Filtering by Tag: PUBLISHING

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

November 15, 2024  /  Susannah Breslin

This is part 17 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.

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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tags / FUCK YOU PAY ME, FICTION, SHORT STORIES, PORN, SEX, WEIRD, WRITING, EDITING, PUBLISHING

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

October 12, 2024  /  Susannah Breslin

This is part 16 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.

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.

_____

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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tags / FUCK YOU PAY ME, WRITING, EDITING, PUBLISHING, MEMOIRS, BOOKS, EXCERPTS, NONFICTION

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

September 19, 2024  /  Susannah Breslin

This is part 15 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.

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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tags / FUCK YOU PAY ME, WRITING, EDITING, PUBLISHING, NEWSLETTERS, THE REVERSE COWGIRL, SEX, MONEY, WORK

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

January 16, 2024  /  Susannah Breslin

This is part 4 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing.

I want to say the first memoir I read was Silvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, which, of course, is not a memoir at all but a novel. I want to say my favorite memoir is Marguerite Duras’ The Lover, which is maybe true and maybe not. I want to say my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment, is not a memoir but a literary interrogation, and that might be right.

My general feeling about memoirs is that I do not like them. The memoirs of which I am thinking are written by women for women, are not concerned with the world at large but with the world of the interior (as if women have nothing to say about the world and must relegate themselves to writing about their interiors), are books of feelings that occupy a literary pink ghetto created by the publishing business that limits women to a silo of what is acceptable to write about and does so in order to mass produce books, regardless of what these books do or do not say or how they say it.

When people ask me for examples of the kind of memoirs I am talking about when I say I don’t like memoirs, I might say Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert or Untamed by Glennon Doyle. I’d like to believe these types of memoirs are on their way out, because surely women readers are getting exhausted from reading stories about women who go on personal journeys of great discovery that just so happen to take place in neat three-act structures and mostly have happy endings. The thing I dislike most about these sorts of memoirs is that they start from a shared premise. A woman is a broken thing. A woman is a thing that must be fixed. A woman must become some thing other than who she is in order to be happy. This the same lie the beauty industry sells: You, a woman, are not, are never enough.

Obviously, there are memoirs that do not follow these limiting definitions of what a memoir is. To name a few: The Woman Warrior by Maxine Hong Kingston (who surely influenced me as one of my professors at U.C. Berkeley), In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado, Constructing a Nervous System by Margo Jefferson. As Megan O’Grady writes astutely in “These Literary Memoirs Take a Different Tack”: “Memory is also identity, and for those historically cast to the margins of our national stories, or those who grew up as the silent daughters or queer kids at the family dinner table, seizing control of one’s narrative has a particular power.” To write within the confines of someone else’s definitions of writing is to disappear oneself.

Memoirs are very popular these days. Prince Harry’s Spare was one of the best-selling books of 2023. Britney Spears’ The Woman in Me has sold over 2 million copies. Matthew Perry’s Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing was an “INSTANT #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER” and a “#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER.” Did these celebrities write these books on their own? Regardless of what they may or may not say or have said, that is probably not very likely. In “Notes From Prince Harry’s Ghostwriter,” J. R. Moehringer shares that “memoir isn’t about you. It’s not even the story of your life. It’s a story carved from your life, a particular series of events chosen because they have the greatest resonance for the widest range of people.” He is not lying.

As I have written in this series previously, I sold my book to one of the Big Five publishers on proposal, and it was stipulated in the contract that I would write it as a memoir. I had not pitched the book I imagined I would write as a memoir but as a book that would interweave memoir, narrative nonfiction, and investigative reporting. I have a history, professionally speaking, of coloring outside of the lines, and I envisioned I would do the same thing with my book. Why be one thing when you can be, say, three? After all, what I was proposing wasn’t so, well, novel. Kingston’s memoir had been published in 1976. Didn’t the world want something … original?

Apparently not. The publishing industrial complex had other concerns. A way to market the book that was simple, obvious. A mode by which my book could be lumped in with other books that were supposedly like it. A formula by which the all-seeing-but-never-seen algorithm would sell a book-shaped product with my name on it. This was smoke and mirrors, a game of charades, a grim routine of The Hokey Pokey. I had worked in publicity and marketing but I could not see the sense in the squandering of an opportunity for a unique value proposition. Yet I had already signed on the dotted line. And what did I know? I wasn’t a publisher or a bookseller. I was a writer.

Generally speaking, I don’t like being told what to do. I find it constraining, like a personal violation. Because that is what it is. At a certain point in my writing career, when people younger than me asked me why I became a writer, I started saying: Because it is the only thing I do well. So to have my writing restricted, limited, or dictated in such a way—let’s be honest: in any way—was like being on a leash and the leash was tied to a stake and I kept spinning around until I was wholly tangled up in the lead. Ultimately, I wrote about some of these very issues in my book, and I would argue the book is not a memoir at all but a literary interrogation pretending to be a memoir to interrogate memoir itself, but I guess that’s for the reader to decide.

Recently I thought about some of these ideas as I read a review of my memoir in The Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism written by Surina Venkat. “Her memoir, a reordering of her eventful life, constructs a narrative of her own design — one with handpicked data points and where the data points are memory, resisting the depersonalizing role of the ‘studied’ that Breslin occupied for decades of her life,” Venkat observes insightfully. “Susannah Breslin was indeed a data baby — twice, even. And her second time, she flaunts the role, resisting its implications and asserting her own control over it.” The only way I could tell the curious story of my life was by wresting the narrative from others: my parents, my publisher, my own preconceived notions of what a memoir should or should not be. By seizing authorship, I assumed the role of author, which, per Merriam-Webster, does not conform to deal terms but is “one that originates or creates something.” And that, to put it frankly, is the entire fucking point.

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tags / FUCK YOU PAY ME, EDITING, PUBLISHING, DATA BABY, BOOKS, MEMOIRS, INVESTIGATIONS, ADVICE

The Zombie Hunter

June 23, 2015  /  Susannah Breslin

Delighted and cool to get my contributor's copy of Clackamas Literary Review! Includes my short story: The Urologist.

"Delighted and cool to get my contributor's copy of Clackamas Literary Review! Includes my short story: The Urologist."

The other day I got my contributor's copies of the latest issue of Clackamas Literary Review, which features a new short story I wrote, "The Urologist." Thanks, Trevor Dodge! You can buy a copy of it on Amazon here. I was delightful to be featured along pals of mine: Lydia Netzer, who wrote the widely-acclaimed Shine Shine Shine and contributed a wonderfully weird short story called "Suicide Doors," which is about a woman who tries to write erotic fiction and keeps getting distracted by life, and Kevin Sampsell, who wrote A Common Pornography, published my very own You're a Bad Man, Aren't You?, and contributed a series of fantastical collages. In any case, I hope you'll pick up a copy. Here's an excerpt from my story:

"Sometimes, at dinner parties, someone would ask her why she had married the husband, and she would say, 'If there is ever a zombie apocalypse, my husband will hunt other humans for us to eat.' Invariably, the person would laugh, thinking she was joking, and she would laugh, too, playing along. She wasn't kidding. The husband was a killer."

Buy THE TUMOR! "This is one of the weirdest, smartest, most disturbing things you will read this year."

tags / FICTION, PUBLISHING, FRIENDS

What Doesn't Kill You

May 10, 2015  /  Susannah Breslin

Depressed. #selfies #depression #tired #purple #pillows #bed #glasses

"Depressed. #selfies #depression #tired #purple #pillows #bed #glasses"

I've had some problems with depression lately, so I thought I would write a post reminding myself of the positive things that have happened thus far this year.

I guestblogged for Kottke.org. Like I said before, this was an awesome time. Why doesn't the New York Times ask me to guest blog for them? This is one of life's many mysteries. It would be great if a high profile blog picked me up. I'm a great blogger. My friend says when you want something, the universe's answer is either: Yes, Yes But Not Right Now, Or No I Have Something Better In Mind. Or whatever. You get the idea. Universe, I await your call.

I published THE TUMOR. Fuck, this guy is like my baby! I love him so much: his cover, his pages, his content. His tone is so marvelously morally bankrupt. I read something earlier today about someone who kept being a nasty resistant asshole until the end of his days, but I can't remember who it is anymore. Excitingly, my next to be self-published short story is underway. It involves a robot. It is already a masterpiece of the genre. Trust me on this.

I auditioned for and got in an improv group that actually performs in a real theater and everything. I heard there were going to be auditions for this improv group downtown, and I went just to challenge myself. I'd only done one three-day intensive improv class at The Second City in Chicago. Experienced, I am not. A few days later I got a call from one of the people who runs it. She left a message, asking me to call her back. I was like, damn, can't she just leave a message telling me they don't want me? Now I have to call her back and get rejected live? Instead, she said I was in. What the hell! There have been a lot of rehearsals, and god knows I need them. Sometimes, I get confused by all the rules, and I spend way too much time thinking how I have to do everything right or I'm a failure, and I forget to have fun and play and whatever. Last Friday, I had to sing for the first time, and while I am a terrible singer, for some reason, it was a great time. I also rapped. Go figure.

I ate at Next. This was a living the dream moment. Such a peculiar, special thing. I want to do more things like this. I want to eat at Alinea one day. I think this is very much a thing that is art that happens to use food. I have a kind of emotional reaction to it. Probably because eating is so primal. My defenses fall away when I stuff duck in my mouth, I guess.

I got a short story published in PANK Magazine. This was a piece of fiction that I submitted a long time ago that got accepted a while ago, but the print copy arrived in the mail last week. It had a $20 bill stuck in it. (That's why self-publishing your fiction is the way to go, IMO. In contrast, I've made almost $600 off THE TUMOR thus far. I'm pretty sure 600 is more than 20.) For the last several years, as is the case with most of us, I'm used to seeing my work online. It was cool to see my words in print. BRESLIN was printed at the top of my story pages. Ink is real.

I got accepted to THREAD at Yale. The only reason I applied to this journalism program at Yale was because I saw a listing for it on Romenesko. I wasn't sure they would accept me, but I thought there was a decent chance they would. I was thrilled when they did. No, it certainly isn't the same as going to Yale, but who fucking cares! I am super excited about going to this. Journalism, journalism, journalism. I hope to meet some cool writers, and tromp around acting like a journalist, and meet some super cool mentors at the top of their game. Yay for Yale.

Getting over that whole thing, maybe. One thing I noticed that I wasn't expecting was that writing, packaging, and publishing THE TUMOR caused something in me to shift. I think maybe it helped me release some of my anxiety surrounding having breast cancer several years ago. Mostly, I avoid reading stories about cancer because they just make me anxious, But after I published THE TUMOR, I started reading more stories about cancer. News articles, essays, what have you. Recently, I went to Aruba, and I picked up a copy of Esquire for the plane, and I read "The Friend" by Matt Teague. It's pretty much one of the most terrifying things you will ever read. In cancer stories, it's always like oooh the battle and then fast forward over the dying part and then dead the end. Teague pulls back the curtain on the dying part, and my god it is just ... I still haven't gotten over reading it. It haunts me. But it makes me want to be a better writer, too: pull back more curtains, be less afraid, show the world what others haven't seen so they can't unsee it. I noticed that when I wrote "Blood Sacrifice" a few weeks ago that it was a story more about recovery than about illness. So congratulations to myself.

Oh, and I got on Instagram. Or, more importantly, I started posting boob selfies on Instagram. Recently, I had a friend diagnosed with breast cancer, and she sent me a photo of her boobs, and I sent her a photo of my boobs. Tit pics are the new dick pics. You can see in that Instagram beach boob selfie that the one on your right is a bit smaller. That's the one that had the cancer. I had a lumpectomy. The tumor was on the inner curve of the boob. The lady surgeon cut around the areola and opened it like a door and pulled the tumor out through the opening. I hope they waterboarded my tumor after they removed it, I told my friend. I suppose that's not nice. It was just doing what malignant things do. Eating people. Go eat someone else, Mr. Tumor. I got boob selfies to take, you shitty prick.

In any case, I don't know why I'm depressed. Genetic programming, maybe. I shouldn't be.

Thanks for reading.

Buy THE TUMOR: "This is one of the weirdest, smartest, most disturbing things you will read this year."

tags / DEPRESSION, CANCER, WRITING, WORK, PUBLISHING, JOURNALISM, SELF PUBLISHING, SELFIES, BOOBS

The Numbers on Self-Publishing Digital Fiction

March 13, 2015  /  Susannah Breslin

Considering a title for this post, I was reminded of a post I wrote back in 2010, "The Numbers on Self-Publishing Long-Form Journalism." In 2009, I'd self-published, "They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?", a longform look at how the Great Recession impacted the adult movie industry. The piece was free for readers, so the numbers I wrote about in that follow up essay mostly focused on how many people had read it.

This week, I self-published "The Tumor," a beautifully designed, deeply horrifying digital short story about a husband, a wife, and the tumor that shows up to terrorize them. You can buy it directly from me on my website, and I'm charging $1.

Or am I?

Gumroad, the platform I'm using to process payments, has a payment option called Pay What You Want. You can read about how Gumroad does PWYW here. Of course, Gumroad didn't invent PWYW. Radiohead used the pricing strategy to sell In Rainbows. Stephen King used it to serialize The Plant. Panera Bread used it to hawk turkey chili.

According to Wikipedia:

"Pay what you want (or PWYW) is a pricing strategy where buyers pay any desired amount for a given commodity, sometimes including zero. In some cases, a minimum (floor) price may be set, and/or a suggested price may be indicated as guidance for the buyer. The buyer can also select an amount higher than the standard price for the commodity."

Gumroad enables you to utilize PWYW pricing by giving the seller (people like me) the option to add a "+" when setting the price for the product. I decided to charge $1 for "The Tumor," and I added the PWYW option. So the price for the buyer (people like you) appears as $1+. When you click to purchase, Gumroad's prompt next to the amount box reads: "Name a fair price." You can enter $1, or you can enter a bigger amount -- say, $3, or $5, or $1,000. It's up to you, the consumer. 

Why would you use PWYW? Well, for one, Gumroad asserts, "Pay-what-you-want products often make upwards of 20% more revenue." I'd already used PWYW with Gumroad because Clayton Cubitt is my friend, and a photographer, and people were emailing him with questions all the time -- you know, asking for advice -- so he created the InterroClayton. Basically, you can ask him a question, but you have to pay for the answer.

As Cubitt puts it:

"This $2 digital download entitles the purchaser to ask any single question of me and receive an honest answer to it in a timely fashion. It is a VIP ticket to my mind."

Way to monetize your brain power.

(Side note: You can also "sell" your stuff for free on Gumroad. One great thing about Gumroad is that you get to see who is buying your product. Unlike Amazon. Like I said before, Fuck Bezos. You won't be making money, per se, but, as Gumroad says, "It's a great way to get valuable data from your audience in exchange for giving them great content." Gumroad's got more on pricing and pay what you want here, and you can also check out their "Is Pay What You Want Pricing for You?" interview with author Tom Morkes, who wrote The Complete Guide to Pay What You Want Pricing. Also, Money has "A Brief History of Pay What You Want Businesses" and Louis C.K.'s role in it).

In any case, "The Tumor" is PWYW priced at $1+. So far, the average price people are paying for it is $2.77. The highest price paid thus far is $20, and $3 and $5 are popular amounts.

Interesting.

What's interesting to me here is not the money, or the pricing model, but the concept of value and who decides it. Is the black convertible Bentley that I see parked at the gym worth $226,000? Last year, Fiat started selling Maserati Ghiblis for $68,000, well below the rest of their $100,000-plus Maserati models, so what does that do to their brand and our perception of it, when randoms can afford a Maserati? Or, you know, why don't you just buy a Nissan Versa for $12,000 and call it a day because you don't need a car to tell the world your worth?   

Why would you pay $1 to read "The Tumor"? Why would you pay $20 to read "The Tumor"? What is "The Tumor" worth? What is its value? What service does it provide? What is the market value of a fiction?

Here's the first page of "The Tumor" (page design by Domini Dragoone):

Now, what would you pay to read the rest?

tags / FICTION, MONEY, PUBLISHING, THE TUMOR

Why You Should Sell Your Own Work

March 12, 2015  /  Susannah Breslin

Yesterday, I launched "The Tumor," an original digital short story I'm selling on my personal website.

It's a story about a husband, a wife, and what happens when the husband wants to shoot the wife to solve the problem, and she won't let him.

Here's why you should sell your work yourself:

It's Really Not That Hard

I'm using Gumroad to process purchases of "The Tumor" on my site. I chose Gumroad because Clayton Cubitt uses it, and he told me to use it. They don't take as big of a cut as Amazon.

Lesson: Fuck Bezos.

It's Great for Control Freaks

I'm a control freak. And a freelance writer. That means editors screw up my prose, incompetent designers do a shitty job of laying out my paragraphs, and artists create horrible art to go with my fine lines. It's like going to the prom and getting caught in the rain on the way, and by the time you get to the prom you look like you just got in from a gangbang. When you sell your work yourself, you control what it looks like, what format(s) it's in, and how much people pay for it.

Lesson: If you're spineless, stick to letting other people ruin your life.

You're Good Enough, You're Smart Enough, and Doggone It, People Like You!

I pitch stories to outlets all the time. Most of the time, they pass, they ignore, they turn up their noses. Every time this happens, it makes you feel a little more worthless, a little more downtrodden, a little more why bother. It's not easy to be a creative and have people shit on your head, is it? Here's the thing. The problem isn't your work. The problem isn't you. It's them. These needlenose fuckers, these self-proclaimed guardians of invisible velvet ropes, these losers who have desk jobs because they're too afraid to go deep and create things that are beautiful, and new, and remarkable? Why would you ask them for permission to do what you want? There are people out there who want to buy what you have. It's up to you to deliver it to them.

Lesson: Be your own Courage Wolf or the world's miniature Dachshunds will devour you.

You'll Expand Your Mind and Your Circle

It took a band of creatives to spawn "The Tumor." Peteski did the cover. Domini did the page design. Susan copyedited. Creatives spend a lot of time in isolation. Creating, producing, and selling your own work forces you to engage with others in a way that makes you smarter, sharper, and savvier. You never learn this when you hand over your work to people you never even know.

Lesson: Collaboration is the spark that ignites creation.

There's No Glamour in Being Nobody

The writer who claims he doesn't care if anyone reads his work is a liar and a fraud. At the moment your work is seen, you are being seen. The work is your child, given up to be adopted by the world, and you have a responsibility to be its doula. Otherwise, it will be invisible.

Lesson: Your 15 seconds of nanofame is there for the taking -- grab it.

Now go buy THE TUMOR.

tags / WRITING, THE TUMOR, PUBLISHING, FICTION, ADVICE

How to Turn a Malignant Tumor into a Digital Self-Publishing Project

March 11, 2015  /  Susannah Breslin

"The Tumor," cover by Peteski

"The Tumor," cover by Peteski

I've been a freelance journalist for seventeen years. I've written for magazines and websites, appeared on TV and radio shows, and self-published a 10,000-word investigation of the Great Recession's impact on the adult movie industry, "They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?" I've published short stories, and Future Tense Books published a collection of those short stories, You're a Bad Man, Aren't You? I've blogged for Forbes and for Time Warner. At one point, I became a digital copywriter and wrote Facebook updates for a bottle of stomach medicine. But today marks the first time I'm selling one of my original digital short stories on my personal website. It is "The Tumor."

On November 23, 2011, I was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer. Over the following year and a half, I underwent five biopsies, two surgeries, three months of chemo, thirty radiation treatments, and a year of IV drug injections that targeted my particularly aggressive type of cancer. Along the way, I went bald, my fingernails and toenails turned brown and peeled off, and I developed what's known as "chemo fog," a chemically-induced state of mind that makes you feel like your brain has been replaced by a bowl of tepid oatmeal. Throughout the process, I wrote. I wrote journalism, I blogged, I drafted a novel. In a way, writing was my therapy.

Eventually, I was declared cancer-free and sent on my way. I went back to life and writing, and I kept trying to write something that captured what it's like when a malignancy shows up in your life, and you're not sure whether you or the tumor is going to win the war into which you have been thrust. I could never quite assemble the words properly. I kept trying and kept failing. The story of the tumor eluded me.

Then, last month, it was time for my annual mammogram. Most mammograms are an unremarkable experience. In theory, one's annual mammogram is no big deal. Still, once you've had one mammogram go sideways, you worry you may pull the short straw again, and it was while I was riding a growing ball of anxiety about this upcoming scan that I wrote "The Tumor."

Of course, if you know my writing, you know this isn't just any story. It's a story about a husband and a wife, and when the wife announces that she has a tumor, the husband's first idea is that he shoot her in the chest in an attempt to eradicate this unannounced saboteur. Things get stranger from there.

I had a terrific time putting this project together, and it wouldn't have happened without the help of others. Clayton Cubitt is an inspiration to all creatives who want to do it themselves and advised me throughout. Peteski made the beautiful cover you see here. Domini Dragoone did a fantastic job creating some of the coolest page design I've ever seen. Susan Clements proved to be a keen and perfect-for-me copyeditor. Lydia Netzer championed my creative efforts, as ever.

As for that mammogram I had last month, the results raised a question mark, a biopsy was done, and it came back benign. I remain cancer-free. For all I know, the tumor has taken up residence on some far off planet. As for "The Tumor," you can buy it online here.

tags / WRITING, THE TUMOR, FICTION, CANCER, PUBLISHING