Reign of Productivity Terror Advances Unabated

I don't know anything about this book other than that I like the cover.

Yesterday, I worked productively on the next work of fiction I'll be selling online.

Today, I was, unbelievably, productive again.

With two days of productivity in a row, one might long to believe anything is possible.

BUT IS IT??

Wednesday will reveal if this madness can be sustained.

I'm up to about 3,000 words, I think.

What I Did This Time

1. I was more rigid in my scheduling
2. I wrote in the morning
3. I pretended someone was channeling words through me
4. I tolerated the voices saying it was awful
5. Afterwards, I went to Pilates

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The End of Failure

Notes to self. #writing #fiction #failure

"Notes to self. #writing #fiction #failure"

After three reports of failure (one, two, three), I was finally able to stop failing and start working on the next short story that I'll be selling online.

How I Stopped Being an Idiot and Started Being Productive

1. I read the last short story I sold online, THE TUMOR
2. I checked my Gumroad sales on THE TUMOR (114 sales, $663.50 revenue)
3. I read "Joe Gould's Teeth" by Jill Lepore in the New Yorker ("We all spend our lives chasing into darkness.")
4. I looked at the drafts of other stories I'd started and not finished (one we'll call S, one we'll call H, one we'll call P)
5. I emailed Lydia Netzer ("It is ASTONISHING how talented I am.")
6. I walked the dog (it was raining)
7. I listed three qualities of THE TUMOR ("scary, smart, surreal")
8. I added seven more ("disconcerting, weird, uncomfortable-making, troubling, twistedly delightful, original, naughty")
9. I thought about how when cats are preparing to jump, they dance their paws in place really fast before taking off (see: Supercat)
10. I wrote a list of the stories that I had worked on and what was wrong with them ("too stiff," "one joke like 'SNL' skit," "no, gross")
11. I read "The Really Big One" by Kathryn Schulz in the New Yorker ("Then the wave will arrive, and the real destruction will begin.")
12. I watched "Ex Machina"
13. I went to bed
14. The following morning, I listed the options of the different stories that I could work on and decided on P ("interested me bc seemed something new")
15. At 8:41 AM, I opened the document that contained P and began working on it
16. I was listening to Black Rebel Motorcycle Club's "Some Kind of Ghost" ("Pain, they say every name got a page")
17. By the end of the day, I had a 2,010-word working draft (the finished draft will likely be between 7,500 and 10,000 words, which I ambitiously would like to have completed by this Friday, July 31)

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Loser, Baby

So far, two days, one and two, of public self-shaming have failed to prompt me to get back to writing the next short story I'm going to sell online.

Things I Did That Were Not Working On The Story

1. Went to the beach
2. Ate BBQ
3. Wrote a Forbes post about porn stars voting for Hillary Clinton and Marco Rubio
4. Slept
5. Drove around in the car
6. Did Pilates!
7. Watched the sun set
8. Thought about the story but didn't open the .doc
9. Considered opportunistic synergies
10. Bought a yak pop for the dog

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Don't Do It

Pots. #bonitasprings #florida

"Pots. #bonitasprings #florida"

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Days of Failure

Despite my public self-flagellation yesterday, I failed to work on the next short story I'll be selling online. As long as I continue to fail to do something as simple as opening up a .doc and moving around some words, I'll be publicly shaming myself for it.

Reasons I Didn't Work on My Short Story

1. I was busy
2. Other things happened
3. I had to exercise and exercise is more important
4. I feel overwhelmed
5. I don't get what it's about
6. The way it is is wrong and I should do it another way that I thought of but can't remember
7. Short stories are stupid
8. Writing is stupid
9. Writing, why do I do it?
10. It's about robots and I don't know anything about robots
11. I don't know what the end is
12. I shouldn't self-publish
13. I'll do it when I'm ready
14. I have to go do something else right now but I'll come back to it later
15. I bet it's worse than I thought
16. I'm so behind, why bother
17. My mind is blank
18. I'm better at non-fiction
19. I should turn it into a novel
20. The dog needs a walk
21. I'm hungry

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Kill Your Terribles

Oops sorry. #guns #2A #target

"Oops sorry. #guns #2A #target"

I have been terrible about finishing the next short story I'm going to sell online. It's really terrific, and it needs to be finished. I will finish writing it tomorrow.

How to Make Yourself Finish Things

1. Public humiliation
2. Shame
3. Embarrassment
4. Self-doubt
5. Listicles

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Am Blogging

I'm working on two new posts for my Forbes blog. One is about the adult industry. One is about guns. Please keep an eye out for them.

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Fun Day

Another day on the job. I smell like gunpowder and AR sweat. #journalism #guns #firearm #gun #ar #amnotwritingamshooting

"Another day on the job. I smell like gunpowder and AR sweat. #journalism #guns #firearm #gun #ar #amnotwritingamshooting"

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Vanity Fair Does Hysterical Literature

Amazing! A terrific profile of Clayton Cubitt and collaborator Katie James on "Hysterical Literature": "I'll Read What She's Reading." Writer Toni Bentley had the balls to do it herself.

Eight feet from the front edge of the table was Cubitt’s camera on a tripod. It would remain stationary for the entire session, no shaky hand-held camera work for this particular project: just a single, head-on P.O.V. It was left to Katie to do the hand-held work under the table with what Cubitt calls her “paintbrush,” a Hitachi Magic Wand vibrator—also known as “Big Buzzy.” “I think she’s the actual artist involved,” says Cubitt. “I just press Record and stand back.”

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Pilates

I've been getting more into Pilates lately and have been seeing and feeling a difference which is cool. At home, I sometimes do this Pilates DVD with Brooke Siler. You don't need any special equipment for it, and the fact that she's built like a stalk of asparagus is inspiring.

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The Wolfpack

"The Wolfpack" is such a strange movie that I had a hard time watching it. It's about a set of boy siblings, and the family that keeps them locked in a Manhattan apartment. Eventually, they venture outside. It's a documentary. I vacillated between enjoying the film's refusal to be a traditional by the book documentary and feeling annoyed with its refusal to spell everything out for me. It's more like an art film, in a way, an assemblage. Still, it's very peculiar -- you kind of wonder: Do I want to see this? Sometimes, I wasn't so sure. What's happened is distressing, yet you almost feel at times like director Crystal Moselle doesn't want to look at that dead on, but instead in passing glances. The parents are a mess. The reenactments of films the boys undertake to escape their confines is intriguing; the final film within a film is probably the most beautiful thing in it. I'm not sure what else is. The boys graduate from their prison childhoods, and it's very sweet to see them seeing their first movie in a movie theater, but the viewer remains a spectator, far removed from whatever happened on the LES.

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Yeah, I Got a T-Shirt

Master Bait & Tackle #florida #Naples #masturbate

"Master Bait & Tackle #florida #Naples #masturbate"

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The Art of Titles

Sure, it's only July, but I've decided "Oh Lord, Won't You Buy Me A Maserati" is my best title of 2015. It came to mind after reading "The Story Behind Janis Joplin's 'Mercedes Benz.'"

Janis and I were giggling and showing off a bit in front of Rip and Geraldine. The alcohol wasn’t meant to do anything except keep us laughing in that bar, but it assumed control, and the result was “Mercedes Benz.” I figured that what we were doing there was just an exercise to impress Rip and Geraldine and pass the time. Nothing more.

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Current Status

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Speechless

via This Isn't Happiness

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Some Stuff I Left Out Of The Donut Burger

I ate a donut burger.

Here's what I didn't write about it:

1. I debated whether to spell it "dougnut" or "donut."

2. The walls were decorated with airplane themes: propellers, maps to make an airplane, paintings of planes.

3. The burger arrived without tomato or lettuce, because wtf would you need tomato and lettuce?

4. It was good.

5. I didn't eat all of it.

6. There's no relationship between 4 and 5.

7. I wouldn't call the donut milkshake a disappointment, but it felt like what happened was the sugar part went into the milkshake part, and then you had a milkshake with dough balls in it.

8. There were two vacuuming incidents.

9. The owner was in the back cooking burgers.

10. It was so hot outside. So hot. Really hot.

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Do Work Here

Susannah Breslin on Instagram: "Home office vignette featuring small girl and pig knife standoff painting from a street vendor in #shanghai, pink glass hand from scary..."

"Home office vignette featuring small girl and pig knife standoff painting from a street vendor in #shanghai, pink glass hand from scary vintage store in..."

I've been working more on setting up my office, and posted this shot to my Instagram. It's got some random things in it. I think the room should reflect my spirit animal, by which I do not mean something with mange, but maybe have pops of color, and images of ghosts, and trinkets from China. I wrote a story once about a woman who had one hand. Maybe that's what this is about. How to get work done when you've mutated.

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#gunequality

What happens if two guns of the same make who love each other very much want to get married.

— Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) June 30, 2015

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Not Ballers

"Ballers." Why does it suck? I'm not sure. Maybe it's the writing. Maybe it's the casting. Maybe it's that The Rock doesn't seem sure how to be anything other than a cartoon. Force him to act like a worried money manager for athletes, stick him in too tight suit pants, make him talk finance, and he gets lost in translation. The biggest problem "Ballers" has isn't ballers. It has plenty of those. A crew of athletes in the various stages of their wound up careers: climbing, struggling, out of it. The biggest problem is that there isn't anything counterintuitive about it. It's all a series of grand cliches. The great hub upon which "The Sopranos" spun was that it was about a mobster who was seeing a shrink. What the fuck is up with that? it made you wonder. Watching "Ballers" is like watching the dramatic version of "Hard Knocks," and, shit, we've seen that already. The closest thing to something interesting is Rob Corddry, who's a fucking freak -- but even then they've got him on too tight of a leash -- and Omar Miller's inhabituation of what happens to players after the NFL. Maybe the problem is that while all the active ball players on the show, the ones whose lives we follow as the plot meanders about confusedly, are black men, and, unless I missed something, and feel free to correct me if I'm wrong, not a single one of the show's executive producers is a black man. But, hey, it's Hollywood, and I guess that's how they play ball.

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Failure and Other Items

I got back to blogging at Forbes, and my god what a horrendous first month. I managed to bang out five posts in the couple weeks I had access, and the traffic was horrendous. Quelle embarrassment! And look at this girl -- she's killing it! Git 'em, LRO.

I don't know what the problem is. Possible theories:

I took a year off, so now the traffic sucks for my new stuff.

I'm a bad person and am being karmically punished.

I fell back into writing for others, when I should be writing for myself.

Probably, it's this last. Nothing worse than words with no heart. July, I will crush you.

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