I’m delighted to share that I’ll be a resident at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska, later this year. While updating my About page at the beginning of the year, I realized how impactful various writing residencies I’ve done over the years have been. So I decided I would apply to, say, a dozen residencies over the course of this year and see what happened. I got a few rejections, so it was extra wonderful to get this opportunity. In an upcoming installment of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” my ongoing series of blog posts on writing, editing, and publishing, I’ll share some tips on getting a residency. One thing that’s especially exciting is that this residency is for the novel that I’m working on. More soon …
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This is part 3 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.
I’ve been working on what I refer to as my porn novel, and it’s been going pretty well. I thought I’d share a few things I’ve learned so far. If the novel keeps moving forward, there will be more posts like this to come. By the way, my novel isn’t porn, or smut, or romance. It’s literary. I call it my porn novel for the sake of shorthand.
Do the math. There is nothing more daunting than writing a novel, so sometimes when I get overwhelmed, or stuck, or unsure, I quantify something that seems unquantifiable. You know, like a novel. So pretty early, I converted the project into numbers. The novel would be approximately 60,000 words long. It would consist of 12 chapters. Each chapter would be approximately 5,000 words long. Each chapter would consist of 10 sections. Each section would be approximately 500 words long. In this way, when I sit down to write, I’m writing another 500-word section of my novel, not attempting to write a novel that is 60,000-words long. Capiche?
Do it your way. Last year, I went to an estate sale at a Hollywood art gallery. Some of what was being sold was vintage adult movie posters. I bought a poster for a porn movie called “She Did It Her Way.” In case you can’t read between the lines, I did not feel while writing a memoir while under contract to a major publisher that I was doing it my way, so in a way the writing of this novel is an effort to go back to what I used to do, which is to write what I want to write how I want to write it, not write what I think someone else wants me to write because that is what I feel I am contractually obligated to do. This novel is all about doing it my way. The other way is bullshit.
Do weird shit. This novel is weird. I mean it’s written in English, but it certainly is very different. I don’t think it has any obvious comparisons in the world of novels, so I guess you could say it is quite original. Also, it has really weird stuff in it, like weird dreams, and a weird main character, and a weird kind of relentless focus on the life of a person in extreme detail to the point of being a little “Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles”-esque. Do you know how many new books are published every year? I don’t either. But a lot. Secret: Most of them are garbage. Garbage or not, the only way to stand out from the crowd is to be weird.
Don’t overthink it. One thing I’m having a fair amount of success with in regards to this novel is not overthinking it. In fact, I don’t even think about it that much when I’m not working on it. I bang out these 500-word sections in about an hour, and I try not to do more than one of them a day. I allowed myself to create a draft of the first chapter that was a little messy but not overly so, and I paid a lot of attention to not dwelling on it, not sitting at the computer for a long period of time, and not spending hours of my life wondering whether or not it’s any good. I mean, it’s about the porn industry. How bad could it be? Ha-ha.
Don’t over revise. When I was done drafting the first chapter, which, I don’t know was done over the course of maybe a couple of weeks or a month or something, who knows, I can’t remember anymore, but not super long, I set it aside for a little bit. Then I decided I would go back and revise the first chapter. Revising my memoir was a bit of a nightmare, for reasons you may or may not be able to intuit, and I wasn’t sure when I went to revise this first chapter of my porn novel if that would be a nightmare, too. Thankfully, it wasn’t. I identified the issues pretty quickly and resolved them relatively easily. There are some things that need to be figured out and tweaked that have to do with the overall unspooling of the book, but I don’t think it will be some massive reinvention of the text. The only part I struggled a bit with was the last section of the first chapter. I’m not sure why. I’ll figure it out later.
Don’t stop trying. Awhile back, I wrote this post about the story of my life as a writer, and I realized as I was writing it how impactful certain events had been. Not obvious life shit, but writer shit. Like the writing residency I did in upstate New York, and the fellowship I did at U.C. Berkeley, and the seminar I did in a Philip Johnson building in Manhattan. And as I was writing the post, I recalled very clearly that for every single one of those things I applied for I was very cognizant of the fact that I didn’t think I was going to get it. But then I did. So I thought, you know, I should apply for some writing residencies for my porn novel. And then I thought, Oh, no, they’ll never pick me because this novel is literary but it is also about porn, and sometimes porn makes people twitchy. Anyway, I applied to one and more to come. Because you gotta try.
Decide to be transparent. If you have any awareness of me and my writing, you’ll know that I’ve tried to write this porn novel many times before, although always in different ways. This way feels different. I debated whether or not to share how it’s going at all, seeing as maybe I’ll just fail at it again, like all those other times. But then I thought, Fuck it. Who cares. One great thing about blogging is no one ever reads blogs anyway. This will be me, writing for me, about me. It will stand as a record of the point where I was now, and maybe at some point in the not-so-distant future I’ll look back on this and think: You go, girl.
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Read "You're Still a Bad Man, Aren't You?," the latest edition of my newsletter, "The Valley," here. It’s about the Ulysses of Porn Valley. Subscribe to my newsletter here.
Here’s an excerpt:
About 23 years ago, when I set foot on an adult movie set for the first time, it occurred to me that someone should write a novel set in Porn Valley. Since, a few have tried it, mostly men, and mostly to poor effect. Take, for example, Chuck Palahniuk’s Snuff, a terrible novel in which terrible things happen and nobody wins. Or, there’s Irvine Welsh’s Porno, which is also a novel and bad. And let’s not forget Martin Amis’s Yellow Dog, which is also a novel and bad, but at least he did the legwork first and visited the adult industry for the now defunct Talk magazine to produce this work of journalism about it.
Suffice to say, the world is still waiting for the Ulysses of Porn Valley.
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Over in my Instagram Stories (they’ll be archived under the Highlight called “Spring”), I’m asking my followers which novel I should write. Head over to Instagram to cast your vote for the opening line that you find most inspiring.
The future world I'm foretelling in my novel-in-progress is coming true. Meet deepfakes, if you haven't already. Videos of female celebrities' faces transposed onto the moving bodies of porn stars in homemade, app-enabled content clips. Truly. Fucking. Bizarre. Sometimes it's the lack of the Frankenstein quality that's what's freaky. Sometimes it's the disconcerting placement of an ill-placed face not seamless situated across another's body. As my novel wonders, speculatively: What does this mish-mash do to the entities from which they were taken? When your expression, your limbs, your breath is combined with another's, will it change you?
Here's an excerpt from my novel-in-progress: PORNOPOLIS. In this work of speculative fiction, a superbug has caused all vice industries to be constrained to Las Vegas, which has become a kind of industrial sin city and is divided into seven sections, for reasons you can figure. The main character is Suzanne Flesh, a reporter who works for a newspaper run by a military general. She has a drone for a BFF, connections in the subterranean world in which the real horrors dwell under the city, and in this scene visits Pornopolis, the part of the city devoted to manufacturing all things adult, where she meets one Mr. Offal, its dazzling kingpin.
Seen from the sky, the city was laid out in a circle. At the center, the tourist area held a roughly round shape. Fanning out in segments from there were the city’s seven districts, each focusing on a particular specialty--guns and weapons, food and alcohol, beauty and health, prisons and the judicial system, shadow banks and the stock exchange, the government seat, and the sex work and pornography business.
By mid-morning, Suzanne stood at the gates to the fifth section. The sign overhead read: PORNOPOLIS. It had been years since she’d been here. For the most part, the stories that she focused on took place in the metropolitan area downtown. The serial killer hunting prostitutes. The former journalist decapitating editors. The disgraced CFO with a penchant for robbing billionaires and whales.
A series of sound stages were contained in a massive structure with a curved roof, a former airplane hangar functioning as a manufacturing plant. There were no trees. Someone had killed them.
In the waiting room, she tried to focus on the messages from the General pinging her phone, but the framed images on the wall kept drawing her attention, the faces in them rearranging their features and expressions.
“Mr. Offal will see you now.”
From behind his massive desk, Offal smiled, a flash of brilliant white teeth against brown leathery skin.
“You know you’re always welcome on my sets,” Offal purred.
“Looks like business is booming.”
Offal chuckled smugly. “Boo-ming. China. Huge. Huge market. Developing countries. Exploding. Can’t get enough. Tell you a secret. Vatican City. Great customer. Terrific customer. Can’t say what they’re buying. Their appetite for it, I can tell you, is unholy. Africa. Big big market just now opening up. Very very into albinism. Albino girls very big right now. In Somalia. That’s the secret. Everybody has a niche. Every stomach wants a particular kind of meal. I find out their appetites. I supply it. The feeding trough for the masses' basest desires. That’s me. I’m the chef. I stir things up. That’s what I do. Before your time, the Daily called me 'the P. T. Barnum of smut.' Can you believe that. Very proud. Framed that. On the wall behind me. Without the technology, it goes without saying, I’m nothing.”
She’d spent the morning studying Offal’s file. A boy genius, he’d hacked into the World Bank at eleven and been recruited by the shadow banks not long after that. He didn’t have time to play chess. He was too busy playing checkers with hedge fund managers' heads, distracting them while he picked their pockets with spybugs and black drives. He was married to a profoundly surgically enhanced Ukrainian former pageant queen named Aleksandra. Rumor had it, he was one of the richest men in the city. He’d figured out how to turn a profit on chronic masturbators. He was at the gym every morning by five and drove an armored X-Hov to work. According to the dominatrix she had coffee with and whom he visited every Friday afternoon, Offal liked to be spanked as punishment for wetting adult diapers, the privilege for which he paid her $33,000 an hour. Suzanne had complimented the dom on her shoes and rued, briefly, the career path she should have taken.
“Dolores!” A comely blonde in an OFFAL INC T-shirt appeared. “Take Suzanne wherever she wants to go. My world is yours, Suzanne. Consider yourself my esteemed guest. Make sure to stop by the cafeteria. They do an amazing lobster bisque with truffle oil and capers.”
She followed the blonde to the stages.
A snippet from my cancer-novel-in-progress:
"In a way, she has shit the pants of her life."
"At the other end of the bar, one of the three guys was talking to the girl with the Windex eyes. A few feet away, his two friends were snickering. The three were known for taking home the drunkest girl at the party and running a train on her. Afterwards, they'd leave her passed out on her bed, and on their way out, one of them would find the girl's purse and take a dump in it. He wondered how the girl would feel tomorrow when she woke up with a massive hangover and found her purse was full of shit. The guy slid his arm around the girl's shoulders, guiding her to the door, the other two guys trailing behind them. In another life, he would've stopped them. In this life, he ordered a double." -- work-in-progress
