: How to Promote Your Book Without Going Crazy, Part 10: The Pornification of My Life, Part 11: How to Be More Creative, Part 12: The Fine Art of Applying to Writing Residencies, Part 13: How to Be a Consultant, Part 14: Cranking the Flywheel, Part 15: Why You Should Have a Newsletter, Part 16: An Excerpt From My Memoir.

I’ve been writing on the internet for a very long time. Since the ‘90s. First, I co-created and co-edited an online literary magazine. Then I had a popular blog. Along the way, I wrote for various publications, digital and print. Today I have my own website with its own blog, and I have various social media channels. Throughout it all, there have been many trends for sharing content online. At one point, you had to have a blog. Then there was that whole pivot to video thing. Somewhere on the route, it was decided that if you weren’t an influencer with clout, you didn’t count. These days, newsletters are the current supposed must-have, and there’s a competitive frenzy over who has the most subscribers, and whether they’re paying subscribers or not, and what said newsletter’s open rate for its emails, and wait how are you monetizing your newsletter in other ways, by the way? In my opinion, newsletters are just one more fad that will boom and bust, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have one. In this edition of Fuck You, Pay Me, I share 10 reasons why you should have a newsletter.

1. It’s an experiment. Should you have a newsletter? Should you not have a newsletter? If you have one, will anyone read it? If you do it, should you monetize it? If you start it, what should you write about? Who cares? Who knows? Everything is an experiment in the beginning, and things only become successful (or not) in hindsight. My first newsletter was called Valleywood, but when that didn’t feel like a fit for me, I started a new one called The Reverse Cowgirl. The latter feels like a better fit. It took some experimenting to figure that out. But the experimenting, the not-knowing, was required to reach the solution.

2. It’s creative. Before I landed on my current newsletter format, which is kind of written like a personal and professional diary, I tried writing my newsletter in various formats. A listicle. A bunch of photos. An essay. More personal and less professional. More professional and less personal. I even used AI to write one (a fact that I disclosed). More recently, I landed on a format I seem to like the best, which is both personal and professional, which incorporates, among other things, a mini-listicle and what I’m doing writing-wise, and which combines a set of different things that appeal to me. This means I have a basic structure that makes the newsletter easier to do and more consistent, but it also means that I can do a bunch of different things within that format, which basically sums up my entire career.

3. It’s multimedia. If you’re posting on social media, you’re probably posting content in one or two mediums. On X, that may be text. On Instagram, that may be an image. On TikTok, that may be video. On Substack, which is the newsletter platform I use, you can do all of those things: write, post images, share video. You can embed social media posts. You can use Substack’s stock photos or its AI image generator. You can share live video. This multimedia approach appeals to me, someone who writes and takes photos and spends too much time on social media. I want to do all the things, not just the one thing. This multimedia approach may also be more appealing to your subscribers, some of whom may be more text-oriented and some of whom may be more visually-oriented.

4. It’s free. On Substack, as long as your newsletter is free to subscribers, there are no costs. You don’t need any special equipment, it’s easy to set up and get started, and there’s no charge for you to send your newsletter to your subscribers. If you enable paid subscriptions—start charging your subscribers to read some or all of your newsletter content—there are fees, which are outlined here. But otherwise, Substack is a free tool, one that you can use to experiment with, create multimedia content with, and share with, and that makes it an attractive option. Of course, Substack isn’t the only newsletter platform, and there are others, which have their own pricing.

5. It has no editor. As someone who has been writing forever, I’ve had a lot of editors over the years. Some are great and have improved my writing. Some are so-so and don’t have much of an impact. Some are terrible and shouldn’t be allowed to edit their own shopping lists. With my newsletter, I have no editor. No gatekeeper who gets to green flag or red flag what I want to write about. No person meddling with my prose. No point-of-view I have to take into consideration when trying to decide if I should or shouldn’t write about something of interest to me. If you’re a weak or inexperienced writer, not having an editor may be a downside, but for me, it’s all good when the editor is not only not in my head but doesn’t exist.

6. It’s uncensored-ish. This isn’t exactly true and not without complications, but I would argue that Substack takes a mostly hands-off approach to content moderation, within reason. (You can find Substack’s Terms of Use here and Content Guidelines here.) This aspect of Substack is not without complications, but for someone like me, whose newsletter’s subject matter is sex, it makes a difference that I not be creating on a platform that has a hair-trigger approach to content moderation, like, say, Instagram. Substack allows “depictions of nudity for artistic, journalistic, or related purposes, as well as erotic literature, however, we have a strict no nudity policy for profile images.” And that’s good enough for me.

7. It’s personal. There’s something intimate about email, isn’t there? Set aside the spam, the generic newsletters from Big Companies, the annoying notes from your boss wanting to know when that thing you’re supposed to do will be done. When the email is from the right person or strikes the right tone, an email can generate a kind of intimacy that random shit posted across the internet can’t. It seems personal. It seems like it’s for you. It allows the subscriber to feel like they have an intimate relationship with the newsletter writer. And that’s valuable. Because that sense of intimacy, even if it’s an illusion, even if, as in the case of pornography, it’s a known illusion, is what will keep subscribers subscribed.

8. It’s not content calendar driven. Those who have toiled in the content mines of social media copywriting, as I have, know that content calendars are ravenous beasts. Your words and images become content. Your posts become empty spaces on a digital calendar that must be filled. You start googling the holidays for the month you’re working on in hopes that will inspire you to create something really high performing in honor of National Hot Dog Day. Unless you want it to, newsletters don’t have any of that. And for free newsletters, you can feel free to write whatever you want to write whenever you want to write it. Deadlines? Fuhgeddaboudit. Maybe you like deadlines—in which case, go for it. Maybe you want to have a content calendar. By all means, don’t let me stop you. But the strategic plan for your newsletter is for you to devise and execute as you see fit.

9. It’s a revenue generator. Your newsletter may make you money, or it may not. It may generate revenue for you directly, through, say, paid subscriptions. Or it may generate revenue for you indirectly, by, for example, getting your name and work in front of someone who likes it, who reaches out to you, and who pays you to do something for them because they saw you do something similar in your newsletter. Or by selling some other product you’re selling, like, say, a book. But one thing is for sure: You will never make money from a newsletter that you never create, that you never publish, that you never write. The only way to find out if your newsletter is a revenue generator is by starting to write it with no guarantee that it will deliver a return on your time and effort investment.

10. It’s fun. For those who are tired of hustle culture and monetizable stoicism and the self as brand, a newsletter can be a place to return to one’s original state: a state of play. When you can do whatever you want, you start to do interesting things. When you realize there is no fence around the field, you start running beyond the old perimeter. When you allow yourself to not be right, to not care, to forget what you’re doing and just start doing, you begin to change what you’re doing, how you’re doing, and who you are. And that’s worth it, not matter who you are or what you do, how much you have or how much you don’t, whether anyone reads a word of it or if it’s just a thing for the only person that matters: you.

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Fuck You, Pay Me #12: The Fine Art of Applying to Writing Residencies

This is part 12 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing. Read the rest of the series: Part 1: How To Become a Writer in 12 Easy Steps, Part 2: The Pros and Cons of Traditional vs. Indie Publishing, Part 3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel, Part 4: Why I Hate Memoirs (but Wrote One Anyway), Part 5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer, Part 6: Letters From Johns Revisited, Part 7: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Journalism Edition), Part 8: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Fiction Edition), Part 9: How to Promote Your Book Without Going Crazy, Part 10: The Pornification of My Life, Part 11: How to Be More Creative, Part 12: The Fine Art of Applying to Writing Residencies, Part 13: How to Be a Consultant, Part 14: Cranking the Flywheel, Part 15: Why You Should Have a Newsletter, Part 16: An Excerpt From My Memoir.

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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Fuck You, Pay Me #10: The Pornification of My Life

This is part 10 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing. Read the rest of the series: Part 1: How To Become a Writer in 12 Easy Steps, Part 2: The Pros and Cons of Traditional vs. Indie Publishing, Part 3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel, Part 4: Why I Hate Memoirs (but Wrote One Anyway), Part 5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer, Part 6: Letters From Johns Revisited, Part 7: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Journalism Edition), Part 8: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Fiction Edition), Part 9: How to Promote Your Book Without Going Crazy, Part 10: The Pornification of My Life, Part 11: How to Be More Creative, Part 12: The Fine Art of Applying to Writing Residencies, Part 13: How to Be a Consultant, Part 14: Cranking the Flywheel, Part 15: Why You Should Have a Newsletter, Part 16: An Excerpt From My Memoir.

In this post, I’ll be talking about my current projects. Now that my memoir is in the world and the promoting of it has lessened, I’m focusing my attention on different things. That includes two books and various freelance writing assignments. What do these projects have to do with each other? Well, they’re all pornified.

The Novel

Since sometimes titles change between conception and delivery, I won’t be sharing the title of my novel-in-progess. In fact, I won’t be sharing too much about this project, to protect it. I will say that this novel is set in Porn Valley. Since I first set foot on a porn set in 1997, I have been trying to figure out how to write this book. When I was done writing and revising my memoir, I turned back to this project. Once again, I tried writing it in various ways, none of which worked. Then, sometime late last year, I figured how to do it. Thus far, about a quarter of the book is drafted. It’s such a delight to work on it. It’s fun, and crazy, and oftentimes when I read back over what I’ve written, I laugh out loud, which is always a good thing.

Having spent the last several years working on a nonfiction book, it’s great to be in the fictional realm. People are made up, facts don’t have to adhere to reality, and the world is different. I’ve been writing fiction since I can remember, and my graduate degree is 50% literature and 50% fiction. Over time, my fiction muscles had atrophied a bit, so it’s been nice to feel them getting stronger. Focusing on one central character has also been helpful. There is world building, the world around this character, but the book is most preoccupied with the main character’s interior, which is my sweet spot.

Another craft-oriented thing I’m doing with this project is working on it slowly. I guess you could say I’m part of the slow writing movement. There is nothing about hustle culture that is good for deep creativity; its disregard for time and process and synchronicity doesn’t allow for organic flow. And, it’s better for my body to not be stuck in front of the computer all the time. I recommend slowing down.

The Nonfiction Book

This book is also set in Porn Valley, but in the real one. Again, I don’t want to say too much about this project as a way of keeping it private for the moment, but it has a bigger arc, a lot more characters, and of course is nonfiction. Again, I’m playing to a strength here, which is thanks to the long time I’ve been writing about the porn business. This book will be longer than the novel, and it will likely take longer to write. In addition to being drawn from current journalistic encounters with the porn industry, it will also draw on what in a few years will be 30 years I’ve spent writing about this subject matter.

This time, there is no central character, and while I’m a kind of tour guide — historically, I’ve compared my role as a journalist writing about Porn Valley to Virgil and the reader to Dante in Inferno — I’m definitely not the narrative focus. I’ve always made sure to remind myself that when I’m on a porn set, I am absolutely, undoubtedly, most assuredly the least interesting thing in the room. Porn Valley. The Other Hollywood. The X-Rated Movie Business. I like to think of it as my personal Yoknapatawpha County.

It’s a bit daunting this one, isn’t it? But I guess that’s part of the draw. Also, while other people have written books about the porn industry, I don’t think anyone’s done one quite like this one. If you’re interested in those other books, you might want to check out The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry by Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne with Peter Pavia.

The Other Stuff

One could argue this is not a blog post at all but something of a strategic plan for the days, weeks, months, and, yes, even the years ahead. If one were to argue that, one would likely not be wrong. I’ll be doing other things as well, including posting on Forbes.com, doing freelance journalism, and writing more fiction. A lot of that will trade in the subject of sex, and some of it will include porn.

I’ve spent a long time waffling around this subject matter. Let’s face it; it’s a little weird for a woman to write about sex and porn, to do it for so long, to be so seemingly obsessed with it. It’s a little embarrassing, a little dirty, a little wrong. Or is it? Well, on the one hand, sometimes I encounter people who think just that. But on the other hand, then I’ll remind myself that three of the most visited websites in the world are porn sites, and those numbers testify to the fact that there is a significant interest in it.

One time an idiot editor (a woman, obviously) suggested that while many people (let’s face it: men, mostly) like to watch porn, that doesn’t mean they want to read about it. I think she was wrong. I think people who watch porn want to know why they watch it, and they want to know why they want to watch what they want to watch, and they want to understand what the scenarios on the screen say about themselves.

In any case, I’ll be sharing more about this process as I move forward. Questions? Thoughts? Suggestions? Hit me up here. It’d be interesting to include the consumers’ perspective in the nonfiction book. Do you watch porn? Why do you watch it? What do you get out of it? Most importantly: How does it make you feel?

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Fuck You, Pay Me #9: How to Promote Your Book Without Going Crazy

This is part 9 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing. Read the rest of the series: Part 1: How To Become a Writer in 12 Easy Steps, Part 2: The Pros and Cons of Traditional vs. Indie Publishing, Part 3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel, Part 4: Why I Hate Memoirs (but Wrote One Anyway), Part 5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer, Part 6: Letters From Johns Revisited, Part 7: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Journalism Edition), Part 8: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Fiction Edition), Part 9: How to Promote Your Book Without Going Crazy, Part 10: The Pornification of My Life, Part 11: How to Be More Creative, Part 12: The Fine Art of Applying to Writing Residencies, Part 13: How to Be a Consultant, Part 14: Cranking the Flywheel, Part 15: Why You Should Have a Newsletter, Part 16: An Excerpt From My Memoir.

You wrote a book! Congratulations! That was the easy part! Ha-ha, just kidding. Oh, wait, no, I’m not. If you live under a rock, you may not have heard that these days publishing houses are very, very busy and can only do so much when it comes to promoting the book you wrote. That’s where you come in! If you want anyone to read your book, you better figure out how to promote it. Not good at promoting stuff? Too bad. Don’t like to promote your work? Tough shit. Would rather hire an independent publicist to promote your book for you? Good luck finding a good one for less than five figures to push your book properly and well to all the appropriate media outlets with no return on investment guaranteed. Luck for me, I was a book publicist a long time ago, so that helped when my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, came out last fall. (Read more about my book here.) Here are a few ways that your book can get visibility in a crowded marketplace and some strategies and non-strategies that worked for me. Will these avenues and strategies and non-strategies work for you and your book? Who the fuck knows!

1. The Publisher Did It My memoir was published by one of the big publishers. This has its upsides and downsides, some of which I’ve written about in previous editions of Fuck You, Pay Me. I was paired with a publicist at my imprint. One of the single most important things your publisher should do for you is get galleys of your book to Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews. These trade reviews come out before other reviews and probably before your book comes out. They’re important because everyone in the book business reads them and also because they’re the first thing you can use in your own book promotions. My book got a starred Publishers Weekly review and a Kirkus Reviews review, and I used quotes from those reviews to promote my book on my website and across my social media platforms. If you find sharing positive reviews of your book challenging, pretend You the Author is a consulting client you’re working with and you’re promoting their book for them.

   Publishers Weekly: “Unpicking thorny questions about determinism and the ethics of human experimentation, Breslin attacks her subject with verve and wit, resisting woe-is-me solipsism without defanging her critiques of the study that rocked her life. It’s gripping stuff.”

   Kirkus Reviews: “An intelligently provocative memoir and investigation.”

2. Networking Did It Because I have been a writer a long time, I know a lot of writers. That came in handy when my book came out, and my publisher sent out review copies of my book to people I know who are journalists. In one instance, that led to a two-page spread in The New York Post. This feature came out about a month after my book did and generated a sales spike. It also involved a photo shoot, which was fun to do. If you don’t have any writer friends, you should think about making some. They will be of use when your book is published. If you don’t have any writer friends or the writers you attempt to befriend spurn your efforts, you can send fan letters to writers about their work and see if they’re interested in checking out your book because it aligns with their professional interests. Please bear in mind that writers are busy, so if they don’t write about your book, it’s nothing personal.

   The New York Post: “Breslin had long been aware she was a ‘human lab rat,’ in her words, but it wasn’t until adulthood that she started to wonder what it was all about.”

3. The Agent Did It That same month, my memoir was selected to be the December pick for actress Emma Roberts’ Belletrist book club. This opportunity came through my agent at CAA, who is amazing. Belletrist is a celebrity book club, they promote your book throughout the month, and they have you do various things on their platform, like create a video of your personal library and write about your favorite literary things for their newsletter and also do an Instagram Live interview. It was such a cool experience. I got the chance to connect with readers who had spent a lot of their developing years online and since my book is about, among other things, not having a private life, it was very relatable for them. By this point in the promoting one’s own book process, I was getting a bit more in the flow of things, and I had reached a certain point of resetting the bar, which is to say not everything you do to promote your book may be up to your perfectionist standards, but at least you are out there doing it, dammit.

   Belletrist: Here’s the interview with me and Emma and Belletrist co-founder Karah.

4. A Book in Motion Did It According to Sir Isaac Newton’s first law of motion: “A body remains at rest, or in motion at a constant speed in a straight line, except insofar as it is acted upon by a force.” One thing you may discover while promoting your book is that while promoting it may or may not get easier over time, the book may develop a motion of its own. The Belletrist stuff happened in December, and in early January my memoir got a great review in The Globe and Mail, which is basically The New York Times of Canada. A couple weeks later, I got an interview request from CBC Radio’s “The Current,” which is, like, let’s say, the NPR of Canada. The interview I did with “The Current”’s host Matt Galloway was fantastic, and they had me record it at the NPR West studio so the audio quality was excellent. When this interview aired, it led to a sales bump, which was nice. I definitely felt like this was Newton’s first law at work, with the book club leading to the review leading to the interview. If I told you that you can feel when something is generating its own momentum, would you believe me? I ain’t lyin’.

   The Globe and Mail: “If, as Socrates contended, ‘the unexamined life is not worth living,’ then Breslin is living hers to the fullest. Lucky for us, she’s written a thought-provoking, ridiculously propulsive book about it.”

   The Current with Matt Galloway: Here’s the interview with me and Matt.

5. Serendipity Did It The amount of stuff I’m leaving out of this process is sort of ridiculous because I spent a huge amount of time pitching my book to many media outlets which led to various other things, but I’m just trying to highlight a few of them here. One thing I did myself was pitch my book to The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which is in the city where I live and the biggest book festival in the country. By happenstance, someone at the festival shared my book with a woman who was to be moderating a festival panel that would be a fit for my book. That woman and I were on a TV show together years ago, so thanks to serendipity I’ll be on that panel at the Festival of Books later this month. I’m really excited about that. All of which is to say, pitch, pitch, pitch away, because you just never know.

   The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books: “These writers share thought-provoking research and personal experience on everything from the role of female bodies in human evolution, to the gaps in medical knowledge about female reproductive systems and a 30+ year lab experiment about human personalities, and finally how all of this plays into the dolls we make to represent women. Though their stories differ, these writers are all experts in one extremely difficult field: being a woman.”

The other thing I would like to add is that—well, a few other things. I wrote my own press release for my book, and I could probably write a whole other post about that. Also, there was a lot of struggle over not having full control over this promotions process that involved the publisher that was very challenging that maybe I’ll talk more about at a later date. Additionally, I would highly recommend that you create a page on your website—if you don’t have a website for yourself, I don’t know what to tell you other than get one—that’s about your book or books and all the reviews and promotions and speaking engagements and such. I created mine here. If you let things sit here and there on the web, no one is going to see that. If you put it on one page and update it regularly, more will come from that. For example, my memoir was published five months ago, and I have more speaking engagements and interviews this month than any other previous month. Keep flogging it or nurturing it or pushing it, and it will start to spin forward of its own volition.

In closing, I guess I didn’t really directly tackle the how to do all this without going crazy part, but I should talk about that in a future post. All I know is that for me it’s all about control, and if you don’t believe you have control, you are controlling one thing: your own wrongheaded delusions about control.

If you liked this post, buy my book. If you liked my book, write a review of it on Amazon or Goodreads or the social media platform of your choice. If you’re interested in interviewing me or having me speak at your next event or querying me about promoting your book or other creative project, contact me.

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I'm The Fixer

In addition to writing books and producing journalism, I’m a creative consultant. As The Fixer, I do a little bit of everything that has to do with words. From ghostwriting books to editing manuscripts to crafting website content, I help my clients with their word-based projects. Are you a busy CEO who needs a ghostwriter? I can do that. Are you a writer who needs someone to assist you in getting your writing where it should be? I can do that. Are you a marketing company in search of someone who can create compelling copy? I can do that. Book a one-hour introductory consultation here or email me to schedule your session here, and let’s get started.

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Fuck You, Pay Me #4: Why I Hate Memoirs (but Wrote One Anyway)

This is part 4 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing. Read the rest of the series: Part 1: How To Become a Writer in 12 Easy Steps, Part 2: The Pros and Cons of Traditional vs. Indie Publishing, Part 3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel, Part 4: Why I Hate Memoirs (but Wrote One Anyway), Part 5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer, Part 6: Letters From Johns Revisited, Part 7: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Journalism Edition), Part 8: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Fiction Edition), Part 9: How to Promote Your Book Without Going Crazy, Part 10: The Pornification of My Life, Part 11: How to Be More Creative, Part 12: The Fine Art of Applying to Writing Residencies, Part 13: How to Be a Consultant, Part 14: Cranking the Flywheel, Part 15: Why You Should Have a Newsletter, Part 16: An Excerpt From My Memoir.

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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Your Audio Porn

Over at Forbes Vices, which I edit, I’ve really been enjoying working with a new contributor, Franki Cookney, who’s covering the sex beat. In a recent post, she profiled some of the best offerings in audio porn. You can read her full post and get her recommendations here: “Audio Porn Is a Booming Business, and Here Are 5 of the Best.” Are you a journalist with an expertise in vices? I’m always on the lookout for strong contributors who have a singular focus in one of our vices categories, which includes everything from gambling to guns. If you’re interested, shoot me an email at susannahbreslin @ gmail.com.

Get a copy of my acclaimed story, “The Tumor.” It’s “a masterpiece of short fiction.”