Fuck You, Pay Me #17: How to Write a Short Story

This is part 17 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, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

Recently, I wrote a short story. I’ve written short stories before; I even published a collection of short stories. Last year, I had a terrible time working with a big publisher on my memoir. In the wake of that negative experience—a bad editor, incompetent PR and marketing, the inability to control the outcome—I set out to reclaim my relationship to writing. When I wrote under contract with a big publisher, I lost my identity as a writer. What I wanted to do was reclaim who I was as a writer. I decided to start with a short story.

The Idea. Back in June, I visited the set of an adult movie for a story I was writing for Forbes.com. As I drove east to the location, I wondered how this time would be different from the last time. The first time I was on an adult movie set was 1997. Now it was 2024. I was a different person and exactly the same. As I stood on the porn set in a building where one would not expect to find an adult movie being filmed, I thought about how much older I was than I had been nearly 30 years ago on that first porn movie set I’d visited. In a way, I felt self-conscious about that; after all, porn is a business built on surfaces, how things look, the appearances of things. At the same time, I felt like with maturity, I could see what was in front of me more clearly: the players, the scene, the spoken and unspoken dynamics at play.

Sometime after that porn set visit this summer, I got an idea for a short story I wanted to write. While I’ve written a wide range of fiction, I thought this time I would try writing a short story that was about a subject of interest to me (the adult movie industry) and was stylistically something more traditional than, say, some of my other fiction writing. In other words, it would be a short story of the sort you might see published in The New Yorker—that just so happened to be concerned with the porn business.

My short story would about a man who was older, whose back hurt, and who discovered one day that an adult movie was being shot in the house behind his. (In the real San Fernando Valley, houses are occasionally rented for adult movie shoots.) And with that, I was off and running.

Stewart by Meta AI

The Details. The story would be called “Topical Matters.” Or “The Scopophiliac.” Or “Van Nuys.” Ultimately, I settled on “Topical Matters.” It would be around 5,000 words long, which was around how long some of the short stories published in The New Yorker in recent years were (although some were quite a bit longer). It would be inspired in part by “The Swimmer,” John Cheever’s 1964 short story classic in which a seemingly ordinary man attempts to swim home through backyard swimming pools in a seemingly ordinary suburb. The main character would be named Stewart, and his wife would be named Maureen. He would be retired, and he would be very interested in controlling his environment. The style of the story would be realism with a twist. The entire course of events would take place in a single day.

I estimated it would take me approximately two weeks to write this story. A week, maybe. Of course, it ended up taking longer than that (life got in the way, so it took about two months from start to finish to write). In a manner of speaking, the story itself would be irrelevant. The only thing that mattered when I was writing it was: Am I having fun? If I wasn’t, I wouldn’t do it. I hadn’t enjoyed writing a memoir under contract, working with a big five editor who did not seem to know how to edit, to attempt to tell the story of my life according to someone else’s idea of what that looked like. This story would be mine.

The Execution. Since I’d had such a shit time writing my memoir, I wasn’t sure if I could do the relatively simple task I’d assigned myself. I mean, it wouldn’t be easy, but I wasn’t even sure I could enjoy writing again. That said, I identified what I could do. I could write a 100-word paragraph. Couldn’t I? And what was a 5,000-word short story if not a series of, say, 100-word paragraphs? I would write one paragraph, and then I would write another paragraph, and that was how I would get there. The entire story would be comprised of five sections, each section some 1,000-words. That was doable, wasn’t it? Surely, it was.

And so it went. Some days I wrote a single 100-word paragraph. Some days I wrote several. At one point, I didn’t work on the story for several weeks. Eventually, though, I got back to it. I started falling in love with my main character, who I thought was hilarious. The premise amused me to no end, what this guy living this relatively normal life would do when he found himself encountering something rather remarkable. I envisioned the house. The yard. The wife. Her departure. How he came to discover that a porn movie was being shot in the house behind his. What his personal history in relationship to porn was. How he justified his curiosity, and what he found when he got there. I was Stewart, and Stewart was me.

The Shift. Somewhere along the way, things began to change. I started to feel more confident about my writing. I began to experience writing as play again (as opposed to work). I transformed into someone who wanted to write rather than someone who regretted what she had written. I was writing well, how I wanted to write, about what I wanted to write. Which seemed pretty ideal. The words kept coming, and when I didn’t get something, I waited for the insight to come. I talked to my shrink about the story. I woke up in the middle of the night and thought about my story. I wrote more and more, and as the end approached, I realized that writing for myself was where it’s at, not writing for someone else.

This process also enabled me to think more and in different ways about some of what I have experienced on adult movie sets over the years as a journalist. What was it like for the male porn star? How did the pornographer relate to his work? Why did the starlet say the things she said? Most centrally, I sought to capture what it was like to be on a porn set: curious, magical, dark, strange, disorienting, hilarious, perverse. As I neared the end, I felt I had captured that experience as best I could, not by nonfiction but by fiction.

The Product. A few weeks ago, on a Sunday, I finished editing my short story. Almost immediately, to my surprise, I was sad. Stewart wasn’t the most likable guy—he is stiff, uncompromising, judgemental—but I had liked him. For nearly two months, I had shared the intimacy of his inner-workings. I didn’t want to let that go. It would be the end of our relationship. I had my 5,000 words, give or take, but being done with the story meant letting it go, letting Stewart go, letting a world in which I was god go. But this wasn’t my first time at the short story rodeo, and I knew what I had to do next.

That day, I submitted my short story to about a dozen publications, The New Yorker among them. So far, I’ve heard from one publication, which declined it. In January, if no one has expressed interest in publishing it, I’ll publish it myself and sell it online. Right now, “Topical Matters” is a story looking for a home, some place that will embrace its main character and not reject it for its prurient leanings.

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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, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

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, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

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 #14: Cranking the Flywheel

This is part 14 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, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

What am I working on these days? A good question. When you’re a writer, you tend to have a lot of pots on the stove. Here are a few things I’m doing, may be doing, am going to be doing, should be doing, want to be doing. The point is to generate momentum and get the proverbial word-based flywheel turning.

“A flywheel is a mechanical device that uses the conservation of angular momentum to store rotational energy, a form of kinetic energy proportional to the product of its moment of inertia and the square of its rotational speed.”

In early October, I’ll be attending the Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma’s 2024 Reporting Safely in Crisis Zones Course for Freelance Journalists in New York. From the course description: “While most hostile environment training for journalists deals with ducking crossfire and kidnappers, this course will teach you how to avoid unnecessary peril through preparation and planning before, during and after assignments.” I’m really looking forward to doing this, and I’ll share how it went afterwards.

In late November, I’ll be a resident at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska. From KHN’s website: “The mission of the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts is to support established and emerging writers, visual artists and composers by providing working and living environments that allow uninterrupted time for work, reflection and creative growth.” I can’t wait to do this and will report back on the experience when I return.

I’m continuing to post on Forbes.com, where I cover the business of sex. So far this month, I’ve written about the return of Playboy magazine as an annual print publication and what happened when Etsy banned the sale of adult toys on its website. I’ve got stories in the pipeline about strippers, AI smut, and escorts, to name a few.

“In recent decades, Playboy has struggled to find its footing in a changing media landscape. When Hugh Hefner, the magazine’s founder and editor-in-chief, who died in 2017, launched the first issue of Playboy in December 1953 with a nude spread featuring Marilyn Monroe, the competition was limited to other adult magazines.”

I changed the format of my newsletter to The Reverse Cowgirl Diaries. “From my recent sexplorations to my current obsessions, this weekly newsletter takes you into the mind of someone who has seen too many porn movies,” pretty much sums it up. It also includes weird pitches I get from publicists trying to get me to promote their sex products. And other things.

Lately, I’ve been writing a new short story. By the end of today, it’ll be two-thirds done, and it’ll likely be finished by Monday or not long after. The main character is a man, and suffice to say it has a pornographic element to it. The entire tale takes place in the San Fernando Valley, which is my Yoknapatawpha County.

“To the sympathetic critics Mr. Faulkner dealt with the dark journey and the final doom of man in terms that recalled the Greek tragedians. They found symbolism in the frequently unrelieved brutality of the yokels of Yoknapatawpha County, the imaginary Deep South region from which Mr. Faulkner drew the persons and scenes of his most characteristic novels and short stories.”

Speaking of porn, I’m working on two books: “a novel set in the adult movie industry and a nonfiction book about the pornography business.” The novel has a male main character, and the nonfiction novel has a female main character who is me. Both are set in the present day. The novel is funny, and the nonfiction book is more serious. The novel will be around 250 pages, and the nonfiction book will be around 400 pages.

This fall, there are a handful of sex-related books coming out, so I pitched a story about them and what it means that they’re all by women and in some ways about the female gaze. I sent that to the Los Angeles Review of Books and will probably pitch it a few other places, as well.

“Last month's New Yorker profile of Anderson revealed that the book is in part a modern-day version of Nancy Friday's 1973 best-selling anthology My Secret Garden. But Want's publisher has "placed off limits" any confessors' erotic fantasies that were too extreme. What happens when the outer limits of female sexual fantasies end up on the cutting room floor?”

Things I’m waiting to hear back on: if a panel I pitched to the 2025 AWP Conference & Bookfair has been accepted, if any of the six other writing residencies I applied to earlier this year have accepted me, and if I got a writing grant I applied for.

Last year, I read exactly zero books, so this year I made it a point to read at least a book a month. Follow along at Books I Read. The books include fiction, nonfiction, memoir, photography, and graphic novels. So far my favorite has been Victory Parade.

“It's an electric, searing, beyond Spiegelman's Maus anatomical and artistic investigation of the twin traumas of war and violence, the nightmares that haunt survivors' waking and sleeping lives, and the banality of evil's horrifying consequences to the human soul.”

And, as usual, I’ll be taking lots of photos along the way.

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Fuck You, Pay Me #13: How to Be a Consultant

This is part 13 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, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

Far and away the best money I make is in consulting. That said, when people ask me what I do as a consultant, it’s hard to say. I’ve described it as I do strategic communications and I tell CEOs and founders what to do and I’m a corporate dominatrix. In any case, I’ve certainly learned a lot as a consultant, so in this post I’ll be sharing a bit about what I do and what I’ve discovered as a professional consigliere.

My background If you look at my personal history, I’m not someone who should be good at advising heads of business on what do. My parents were English professors, and they had little interest in and a general disdain for anything corporate. For them, money was a source of anxiety, and there was never enough of it. A fair amount of their psychic energies was spent figuring out how not to work or get in a position where they didn’t have to work: obtain a grant that gave them an excuse to not have to teach, go on sabbatical, make it to the summer months when school was out. Maybe because my parents were so anxious about money, I started working at a young age. My first business was a pet-sitting business. To drum up clients, I made signs and put them around the neighborhood. I took care of dogs and cats and parakeets. I think I was 11. After that, I did babysitting. When I was thirteen, I worked at a flower stand. My first real job was at Baskin-Robbins. As I got older, I was an au pair, and I did various retail jobs (making sandwiches, selling pasta, working in a cake shop). Basically, I saw money as something that you earned but was elusive.

My education First I got a B.A. in English from the University of California, Berkeley. Then I got an M.A. from the Program for Writers at the University of Illinois Chicago. I don’t have any recollection of learning anything about business during these years. As part of my graduate program, I taught English to UIC freshman. After I got my degree, I moved back to the Bay Area, where I taught English at community colleges. I taught because it was what my parents had done. Then my father died. I stopped teaching. It was right around this time that the Internet started really ramping up (it was the mid-Nineties). I got a job as a publicist for a book imprint; after a while, I started wondering why I was promoting other people’s work when I could be promoting my own. A couple girlfriends and I created an online magazine. I started writing freelance articles for local weeklies. Then I wrote for national glossy magazines. I was making money from writing. Eventually, I did TV, too. My first TV appearance was on “Politically Incorrect.” I moved to Los Angeles. I carved out a pretty good living freelance writing. I got a gig on Playboy TV.

My internet In 2002, I launched The Reverse Cowgirl. I believe it was the second sex-related blog to ever exist. People really liked it. I liked that it was hosted on Salon’s website, and their back end allowed me to see my blog’s traffic. I got hooked on the numbers. I combined my writing skills with my PR savvy and got very good at driving traffic. It was like the internet was a ball of energy, and people were the thing that you could move through the space. Within a few years, I had gotten so good that big media companies were hiring me to help them increase traffic to their platforms. I kept writing, of course. But my work got a little more commercial, and I started learning how the sausage gets made in corporate America. I wrote for Forbes.com. I became an editor for a media company. I did creative projects on the side. The internet was where I really thrived. I launched various projects that got media attention. Things were flowing.

My faux-MBA Eventually, I got married. Later, after I got divorced, I would refer to my marriage as “my Harvard MBA.” (To be clear, I do not have an MBA from Harvard or any other institution. My use of that terminology is a metaphor. If you think I have an MBA or went to Harvard, you are wrong.) The person to whom I was married worked in the corporate space. I learned about how companies work, how they think, what CEOs want, how strategy works, and what the difference is between companies and executives that thrive and companies and executives that fail. As it turned out, I had an uncanny knack for predicting how things would move strategically in the corporate realm. It seemed odd that I was good at this, since I had been raised by intellectuals and had no business education. Yet, there it was. It was like waking up one day and discovering that you are very good at chess, even though you had never played chess. One thing I liked about the corporate world was that it was easier to quantify success than in the writing world. The corporate world was all about profit margins and revenues and market shares. Writing is all about chasing good writing and subjective interpretations and creative expression.

My consultancy When I got divorced, I took my consulting savvy with me. Almost immediately, I started doing consulting work. I only work with a retainer, because that’s the best way to form a relationship with a client. Years ago a former boss of mine compared me to a Swiss Army Knife, which was a way of saying I did a lot of things. This is true for consulting. I advise on branding, communications, social media, PR, marketing, and strategy. Oftentimes, my role is prophylactic. That is, I am advising the client to not do something that wouldn’t be to their advantage. At other times, I help them shape their image. Most of my clients come through word of mouth. I have a reputation for being good at crisis communications. I like the proximity to power, to big-number deals, to real movers and shakers. I have learned how general counsels think; what makes millionaires, multi-millionaires, and billionaires tick; that if you get exposed to enough high-level operators you will find yourself referring to companies with $3 billion-dollar valuations as “small.” My clients are almost exclusively men. As a consultant, I am an invisible member of the big boy’s club.

Today, consulting is some of the most interesting work I do. I like helping people, working closely with my clients, and shaping something into something better than it was before. The kind of work I do isn’t easy, and it requires both strategic and intuitive talents, but the payoff is, well, pretty remarkable.

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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, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

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 #11: How to Be More Creative

This is part 11 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, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

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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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, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

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, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

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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Fuck You, Pay Me #8: Some of My Favorite Things I've Ever Written (Fiction Edition)

This is part 8 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, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

I thought I’d list some of my favorite things I’ve ever written in terms of fiction. Obviously, I’ve excluded my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. But I’ve included my short story collection, You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You?, and my novel-in-progress, (which I’ll refer to here as) Untitled Porn Novel-in-Progress.

1. You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You? In 2003, I published my short story collection through Future Tense Books. The collection is comprised of fourteen stories, among them: “Apartment,” “He Was Probably in Jail,” and “Hey Doll.” These stories were written when I was in graduate school, after I graduated, and during the course of my writing career. The subject matter is nuts and often about weird sex fetishes, dysfunctional relationships, and things that happen when you find yourself working in Porn Valley. You can buy it on Amazon for $80.

   Standout quote: “You could call him nullified, or orchidectomized, or emasculated, or a eunuch, but he was simply the possessor of a penectomy, a person who no longer bore his own penis, a man undeniably lacking in what he had previously carried in his lower basket.”

   Year published and publisher: 2003, Future Tense Books

2. Untitled Porn Novel-in-Progress Currently, I’m working on a novel that’s set in the adult film industry. It focuses on a single character and is a real pleasure to write. As I have shared in interviews, writing my memoir was a slog, and I really wanted to undo that experience and create something that was amusing and exciting and fresh. I’ve written nearly 25% of this novel so far, and every time I re-read it I laugh out loud. It’s a delight.

   Standout quote: “Of course, there were freaks of nature that worked the adult business like sideshow acts, men preternaturally gifted with eye-popping appendages who had carved out a niche for themselves by starring in movies with titles that trumpeted their larger-than-life anatomies, but those guys were outliers.”

   Year published and publisher: TBD, TBD

3. “The Tumor“ In 2015, I self-published this short story. It’s about an anthropomorphic tumor, a troubled marriage, and a bad man. I had the cover designed, the layout designed, and the formats designed. I really enjoyed this process, as it gave me the ability to control the process from soup to nuts. You can buy it on Gumroad for $1. To date, I’ve earned a total of $884.50 selling this product through Gumroad, using the Pay What You Want option.

   Standout quote: “My original idea was that we take her out in the yard, and that I, an expert marksman, shoot her in the breast at the site to which she had pointed, thereby destroying the tumor.”

   Year published and publisher: 2015, self-published

4. “Spike” In 2020, Bending Genres published this short story of mine which is about a male porn star who is struggling with performance anxiety. I wrote this story some years earlier, and I submitted it many times to many literary journals, and no one wanted to publish it until Bending Genres came along. I love this story and think it’s hilarious.

   Standout quote: “Then he’d seen an ad for a cattle call in the San Fernando Valley, and when the guy in the wood paneled room in the second-story office asked him to drop his pants so they could take a Polaroid that would crop out his head entirely and feature his cock prominently, he did what the man said.”

   Year published and publisher: 2020, Bending Genres

5. “Necking Team Button” In 2009, Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker asked me to write a short story for their Significant Objects project, which was a literary experiment that involved pairing writers with found objects. The experiment prompted the interrogation of how narratives shape the perceived value of objects and culminated in an auction. (You can read how the project worked here.) The writers of these stories included Jonathan Lethem, Sheila Heti, and Colson Whitehead. Eventually, the project became an anthology, which you can buy on Amazon. My story combines fiction and nonfiction.

   Standout quote: “Looking down at the pin staring up at me like a Cyclops, looking through this portal into a time wherein I was nothing but a flickering flash in one of my father’s constellation of neurons, I wondered who this all-star necker was: my father, a young man not unlike myself, or something else altogether—a man beyond my understanding now relegated to a past that lay on the other side of a bridge where the land was so dark that I could no longer see him.”

   Year published and publisher: 2009, Significant Objects; 2012, Fantagraphics

6. “She Is a Girl” I wrote this story in 2005, when I was living in New Orleans. It was published in the very cool Maisonneuve. Like a lot of my fiction, this story interweaves fact and fiction, and in some ways it exists as a very early draft of my memoir. Also like a lot of my fiction, and some of my nonfiction, including my memoir, it has surrealist elements. The story is about what it’s like to be a girl and what it’s like to be a woman and the stuff that happens in between. I think this story is kind of sweet.

   Standout quote: “The tectonic plates of her ribs lying protectively over her heart can hardly contain whatever it is thumping inside her.”

   Year published and publisher: 2005, Maisonneuve

7. “The Flesh Eaters” This story was published in 2018 on Construction, which was a literary magazine, but maybe that publication no longer exists. Anyway, you can read the story by clicking the title, thanks to the Wayback Machine. This story is one of a series of short stories I’ve been doing over the years that take place in Porn Valley. In case you haven’t noticed, Porn Valley is my Yoknapatawpha County. The tale features Dolores, who works for a company in the San Fernando Valley that makes silicone vaginas. I think the idea came to me after I visited an adult toy manufacturer in North Hollywood and also because I used to own a silicone vagina, although I lost it.

   Standout quote: “Dolores didn’t expect to spend the last year sewing pubic hair into a disembodied silicone vagina, but that’s the way it happened.”

   Year published and publisher: 2018, Construction

8. “Hey Doll” If you’re looking for Susannah Breslin brand fiction, this is it. It was published by Nerve in 2002, if you’re old enough to remember that site. Thanks again to the Wayback Machine for providing a link to it in archived form. I don’t want to say too much about this story other than to say it was inspired by real events, and dating in Los Angeles is crazy, and in Hollywood truth and fiction are one and the same.

   Standout quote: “All of a sudden, before she knew it, he was naked down on the floor, and the bottom of her boot was across the back of his neck, and his tongue was on the top of her other boot, licking it, and she was shouting at him, You're licking my boot because that's the only thing that you're good enough to do!”

   Year published and publisher: 2002, Nerve

9. “The Boy Who Wore His Heart on His Sleeve“ This is a charming bit of flash fiction that appeared on A Shaded View on Fashion Fiction. It dates back to 2010. A Shaded View on Fashion is the brainchild of Diane Pernet, who is the coolest. I was really delighted to have anything of mine associated with anything of hers.

   Standout quote: “The boy had no idea if he could singlehandedly un-pin his heart, stuff it back into his chest, and darn up the sweater in such a way that no one would ever know that he had stood in his kitchen in the fading light and removed his heart from his chest with a serrated steak knife, all for a woman whom he had yet to meet, a glowing collection of pixels that was her smiling out at him from the computer screen.”

   Year published and publisher: 2010, A Shaded View on Fashion Fiction

10. “Revenge of the Cum Dumpster” It’s hard to believe that a story I wrote with this title has struggled to find a publisher. The story itself focuses on a pornographer who is not a very nice guy, who says something mean about the young woman who finds herself the subject of his current film project, and the swift consequences of karma on a porn movie set. I think it has yet to find a publisher because it has cum dumpster in the title and because people are so afraid of being cancelled these days for who knows what reason. Anyway, if you’re interested in publishing this seminal work, let me know.

    Standout quote: “The men had surrounded her in a half-circle, their penises a forest of trees in which she was lost.”

    Year published and publisher: TBD, TBD

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Fuck You, Pay Me #7: Some of My Favorite Things I've Ever Written (Journalism Edition)

This is part 7 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, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

I thought I’d list some of my favorite things I’ve ever written in terms of journalism. In this list, I’ve excluded my books—my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment; my short story collection, You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You?; and my novel-in-progress, (which I’ll refer to here as) Untitled Porn Novel.

1. “They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They?” This is my 2009 long-form investigation of the Great Recession’s impact on the adult movie industry. Originally it was written for Slate’s Double X, when they were trying to turn Double X into a full-blown magazine that I think was described as something like the original Esquire but written by women. The editor wanted me to change my story in ways that I didn’t, I shopped it around and was unable to place it anywhere else because print magazines were nervous about running adult-themed content (some of it quite graphic) next to advertising that paid their bills, and I ended up self-publishing it (initially it lived on its own website, but I later moved it to my website). See also: “The Numbers on Self-Publishing Long-form Journalism.” I’m so glad I went this route instead of letting some editor trash it.

   Standout quote: “As for the ‘sperm omelet,’ as everyone referred to it in awestruck tones, that was Jim’s idea, she told me.”

   Year published and publisher: 2009, self-published

2. “How to Romance the Taller Woman.” I’m not saying this was my finest hour as a journalist, but this was the first story of mine that appeared in a glossy magazine. This story about how to date tall chicks (I’m six-foot-one) appeared in the December 1997 issue of Details. My editor was Duane Swierczynski, who is now a famous crime writer. The story was illustrated with the poster for the 1958 film The Attack of the 50-Foot Woman, which is maybe my all-time favorite movie poster. This story doesn’t exist online, but I bought the print version of the issue on eBay to replace the one that I lost somewhere along the way.

   Standout quote: “Just because we’re tall doesn’t mean our genitals are as big as the Holland Tunnel.”

   Year published and publisher: 1997, Details

3. “I Spent My Childhood as a Guinea Pig for Science. It Was … Great?” Speaking of Slate, last November this piece I wrote in conjunction with the release of my memoir appeared on the website. I wrote this story on spec, which is something I hate to do because I think it’s beneath me at this point in my career, but doing so gave me the opportunity to write my story how I wanted to write it. The editor was excellent. She had a light touch and came up with the title, which I think is brilliant and hilarious. This piece didn’t take me long to write; four days, I think. The only thing I don’t love is the image used with it, which is a stock image, that kid is maybe a boy, and I think those aren’t M&M’s but Skittles.

   Standout quote: “Even when I was in a dangerous place, I could feel a connection between the study and me, like a gossamer thread spun from inside of it and wrapped around me.”

   Year published and publisher: 2023, Slate

4. “Extreme Porn Crackdown.” Over two decades ago, I wrote this story for Salon about a series of LAPD busts in Porn Valley. I think this was the first time I wrote a big piece tackling an issue going on in the adult movie business. At the time, I was living in a one-bedroom apartment on the east side of Los Angeles. For some reason, various porn companies kept sending me VHS tapes (how one watched porn in those days), and my place was overflowing with them. Also I had a silicone vagina molded off a real porn star’s vagina that I kept in a hallway cupboard. As part of my research, I interviewed Seymore Butts at his home, and it just so happened that I had been on the set of an “American Bukkake” movie that was of interest to the LAPD. I remember seeing the story after the editor went through it and thinking what the fuck did he do, as he had changed it quite a bit, and then realizing he had made it quite a bit better.

   Standout quote: “These days, it seems like the Los Angeles Police Department has got a thing for porn.”

   Year published and publisher: 2001, Salon

5. “To the Max.” I find a lot of people who work in the porn industry pretty interesting, even people who do things other people would think are indefensible, but Max Hardcore was a pornographer I did not like. I use past tense here because he died last year. Back in 2008, I wrote a post about him on a blog I had at the time. That post, which I reposted here because people kept asking me about it, was entitled “To the Max,” and I wrote it a few days after Hardcore was sentenced to 46 months in prison after being found guilty of various obscenity charges brought by the Department of Justice’s Obscenity Prosecution Task Force. In the wake of the sentencing, the liberal and libertarian and independent-minded people of the internet were bellyaching about Hardcore’s sentence, wailing about their First Amendment rights being threatened. Glenn Greenwald was one of the loudest complainers, so I wrote him an email asking him if he had bothered to watch any of the Hardcore-created porn he was so busy defending (spoiler: he hadn’t), and then I wrote about why if you’re going to defend various types of extreme porn you might want to bother watching it first. I wish I could recall why years prior to this Hardcore had gotten pissed at me at some party in downtown Los Angeles or what he said to trash me to some reporter who visited him in prison, but I can’t. Anyway, my passion made the piece sing.

   Standout quote: “Because if you're going to talk about how far we've come when it comes to porn, if you're going to posit Paul ‘Max Hardcore’ Little as the latest victim of the Bush administration, if you're going to lament one more strike against your First Amendment rights, you should bear witness as to what a porn star drenched in vomit looks like.”

   Year published and publisher: 2008, my blog

6. “How the Biggest Strip Club in American Grinds.” For some time now I’ve been covering the business of sex on the Forbes website. In 2015, I was living in Southwest Florida and drove to the other side of the state to go to Tootsie’s Cabaret, which bills itself as the biggest strip club in America. Holy shit! I have been to a lot of strip clubs in my life, but I had never and have not since seen a place like this. I guess in Miami they just strip different. It’s 74,000 square feet! It has a 30-foot stripper pole! In a 24-hour period it might entertain 1,500 customers! On a weekend night, there may be 150 dancers working there! Anyway, it was fucking nuts, and I really enjoyed it, and I would like to go back someday.

   Standout quote: “‘I like dancing a lot,’ she says. ‘I'm not shy. I have a lot of spunk.’”

   Year published and publisher: 2015, Forbes.com

7. “Blood Sacrifice.” Around the same time, I wrote a story for the now defunct website The Billfold about how I flew from where I was living, Naples, Florida, to Chicago, Illinois, to have a $350 dinner. My friend had invited me, and the restaurant was Grant Achatz’s Next, and what was I going to do, say no? (I was not.) The tale involves the consumption of canard à la presse and getting over breast cancer and fantasies about meeting your heroes. This took place during a period in my life that feels so far away now. I was married, and now I am divorced. I was living in Florida, and now I live in California. I was fresh out of having survived breast cancer, and now I am a decade-plus survivor. Sometimes it’s good to write about things that are complicated because you can see how far you’ve come later.

   Standout quote: “He would smile knowingly at me, and I would smile knowingly at him, and then he would disappear into the kitchen, and he would emerge with a plate of something that looked like a tumor splattered across porcelain, and I would eat it, and whatever it was made of (rhubarb? venison? something else entirely?), it would be delicious, and I would have eaten the tumor that had tried to eat me, metaphorically, of course, and the cycle of life would close upon itself, completing itself, like Ouroboros with his tail in his mouth rolling down a street like a wheel.”

   Year published and publisher: 2015, The Billfold

8. “Porn’s Uncanny Valley.” How has tech transformed porn? I’m sure I seemed like the perfect writer to write this story which is why an editor at The Atlantic reached out to me to write it. I can’t recall what was asked of me, but it was something about like the landscape of (Virtual?) Porn Valley? Anyway, I ended up experiencing virtual reality porn for the first time, and, man, was that weird. I don’t mention it in the story, but when I was at the VR porn guy’s office, and I was watching the VR porn with the VR headset, I had this weird, visceral urge to punch the VR porn performer in the virtual world in the face. After I took off the headset, I related this to the VR porn guy, and he said something to the effect of, yeah, a lot of people have that experience. I have no fucking idea why, but there you go.

   Standout quote: “‘It’s a phantom-limb penis syndrome,’ said a tall, British man who goes by the name Adam Sutra.”

   Year published and publisher: 2017, The Atlantic

9. “Everyone Has a Pervert Hidden Inside of Them.” A few years ago, I started going to estate sales. My maternal grandmother was a very successful antiques dealer, so maybe that is part of why I do this. Pretty quickly I noticed that when you’re pawing through the things the dead have left behind, you get a very intimate view of them. Sometimes you get to see what they kept hidden from the rest of the world. Occasionally, those secrets are sexual in nature. In this edition of my newsletter, The Reverse Cowgirl, I wrote about what that’s like and some of the things I’ve found, among them: small handmade penis sculptures, binders of autographed porn star photos, forgotten sex toys. It’s like nostalgia, but X-rated.

   Standout quote: “A woman had spent her days painting these penises, sculpting these phalluses, drawing these nudes.”

   Year published and publisher: 2022, The Reverse Cowgirl

10. “The Graduate of Porn Star High.” This was such a fascinating story to write, back in 2001. An editor at Arena magazine in the UK had heard about this Staten Island high schooler who had gotten a famous porn star to go to his prom with him (thanks to Howard Stern), and then the high schooler and the porn star had started dating, and the editor wanted me to write a profile of them and their relationship. For some reason, I wrote this piece in a more experimental way, using the second person and also interweaving block quotes and the text of the story itself. The editor was so enthusiastic about what I had written; it was such a delightful experience. I believe I sold the story to other markets that approached me, as well, in Europe, I think, and maybe Australia or Asia or something.

    Standout quote: “It was like he was in the porn star twilight zone.”

    Year published and publisher: 2001, Arena

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Fuck You, Pay Me #6: Letters From Johns Revisited

This is part 6 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, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about Letters From Johns, a 2008 project in which, over the course of a year, I shared emails that men sent me about their experiences paying for sex. (As you can see on the project’s website, by submitting their letters, the letter writers were granting me permission to share their letters, anonymously, of course.) This letters project was part of what would become a five-year project I called The Letters Project, and which included Letters From Working Girls, Letters From Men Who Watch Pornography, Letters From Men Who Go To Strip Clubs, and Letters From Cheaters. The Letters Project as a whole got a fair amount of media attention, including coverage by Salon, CBC Radio, and Newsweek. In a weird coincidence, I launched Letters From Johns on January 3, 2008, and then New York governor Eliot Spitzer was entangled in a prostitution scandal a little over two months later, the latter bringing some attention to the former. (That’s timing for you, I guess?)

In August of 2013, as The Letters Project was winding down, I published an essay about the project: “You Were My Studs.” I wrote about how the whole project had started with a shot in the dark: I had put out a call on my blog, asking readers why they had paid for sex. Within a few hours, I had my first answer: “The Night I Drove a Call Girl to Her Next Stop”; it begins: “I am writing because I can’t tell this story to anyone I know and retain my dignity, but since your soliciting I figured I can get it off my chest.” There were more letters to come. As I wrote in my essay: “Over the following year, I heard from over 50 johns. Their letters came at all hours of the day and night. They were from young guys and old guys, white guys and black guys, military grunts and corporate drones. The letters were poignant, exhilarated, nostalgic, terrifying, revelatory. They were all confessions.”

One letter in particular, “I’m a State Investigator,” struck me:

“I keep a coded diary, in case it's discovered. 1 dot is oral, 2 dots is vaginal sex, and 2 connected dots is anal sex. In the event that someone questions the dots, they are associated with good/bad days: no dots are normal days, 1 dot is a good day, 2 dots is a great day, and 2 connected dots is the best day for that week."

As I wrote: “Of course, the letters weren't about sex, or prostitution, or johns. They were about love and loneliness, from guys who just wanted to be touched and men who had gotten dumped, stories in which call girls really had hearts of gold and mercenaries cruised foreign streets in search of bodhisattvas-for-hire.” After a year, each letters project was closed to submissions, and while I received many letters, I rarely responded: “I surmised the letters were not for me; they were for their authors.” But, as I recounted, I did reach out to one john: “I Am Ashamed of Nothing I Have Done.” In an email, I asked him why he had written a letter to me (a woman).

His response, in part:

“By that, I mean I never considered that I was writing my letter to a woman. You're Ms. Breslin, with a blog about john experiences. Like my several john experiences, I was reaching out to no one in particular; I was, in hindsight, trying to find some elusive unidentifiable emotion. Although I gave you 'a perpetual, royalty-free license to use, reproduce, modify, publish, distribute, and otherwise exercise all copyright and publicity rights with respect to that information at its sole discretion, including incorporating it in other works in any media now known or later developed including without limitation published books,' you cannot take from me the liberating experience you elucidated from three simple questions. Thank you. And again, thank you, if only for a few brief moments of experiencing ... .... ..."

Looking over the letters now, I remembered a lot of them, and how I got a kind of thrill whenever I received a new one. It was fascinating to revisit them today.

Like Letters From Johns’ “I Am a Gentleman”:

“There are many who would maintain that my philandering disqualifies me from claiming to be a good person, and definitely from being a good husband. Frankly, I don't care what they believe. I have a hobby that is infinitely more interesting to me than travel or theme parks. The ladies I prefer can hold conversations and appreciate the occasional session just to stroke their bodies. They do not judge. They do not become angry at requests. They treat the experience as an encounter between equals. There is no power struggle. There is no drama. There is privacy, and usually conviviality. What we do behind closed doors remains there.”

Or Letters From Working Girls’ “I Am Just An Ordinary Woman With The Knack Of Making People Love And Trust Me”:

“I am just an ordinary woman with the knack of making people love and trust me. These were just men who needed to love somebody who would let them. It's all so simple. Not complicated in the least. There were no perversions too perverse to get in the way of the trusting bond that was needed. Women suffer out loud, and men suffer in silence. Until we allow men to suffer out loud, many a wife will wonder where her husband is during his lunch hour, and in my opinion, a lot of those wives deserve it. (Not all of those wives.)”

Or Letters From Men Who Watch Pornography’s “I Was a Geek”:

“I've come to accept pornography as my surrogate sexual lifestyle: devoid of complication, disease, and odoriferous unpleasantness, and heavily populated with a wide range of women to satisfy every craving, it is a hollow yet adequate solution to my otherwise celibate bachelor existence. And while I am still aware of the inherent pathetic quality of being a man alone at my age, I would much rather be the connoisseur of an under-appreciated form of entertainment continuing to transcend the aesthetic limits hitherto placed upon it by forces of official history than a harried everyman, harangued by the burdens of emotional turmoil, personality conflict, atrophying sexual energy, and ludicrously inexcusable asinine conversations and circular arguments.”

Or Letters From Men Who Go to Strip Clubs’ “I Am Gay”:

“All of that is uncomfortable to witness, because none of it can be commented on nor helped without becoming far too intimate far too fast. The club creates the illusion of heterosexual intimacy, a coy game of it, but it refuses to actually allow or engage the real thing. So long as everyone involved simply enjoys the game, all is well; but the moment someone needs more than the game, they absolutely cannot have it, and so they stand there, open and raw and unable to share. Most of the other dudes are too engaged to notice, but the detached strippers and the detached gay man notice.”

Or Letters From Cheaters’ “I Have Always Been a Cheater”:

“Eventually, this split life I was living took a toll on my relationship. One day I pulled the plug. I tried to reform myself. I took up a daily meditation practice. I tried my best to avoid massage parlours, prostitutes and gangbangs. About eighteen months ago I met another wonderful woman. We’re talking about building a house outside the city, starting a business and, of course, having a child. I’m happy. But… I still can’t stop myself from looking at the online ads; I’m still not quite there, if you know what I mean. Sometimes I worry that everything is really just work and performance.”

Sometimes when people ask me what I write about I say sex or porn or the business of sex. The real answer is probably closer to intimacy. That’s what these letters, the best of them, anyway, the most real and raw and revealing, are about. Every so often, I think of one of the Letters from Johns that’s stayed with me: “I Have a Physical Disability.”

Here’s his letter in full:

“I have a physical disability known as Cerebral Palsy and am in an electric wheelchair. I have always struggled in my own existence, largely because I rely on a lot of people to assist me with the most basic tasks, such as dressing, showering, getting in and out of bed, and other basic things that many people take for granted. Although I am verbal, and highly intelligent, having acquired two university degrees at the age of 24, people do tend to judge a book by its cover when it comes to things such as dating and sex.

My entire life I have been trapped inside a body that I hate. It never does what I want it to. It always conspires against me. Although I am confident in my intellectual ability, I do not have a very strong self-image. This is largely because every girl I have asked out on a date has rejected me. Some were even cruel enough to say, ‘Why would I ever go out with a cripple like you?’ Even now, I still have not yet had a girlfriend.

A few years back, I was hanging out with a few other disabled guys who were less physically able than I was. They mentioned that they regularly used a pro because it was the only way they could get the release they craved the most. Most of these guys couldn’t lift their heads up on their own, let alone have the ability to please a woman the way they wanted to. They would go to a brothel and get a hand-job once every few weeks. One of them described his first time with a pro in a way that will stick with me for the rest of my life; he said that ‘It was the first time I felt like a real man.’

Sometime later, I fell in love for the first time. After pursuing her for several months, I was rejected once more, but this time was much harder to swallow than the others that came before her. After several weeks of feeling sorry for myself, I decided to do something about it. Remembering the words of my friends, I decided I would visit a brothel. However, unlike my friends, I knew I wanted more than a hand-job. I wanted to lose my virginity.

I searched through the phone book, found a brothel I wanted and asked about the processes involved. I soon discovered that like most things in my life, this could not be a total secret. If I wanted to have sex, I would need somebody to help me shower before and after, as well as to lift me onto the bed. This would put most of my other disabled friends off immediately, but it did not deter me in the slightest. Without a moment's hesitation, I asked my older brother if he could help me. Although he was initially stunned, he reluctantly agreed.

On the night we turned up at the brothel, we were two completely different men. I was excited, nervously anticipating what would await me. My brother, in contrast, was absolutely petrified, afraid that someone he might know would walk in. After a short while, some girls made their way out and introduced themselves. I picked one and we followed her into the room. She stepped out while my brother helped me get organized. I told him to go for a walk, and I’d give him a call when I was ready.

The whole experience was everything I hoped it would be. She started by giving me a massage, which eased my muscles that are normally tight and non-compliant. As she completed the massage, my body felt like it could do anything I wanted, something I had never felt before. She went down on me, and we had sex. She made me feel safe and confident in myself. For that portion of time, having sex with her (even if I had to pay for it) made up for a lifetime of rejection.

It was the most enjoyable experience I have ever had in my life. I would put it down to two things. For once I had gained control over my body, and it felt like I was in control of my life. The worst thing about having a physical disability is the lack of control I have in life. Everything is very clinical, get up at this time, eat at this time, have a shower at this time, and go to bed at this time. I have no control over these things. This time, I got to do things on my own terms. Second, it was the first time I felt like I was being treated like a sexual being with desires and needs that were important. All my life I have been viewed as an asexual being whose desires should be avoided or neglected. The trip to the brothel taught me not to be afraid of my sexuality and not to push it into the background.

I am now a regular customer, although not as regular as I’d like to be. This is mostly because my brother has moved overseas, and it is hard to find people who will willingly accompany me. However, each time I go, I no longer feel like a cripple. I feel whole.”

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Fuck you, pay me #5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer

This is part 5 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, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

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.

1. 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.

2. 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.”

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. 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.

11. 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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.”

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. 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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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, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

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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Fuck You, Pay Me #3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel

This is part 3 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, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

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.

1. 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?

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. 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.

5. 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.

6. 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.

7. 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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Fuck You, Pay Me #2: The Pros and Cons of Traditional vs. Indie Publishing

This is part 2 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, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

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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Fuck You, Pay Me #1: How to Become a Writer in 12 Easy Steps

The writer at 4

This is part 1 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, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

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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