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 #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 #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 #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 #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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My Thoughts on Traditional Versus Independent Publishing

Today I posted my thoughts on traditional vs independent publishing in my Instagram Stories. I’ve saved it in my Instagram Highlights, as well. Obviously, this isn’t my final verdict on the matter, but where I’m at now.

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The Zombie Hunter

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."

Now You Can Buy The Tumor with PayPal

When I decided to self-publish THE TUMOR, my new short story about a guy who wants to kill his wife and her tumor, I chose Gumroad as my payment platform because a) my friend Clayton Cubitt recommended it, b) it's super easy, c) it looks great. And, as of yesterday, you can pay with PayPal on Gumroad purchases. This is the perfect option if you like using PayPal and/or felt unsure about using Gumroad for the first time. So cool of Gumroad to do this!

As far as updates on this experiment in selling fiction online, thanks to my great readers, it's been a rousing success! My goal was to sell 100 copies, and last weekend I reached my goal. Because Gumroad offers the option of using Pay What You Want pricing, which enables customers to pay what they want for whatever product they're buying, my sales are $609 on 102 copies. So that's an average sale price of about $6. Not too shabby, and way more than I ever would've made selling that story to most literary magazines.

Currently, I'm at work on my next story that I'll be selling the same way. It's about a man, a female robot, and a brave new world in which everyone's a little cyborgian. I hope you'll keep an eye out for it.

If you haven't tried selling your work online, I highly recommend it. THE TUMOR project has had a profound impact on me in a couple of ways:

1. It enabled me to move on and get over it. For some reason, self-publishing this piece that was based on my real experiences having cancer (I was diagnosed with early-stage breast cancer in late 2011 and am now cancer-free) enabled me to move on from being Ms. Cancerpants and get on with being a regular human being. For years after my treatment, I had terrible anxiety and suffered a certain degree of professional and emotional paralysis. Making a real tumor into THE TUMOR proved cathartic. If stories are children you put up for adoption, I put a malignant mass on the market and people seem to have enjoyed it. Since, I've felt happier, freer, and more determined than I have in a long time.
2. It empowered me to stop being a victim. I've been a freelancer for 17 years. That means the majority of your work life is spent trying to get people to give you permission to do what you want to do. This sucks and is awful. It means your success and self-worth depend on the whims and taste of a cast of editors, publishers, and advertisers that usually have agendas focused on the bottom line and not on producing great work. It's convenient, though, isn't it? To let everyone else decide who you are. God knows how difficult it would be if you had to decide who you are. Self-publishing, with its soup-to-nuts nature, forces you to own everything: the way it reads, the way it looks, the way it sells. If it bombs, you've got no one to blame but yourself. And if it succeeds, that's all you. When you self-publish, you get to decided who you are. In other words, I highly recommend it.

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

What Doesn't Kill You

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."

How to Make a Cool Book Cover

Very cool: Gumroad CEO Sahil Lavingia singled out THE TUMOR's awesome cover designed by Peteski as an example of great Gumroad product covers on a new Gumroad blog post: "Judging Books (and More) by Their Covers." 

Who: Sahil:
What: The Tumor: A Short Story by Susannah Breslin
Why: It’s a professional cover, but it’s nothing so crazy that you couldn’t wrangle something of that quality with a bunch of free/online tools. And I like how “A Short Story” sits in the center of the target.

Thanks, Sahil and Travis!

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

Remarketing

I changed the blurb describing THE TUMOR.

Here's the first incarnation:

"THE TUMOR is a deranged, surreal exploration of our dark places, malignancies that won't stay gone, and the lengths to which a man will go when he goes to war with a determined enemy."

Here's the new incarnation:

"THE TUMOR is a slipstream short story starring an anthropomorphic tumor, a killer husband, and an invisible woman. Based on the author's true life experience with cancer (she's fine now!), this terrifying tale will grab you by the balls and make you scream."

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

The Tumor Sales

Here are the sales numbers for THE TUMOR to date:

Total copies sold: 89

Total revenue: $541.00

I use Gumroad and Pay What You Want pricing.

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

This Is Happiness

Thanks to This Isn't Happiness, who posted a link to THE TUMOR last Friday, I sold 34 copies of THE TUMOR over the weekend.

Fun facts:

Of those sales, the average sale price (I use Pay What You Want pricing) was: $4.48.

The cover of THE TUMOR was designed by Peteski, who runs This Isn't Happiness.

This weekend customers were 76% male, 18% female, and 6% unknown.

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

The Numbers on Self-Publishing Digital Fiction

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?

Why You Should Sell Your Own Work

Courage Wolf!

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.

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

"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.