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.

About | My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email

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.

_____

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.

_____

About | My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email

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.

About | My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email

Fuck You, Pay Me #14: Cranking the Flywheel

This is part 14 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing. Read the rest of the series: Part 1: How To Become a Writer in 12 Easy Steps, Part 2: The Pros and Cons of Traditional vs. Indie Publishing, Part 3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel, Part 4: Why I Hate Memoirs (but Wrote One Anyway), Part 5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer, Part 6: Letters From Johns Revisited, Part 7: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Journalism Edition), Part 8: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Fiction Edition), Part 9: How to Promote Your Book Without Going Crazy, Part 10: The Pornification of My Life, Part 11: How to Be More Creative, Part 12: The Fine Art of Applying to Writing Residencies, Part 13: How to Be a Consultant, Part 14: Cranking the Flywheel, Part 15: Why You Should Have a Newsletter, Part 16: An Excerpt From My Memoir, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About | My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email

August Is the Hottest Month

In August, I’ll be posting more frequently on Forbes. Got a story suggestion or a tip? You can email me here.

About | My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email

Erotic Books

If you’re interested in used / vintage books of a sex-related nature in Los Angeles, I’d recommend checking out Counterpoint Records & Books in Franklin Village. In the back of the store on the left, there’s a pretty good-sized selection of sex-related books, from nude photography to dirty comix to Playboy histories. Near the middle of the store on the right, there’s a selection of plup-y vintage erotic books. Check it out.

About | My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email

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

This is part 13 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing. Read the rest of the series: Part 1: How To Become a Writer in 12 Easy Steps, Part 2: The Pros and Cons of Traditional vs. Indie Publishing, Part 3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel, Part 4: Why I Hate Memoirs (but Wrote One Anyway), Part 5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer, Part 6: Letters From Johns Revisited, Part 7: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Journalism Edition), Part 8: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Fiction Edition), Part 9: How to Promote Your Book Without Going Crazy, Part 10: The Pornification of My Life, Part 11: How to Be More Creative, Part 12: The Fine Art of Applying to Writing Residencies, Part 13: How to Be a Consultant, Part 14: Cranking the Flywheel, Part 15: Why You Should Have a Newsletter, Part 16: An Excerpt From My Memoir, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About | My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email

RIP, Evan Wright

Last weekend, I got a call from a friend who had heard that Evan Wright had killed himself. I knew Evan, had met him over 20 years ago, had kept in touch over the years but not in recent years. Before he did all the war reporting, he had been an editor at Hustler. So we had writing about porn in common. I wasn’t really surprised to hear that he had killed himself. This kind of journalism takes a toll on you. It’s taken a toll on me. It’s hard to bear witness when you stand in the face of insanity. Back in 2009, I interviewed Evan about Hella Nation for The Daily Beast. In the last question, I asked him about his friend David Foster Wallace’s suicide.

You were friends with David Foster Wallace. Were you surprised that he killed himself?

I wasn’t surprised because, I mean, actually there were a couple conversations we had a few years before where, you know, he said as a grim joke, “Well, if I continue in this state of mind …,” and then he did say, “I’d be hanging from a rope,” or something like that. On a super-functional level, he had a gallows sense of humor. It was actually a theme. When I heard about [Wallace’s suicide], I was surprised.

I once complimented him on some piece—he referred to his writing as his “shtick”—and he was very self-deprecating. He separated himself from the persona he had as a famous writer. So, when he died, I was very sad. Back to that gallows humor, knowing him pretty well, what I resent is all these stories where they’re all, “Oh, it was inevitable.” I look at it like he had a bad day. And as an accidental death. I know there were attempts before. A lot of people almost do this, and then they don’t. He was a really great person, a really extremely generous person, and it’s hard to see him as anything else but that.

Read the rest here.

About | My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Consulting I Email

Susannah Breslin's Writing Style

Generally I think AI is a parasite that leeches off of creatives and generates garbage, but occasionally I interact with it. Recently, I asked Meta’s AI search function on Instagram what my writing style was. The answer was … well, it wasn’t exactly wrong. Does AI know my writing style better than I do? Maybe.

About | My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

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.

About | My Book I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

The Writing Residencies

In January, I was updating my About page, and I realized how impactful doing various writing residencies and fellowships had been and how I’d made some great friends doing them. So I decided I would apply to some writing residencies this year. I did some research and estimated there were about twelve to fourteen to which I wanted to apply. The deadlines are staggered throughout the year, so I couldn’t do them all at once. Last weekend, six months later, I had applied to fourteen. So far, I was waitlisted by one that turned into an acceptance, I’ve been rejected by six, and there are seven more I haven’t heard from yet. Later this year, when I’ve heard back from all of them, I’ll write one of my Fuck You, Pay Me posts about it. Applying was a good exercise for a variety of reasons. It required perseverance. It demanded an investment with no guarantee of a return. It prompted me to think about my work as a whole and individually in a broader context. Next time, I’ll probably apply to half as many because fourteen was a lot! But I’m glad I did it. It taught me a lot.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

The Boy Who Wore His Heart on His Sleeve

This short story was originally published by A Shaded View on Fashion Fiction in May 2010.

She had been waiting forever, it seemed, for a boy like this one, who wore his heart on his sleeve. Now, here he was, sitting across from her in this dimly lit restaurant, his arm on the table. The exposed, bloody organ was attached to his sleeve with what appeared to be a safety pin. Across the table, he was looking at her expectantly, his head cocked slightly to the left, like a dog listening for a sound only he could hear, the right side of his mouth pulling up slightly, as if he was unsure what she was thinking. Judging by the tangle of threads unraveling around the gaping hole in his blue sweater where his heart should have been, he had carved himself open to retrieve it. On his sleeve, the heart was shaking and shuddering, straining against the pin’s grasp. They had found each other on an online dating site three days previous and met for the first time 17 minutes ago. Now, here he was, looking eager and hopeful, and it was up to her to figure out what was she supposed to do next. She looked at the boy uncertainly and tried to hurry up and decide what she was going to do about this boy and his still-beating heart before the angry waitress returned and demanded to take their order. Is it too late? she said. The boy’s face dropped. Late? he said. Too late to put it back? She nodded her head at the heart. Oh, the boy said, looking down at it. Slowly, the blood was seeping into his napkin. Soon, it would spill off the table and pool on the floor, making a mess. I don’t know, he said. The boy had no idea if he could singlehandedly un-pin his heart, stuff it back into his chest, and darn up the sweater in such a way that no one would ever know that he had stood in his kitchen in the fading light and removed his heart from his chest with a serrated steak knife, all for a woman whom he had yet to meet, a glowing collection of pixels that was her smiling out at him from the computer screen. It was too late to pull his arm off the table and put it in his lap. She would know what he was doing, and he would bleed all over his trousers. From somewhere behind him, he could hear the hard clanging of pots in the kitchen, the frantic barking of the chef, the buzz of other couples in love cooing at one another in the candlelight. Shit, he said, under his breath but loud enough that the girl would hear it. All of a sudden, he decided he had had enough. He reached over with his left hand and unfastened the safety pin holding his heart to his sleeve. Here, he said, taking his heart in his right hand. Standing up slightly, he leaned across the table and deposited the heart on the plate in front of the girl sitting across from him. The girl poked at the heart with her fork. Interesting, she said, sounding like a forensic pathologist. He had no idea what she meant by that, but he knew at that moment that if she would continue saying things like this while stabbing at his heart with the tiny tines of the silver fork in her hand, he could be with her and stay happy forever. In that moment, it seemed anything was possible.

About | My Book I Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

Fuck You, Pay Me #11: How to Be More Creative

This is part 11 of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” an ongoing series of posts on writing, editing, and publishing. Read the rest of the series: Part 1: How To Become a Writer in 12 Easy Steps, Part 2: The Pros and Cons of Traditional vs. Indie Publishing, Part 3: Scenes From My Life Writing a Porn Novel, Part 4: Why I Hate Memoirs (but Wrote One Anyway), Part 5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer, Part 6: Letters From Johns Revisited, Part 7: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Journalism Edition), Part 8: Some of My Favorite Things I’ve Ever Written (Fiction Edition), Part 9: How to Promote Your Book Without Going Crazy, Part 10: The Pornification of My Life, Part 11: How to Be More Creative, Part 12: The Fine Art of Applying to Writing Residencies, Part 13: How to Be a Consultant, Part 14: Cranking the Flywheel, Part 15: Why You Should Have a Newsletter, Part 16: An Excerpt From My Memoir, Part 17: How to Write a Short Story.

Lately, I’ve been working on my novel-in-progress, which I’ve mentioned previously, and which is set in Porn Valley. Previously, I had published and was promoting my memoir, so this was a change of gears, from nonfiction to fiction. As a way of strengthening my fiction muscle, I created a project. Originally, it was called 30 Days of Smut, and the goal was to write 30 sex-related (not erotica) flash fictions in 30 days. Pretty quickly, I fell off that pace, but I continued to write anyway. Ultimately, I revised the project to 30 Days of Smut and generated 30 flash fictions in a couple of months. The exercise was helpful. Why? I’ll explain.

STRUCTURAL

I don’t believe in that whole idea that if you do something for 10,000 hours, you can master it. I mean, c’mon. But I do believe that doing something repeatedly can be beneficial and perhaps more importantly it can take you to places you wouldn’t go otherwise. So, as I stated in my introduction, I set up an informal structure within which I would be creating. I broke my project down into 30 bite-sized steps. All I had to do was churn out a flash fiction a day, and I had accomplished that day’s goal. That went along swimmingly for the first few days, but then something happened; life got in the way, as they say. I have no idea what it was, and it doesn’t matter. I thought about quitting as soon as I failed to meet my daily quota for the first time. But I didn’t. Instead, I kept at it. I changed the title of my project to cross out the 30 (as in days) part, and then I was no longer failing at the project I had intended. Instead, I was succeeding at the project as I had re-imagined it. The first 10 stories are about a porn addict, an adult store mannequin, a male porn star, a phone sex operator, a voyeur, that voyeur’s voyeur, a sex writer, a dominatrix, an autocannibalist, a fan of the autocannibalist, and a male stripper. None of those people, their internal lives, their curious thought processes would have existed if I had given up. Here is a line that I like, from “#6: The Sex Writer,” who has a challenging dating life because of her job: “No one wanted to take her home to their mother and say, here is my new girlfriend, the one who writes about bukkakes and gangbangs and CGI futanari.”

CRITICAL

How long did it take me to write each approximately 150 to 250 micro-fiction? Not long. I’m pretty sure it was maybe 15 minutes at the most. I mean, it was probably more like 10 minutes maximum. I wrote the story directly on the webpage I had dedicated to the project. I drafted it straight through without stopping or thinking. Then I published it. After that, I went back into the CMS and lightly revised the story, not really changing it so much as cleaning it up. If the story wasn’t perfect or not up to some standard in my head, oh, well! It was done. Finally, I added a photo to accompany the story (each story is paired with one of my photographs). Mission accomplished. With every story, I was one step closer to my goal. This uncensoring-the-self aspect of the project was the most important component and the most additive to what I was doing at the same time: working on my novel. I wasn’t so much exercising my fiction muscle, I was starting to realize, as I was shutting off the critical part of my brain and giving the creative part of my brain room to run around and kick up its heels and get a little wild. Stories 11 through 20 are about an avatar, a robot, a cougar (I was watching the second season of “MILF Manor,” which is totally insane, and which apparently deeply affected me or at least gave me a rabbit hole to go down), that cougar’s cub, that cougar’s cub’s ex-girlfriend, that cougar’s cub’s ex-girlfriend’s father, that cougar cub’s ex-girlfriend’s mother, that cougar’s son, a vagina, and a penis. Here is a line that I like from “#19: The Vagina (After Frank Kafka’s The Metamorphosis)”: “One morning, when the unidentified woman who may or may not have been a writer of stories about sex woke from troubled dreams, she found herself transformed in her bed into a vagina.”

MAGICAL

Is writing a little bit magical? Maybe. On the one hand, doing this project was easy. Bang out a few hundred words. Post it online. Do the same thing the next day. One the other hand, it was hard. In all likelihood, I suspected, no one was reading any of them. Why bother? Also, why was I sitting around writing weird short fictions about people who had curious fetishes and bizarre sexual desires? Wasn’t this whole thing sort of embarrassing? There was a chatty person in my head—let’s call her Susan—who thought the whole thing was pretty dumb and pointless. But Susan isn’t much fun, is she? And what did Susan ever do? Her job seems to consist of sitting on the sofa and criticizing what other people are doing. In any case, I was able to ignore Susan and keep writing. And my novel kept getting better. Because I was reminding myself that writing isn’t a job or a task or a list to be checked; it’s imaginative play, it’s the self on the page, it’s your unbridled mind running with the bit in its mouth. Stories 21 through 30 are about a sex club, a group of robots, a husband, an inflatable woman, a donor, a fetishist support group, a dating app for anglerfish, an AI wife, a woman who watches extreme pornography, and an ER murse who, well, it’s a little strange. Here is a line that I like from “#22: The Robots”: “Still, the nighttime bangings and clangings and humpings continued, a symphony of clashing steel and rubbing metals, a chorus of robot lovemaking.”

In any case, you can read all the stories here.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

The Soundtrack to My Writing Life (Yeah)

Lately when I’ve been working on my porn novel I’ve been listening to “Maps” by the Yeah Yeah Yeahs (2003).

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

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?

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

The Last Thing

This week’s must-read essay is “The Last Thing My Mother Wanted” by the (pseudonymous) Evelyn Jouvenet.

The Resident

I’m delighted to share that I’ll be a resident at the Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts in Nebraska City, Nebraska, later this year. While updating my About page at the beginning of the year, I realized how impactful various writing residencies I’ve done over the years have been. So I decided I would apply to, say, a dozen residencies over the course of this year and see what happened. I got a few rejections, so it was extra wonderful to get this opportunity. In an upcoming installment of “Fuck You, Pay Me,” my ongoing series of blog posts on writing, editing, and publishing, I’ll share some tips on getting a residency. One thing that’s especially exciting is that this residency is for the novel that I’m working on. More soon …

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

The Residencies Process

In the past, I’ve gotten writing residences, so I figured I’d try again this year. So far, I’ve applied to seven writing residencies. By the end of the year, I’ll likely have applied to 10 to 12 — or that’s the goal. To date, I’ve gotten zero acceptances, six rejections, and one wait list. At some point, I’ll probably write a longer post on applying to writing residencies for my “Fuck You, Pay Me” series on writing, editing, and publishing.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

AI Susannah Breslin

On principle, I hate AI because it is a thief of creatives’ work, but when Meta added its AI whatever you call it to Instagram, I got lured into engaging with it. Initially, I asked it if it was a whore (it responded in the negative and requested I engage with it in a respectful manner). But then my narcissism got the better of me, and I asked it if it knew who Susannah Breslin was (it did). Falling into my AI reflection in a digital pool, I asked it if I write about sex (I did, it responded). Finally, I instructed it to write a paragraph in the style of Susannah Breslin, and that’s when I learned AI knows me and does me better than I do.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email

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.

Buy My Book I About | Blog I Newsletter I X I Instagram I LinkedIn I Hire Me I Email