Writing As You Go

Off with her head.

"Off with her head."

"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day about freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.

I've been in Chicago -- butt cheek-clenchingly cold -- for a few days and took the opportunity to do a couple stories while I'm here.

Both pieces rely heavily on deeply sensory experiences, which I find particularly challenging to write about, especially days or even weeks after the fact. You stare at your notes and search for the proper way to resurrect a since-faded feeling. How do you describe what something tastes like, smells like? No easy task. 

For the second story that I worked on, I tried writing the piece while it was happening, on my iPhone. It was a bit of a challenge to construct prose on the fly, but it forced me to better track action as it happened -- and, maybe, better capture sensory responses as they surfaced.

It definitely made me more conspicuous, which isn't ideal for someone whose usually strategy is to assume the pattern of the wallpaper. I had to hide my phone from prying eyes several times. I'd like to do more writing like this. I enjoyed the spiritedness of words generated in medias res. 

You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.

Have Laptop, Will Travel

Fall.

"Fall."

"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day about freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.

I'll be traveling, and blogging, over the next few days, but one thing I try and do as a freelance writer is to do a story every time I travel.

So, when I went to Hawaii, I wrote "Gun Tourism Is All the Rage in Waikiki": "It was like Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, California — except for instead of burning incense and selling hemp necklaces, they were hawking the fruits of the Second Amendment."

When I went to Miami, I wrote "How the Biggest Strip Club in America Grinds": "'I like dancing a lot,' she says. 'I’m not shy. I have a lot of spunk.'"

And when I went to Shanghai, I wrote "This Restaurant Is Shit": "I had no trouble eating the desserts that looked like shit at the toilet-themed restaurant."

Freelancing is about starting, and stopping, and restarting. I've found this process of living, and working, and reworking helps me stay in the flow.

You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.

The Fine Art of Selling Yourself

"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day about freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.

Last year, I self-published a digital short story. It's called THE TUMOR. I used Gumroad to publish and sell it because Clayton Cubitt recommended it and because Gumroad takes less of your money than Amazon does. This Isn't Happiness designed the beautiful cover, Susan Clements did a beautiful job copy editing it, and Domini Dragoone did the gorgeous page layout and assembled the entire thing together into a variety of publishable formats that transformed it into a digital book.

Here are a few good reasons for self-publishing:

You can own your shit, soup to nuts

As a freelancer, there's a lot of relying on other people to get permission to do the shit you want to do. Editors, or bosses, or directors. When you self-publish, it's all you. If you fail, it's on you. If you succeed, it's all yours. I'm a control freak, so this was very appealing to me.

You can step outside the box

Who was going to publish a short story about a man that wants to stab his wife to death over a malignant tumor that wanders around the house? Well, who knows, but no one, probably. Except for me. If you're going to go through the bother of self-publishing, you might as well do it with something that's more interesting than the dumb ass crap you do for money.

You can make some money

I used the Pay What You Want Pricing option on Gumroad. So my customers could pay $1, or they could pay however much they liked. I sold 123 copies, and my total revenue was $697. That was nice.

I really enjoyed doing it, and I highly recommend it. Gumroad makes it easy. The rest is up to you.

You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.

Master of All Jacks

"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day about freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.

My LinkedIn profile is sort of a complicated beast. To me, it makes sense: everything is words. To others, it may look all over the place. Am I a journalist? A blogger? An editor? A copywriter? A pundit? A photographer? A comics maker? An author? Am I a jack of all trades or a master of none?

On the one hand, it probably would've been better to have picked a niche and stuck with it. Say, journalism. And just done that. Improve those skills, sell those tools, climb up that ladder.

On the other hand, it was my ability to diversify and apply my tools across multiple categories that enabled me to survive as a freelancer. To be a marketer and a reporter. To write copy and to create fiction. 

In, say, 2000, my income was approximately $50,000. Half of it was from freelance writing and half of it was from TV appearances.

In, I believe, 2012, my income was approximately $100,000. Half of it was from freelance journalism and half of it was from freelance copy writing.

Looking back, I can't say I'm sure what's the best path. Why should I limit my abilities? Or did I create a kind of ceiling for myself? Perhaps I followed where things led me, to this place.

You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.

The Challenges of Self-Censoring

"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day about freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.

A few hours before New Year's Eve, I posted my final Forbes post of 2015: "I've Waited for Virtual Reality Forever and Now It's Here." I wrote the post because I'd been sitting on the material for a while, and I felt underwhelmed by the work I'd published this year, other than "Blood Sacrifice."

The virtual reality porn piece combined several things: some backstory about me writing about porn, a visit I paid earlier this year to a virtual reality porn star where I donned an Oculus Rift for the first time, and a phone conversation I had with the guy who's arguably the biggest pornographer in the business.

One of the challenges of writing the post for Forbes, and probably why I sat on it for so long, is that because it's the Forbes website, I knew it couldn't be X-rated. So that meant leaving out any graphic description of John Holmes in a porn movie I saw when I was 15, like how it seemed he barely had the energy to get his monstrous appendage erect; leaving out the part about getting a lap dance at a strip club in 1997, and the dancer's implant-stuffed boobs in my face, and her skin smelling like peaches; leaving out the spectacle of the girls fucking themselves with dildos atop the tables at the Mitchell Brothers O'Farrell Theatre while guys sat around them in booths like it was some kind of explicit diner; leaving out the five years I spent chasing the most extreme things in the porn business, including bukkake, and gangbangs, and other weird ass shit; and leaving out the part where the virtual reality porn star stuck her fingers inside herself and put them in her mouth and her spit glistened like something otherworldly in this alternative universe. 

Does including or leaving out that information make the piece any better or worse? I'm not sure. Self-censored, it becomes more discreet, obviously, and there's something to be said for that, but it's not so raw when it's cut, and the point of pornography is to rip things down to the raw so you can see the pink.

At one point in the post, I write: "At a certain point, she opened her mouth, and she leaned forward like she was getting close to me, and the only thing that was missing was the sheer scent of her, and I thought: I’m sold." And, for now, you know, that is one thing that VR lacks for sure. When you visit a porn set, the smell is unmistakable: the meat, the fluids, the things that happen under the heat. That's the action. That's the story. That's the truth.

You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.

365 Days of Blogging

"Flogging the Freelancer" is a blog post a day about freelancing in the gig economy. Browse the archives here.

Since I tend to do better when expectations are too high instead of too low, I thought I would try blogging every day in 2016. We'll see how that goes. My goal, today, January 1, 2016, is to focus my blogging on my professional work. I'm a freelance writer, and I'd like to up my game a bit this year. I hope to share that process in the course of executing this process.

Fuck Your Hustle

I started working on the freelance writing portion of my career earlier this week. Among other things, I prostituted myself on this blog, I sent queries to 30 people regarding potential work opportunities, and I updated my LinkedIn profile. I've got some leads, so in future posts I'll be sharing how many work out, how many don't work out, and how many people ignore me.

Spanking the Monkey

I started blogging for Forbes in 2010 (!) after I got downsized. Initially, the blog was in the women's section, and it was called Pink Slipped. At a certain point, I got tired of churning out self-help drivel, and I changed the focus on the blog to covering the vice beat. Now it's called SIN INC. Then I took a year off. I returned to it at some point this year. I've floundered at covering this beat properly, posting on a regular and sufficient basis, and generating the same massive amount of traffic that I did when Forbes blogging was young and there weren't 1,000+ other people doing it. I would like to solve the conundrum of doing that blog properly and return to my former glorious status there.

We Are Not the World

It would probably be a good idea if I did something to help other people. I regularly get emails from people asking for advice. Most of the time (by which I mean all of the time), I delete them. I could devote, say, one post a week to answering a professional, say, gig economy question on this blog. If you're interested in asking for professional advice from someone who is a veteran freelancer and inappropriately overconfident, you can email me.

This Trap Queen's Game Is Tight

I'm working on a book proposal. I have an agent. I hope to sell that project this year. That is my long con for this season. I'll be going into more detail on that in upcoming posts, but there may be some vague-blogging on that front. It depends on how things go.

In any case, I suppose that's a place to start.

You can connect with me on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and you can email me here.

I Wrote About Virtual Reality Porn

I wrote this piece about my life in porn, my junkie ex-girlfriend, and virtual reality porn for my Forbes blog.

I was in this other world, this virtual reality. Overhead, the sky was pink with dusk, and nearby there was a tranquil pool with lit candles and lily pads floating in it, and there was a vast expanse of perfectly manicured lawn leading to a line of autumn-leaved trees and maybe a river beyond that. A massive mansion sat several yards away. It was all very lush. I knew Ela was in the other room of the apartment, but she was in my head at the same time, and I realized I could no longer tell which one was real. You could say I suspended my disbelief. It was just me and her pixelating, and I reached out my hand into that empty space that was me not touching her in a world in which I believed that I could. At a certain point, she opened her mouth, and she leaned forward like she was getting close to me, and the only thing that was missing was the sheer scent of her, and I thought: I’m sold.

Want to Hire Me?

I'm a journalist, blogger, editor, copywriter, and consultant.

Looking to hire an experienced, savvy word-person?

Here are a few of the things that I do:

I'm a journalist.

My writing has appeared in Harper's Bazaar, Details, Newsweek, Salon, Slate, The Daily Beast, Marie Claire, Esquire, The Guardian, Men's Health, The Atlantic, Glamour UK, The Billfold, Women's Health, Inc., The Telegraph, Movieline, The Vancouver Sun, Radar, The Virginian-Pilot, Nerve, Wired, The New York Post, Arena, Variety, The San Francisco Chronicle, The San Francisco Examiner, The San Francisco Bay Guardian, The LA Weekly, and many other publications.

I'm a blogger.

On my Forbes blog, SIN INC, I cover the vice beat. I've uncovered how much strippers make, test drove a bra gun holster, and attended porn conventions. The blog has been mentioned by the Wall Street Journal, AdAge, ESPN, BuzzFeed, and Katie Couric. In 2002, I created one of the internet's first sex blogs, The Reverse Cowgirl. In 2008, TIME.com named me one of the top 25 bloggers of the year. I've guest-blogged for Kottke and was a blogger for Slate's Double X.

I'm an editor.

From 2008 to 2011, I was an editor for Time Warner's The Frisky, a digital vertical for women, where I covered everything from fashion to celebrities to relationships. I wrote nearly 1,400 posts and led the site's online outreach program, helping grow the site's traffic to 4M unique visitors and 22M page views a month through my network of blogger influencers. From 2011 to 2012, I was the Digital Outreach Manager for Conan O'Brien's "Conan" on TBS, teaming up with Emmy-winning Team Coco Digital to create compelling content and increase engagement.

I'm a copywriter.

As a copywriter, I've worked with Publicis Groupe's MSLGROUP and Weber Shandwick, creating social media content, commercial scripts, and celebrity ghost-tweets for multi-billion-dollar brands. In 2008, I partnered with American Apparel to debut a series of controversial banners on my blog that provoked widespread debate and were covered on BuzzFeed, Fleshbot, and Nerve.

I'm a consultant.

I consulted on Steven Soderbergh's "The Girlfriend Experience" movie about a high-class call girl and on "E! True Hollywood Story: Child Star to Porn Star: The Scotty Schwartz Story."

Want to hire me? Email me.

Continued

My guest blogging stint at Kottke continues. I'm not gonna lie. This one's my fav of the day.

Guestblogging

I'm guestblogging on Kottke this week. Check it out.

Spread it, man

Here's a fun one on how to cook prison spread, starring Chef Lemundo.

Recently, I was doing some research on food in prison, specifically prison spread. According to Urban Dictionary: "Typically spread is a Top Ramen base that can be augmented to a specific flavor by using chips, canned meat, or other foods that are also available in the prison store." According to Prison Culture, it's also a social ritual: "Spread provides inmates with an opportunity to 'create community' within the jail as they share their food with others."

Transparency

I binge watched the second season of "Transparent" a few days ago. It was really, really lovely. A lot of feels, and a lot of nodding to the imperfection of everything, and an homage to crazy LA.

Watch it.

The Internet Is Jolie Laide

I keep following and unfollowing Farhad Manjoo on Twitter. For one, he posts too much, and for another, there's something ... treacly about his sentiments. In the latest installment of his "State of the Art" tech column for the New York Times, "The Internet's Loop of Action and Reaction Is Worsening," he asserts that the internet has become a terrible, dangerous thing. "The Internet wasn't supposed to be this ugly," he bellyaches, bemoaning the various ways the web has gone bad: hot takes, social media sparring, the Islamic State.

It's all very disappointing, he whines, pointing to John Perry Barlow's vision of a kinder, gentler internet, circa 1996: a cyberspace place better than meat space, "more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.” How ... optimistic. Instead, we've got beheading videos, Twitter faux-rage, and "2 Girls 1 Cup."

The idea that the internet would offer up something superior to reality was the first misguided thought. The next wrong turn was that if it offered up the the opposite instead, something had gone wrong. In fact, the violent, tumultuous, deeply conflicted world spewed across the screens of our desktops, iPads, and mobile devices mirror us exactly how we are, which, of course, is exactly what we want to see. The war doesn't exist overseas, it exists within. Humanity's perversions aren't born on PornTube sites, they're expressions of our own twisted minds. The internet of 2015 reflects us truly: tortured and deluded, in denial and agape, salivating for something that makes us feel like something other than what we are -- slabs of tissue parked like inanimate objects in front of a pixel otherworld that dances in front of us -- and makes us feel, a little, for a moment: afraid, awestruck, consumed by the horror, the horror that, in the end, is us.

Drinking Tea with the Taliban

I read Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist Lynsey Addario's memoir, It's What I Do: A Photographer's Life of Love and War, and liked it very much. Is it an extraordinary work of masterful nonfiction? No. Is it the riveting account of a woman who has bigger balls than you do? Yes. There may be too much love story in this war story for man readers, but ladies looking to live boldly in a world that isn't made of pixels will be inspired by Addario's fearless approach to love and war.

“Madam,” Haleem said, “the commander’s men are worried you can’t drink your tea through your veil. They would really like for you to drink your tea.” The whispers continued, and if it weren’t for the veil, I would have had a difficult time concealing my smile. Only among Muslims is the hospitality so great that they cannot bear the notion that someone’s tea will be left untouched.

Haleem had another brilliant idea: “I know! You can stand in the corner of the room, with your back facing all of us, and lift your veil to the wall and drink your tea. Once you finish, you can replace your veil.”

And so, in a room full of some of the most vicious fighters against the United States and everything it stood for, I stood in the corner and faced the wall as I drank my tea.

Don't Work for Free, Unless You Work for Free

Image via Inked

In a post about freelancing and writing for free, Poynter quoted a Forbes post I wrote awhile back about freelance writing.

“These days, it’s not enough to be a good writer online,” notes Breslin in a Forbes post. “You have to be a smart marketer, your own content factory, your own publicist. If you can do it all, you are golden. If you cannot, you are screwed.”

#DONUTRAT

I scored the world exclusive interview with the guy who shot that video of that rat dragging a donut.

SB: It’s hard to tell from the video if that’s a donut or a bagel.

DS: It was a donut from Dough, an artisanal [donut] place in Brooklyn. I’ve seen that donut before. Not in a rat’s mouth.

My Life in Playboy

I wrote about how my life path has intersected with Playboy, and how I feel about the fact that the magazine will no longer be publishing nudes. I guess I'm disappointed, for some reason.

Growing up, I never expected to work for Playboy. I grew up in Berkeley, California, where feminism is what’s for breakfast, Columbus Day has been replaced with Indigenous Peoples Day, and I was an undergrad at the University of California at Berkeley at the same time as the Naked Guy. According to my feminist film studies class, the patriarchy was something to wage a war against, women’s bodies were a battleground, and sexual objectification was the tool of the enemy. To posit oneself as an object of sexual desire, to relish scopophilia, was an act of political betrayal.

At least in theory, Playboy was the opposite of all that.

SNEAKS

Can't catch me. #newbalance

"Can't catch me. #newbalance"

Letters from Men Who Want to Be Porn Stars

I'm back posting the emails I get from men who want to be porn stars, which I get because I wrote this. I've got over 500 emails at this point, so I figure I might as well keep posting them.

Perhaps these actresses were simply matchless in their craft, but I chose to believe that the majority of them (if not all) were truly enjoying themselves at the hands of their well-selected masculine counterparts. The smiles I saw from these women as they approached such visceral climaxes were sublime, as if Himeros was dripping sweat from exhaustion and each drop of sweat was a divine note that played a melody on each fair lady's skin. The shakes of their glowing feminine bodies as every little sensory impulse went through their electrified minds, all firing back messages to the tiny control muscles of the face to create those heavenly facial expressions and smiles, were a joy to witness.

["I Don't Think I Could Have Been a Male Pornstar, but James Deen Is My Spirit Animal"]

I Got 500 Emails From Men Who Wanted To Be Porn Stars. You'll Never Believe What Happened Next

My latest on Forbes explores why I keep getting emails from men in India who want to become porn stars:

According to Harjant Gill, a documentary filmmaker and anthropology professor at Towson University who focuses on masculinity in India, the Internet’s swift delivery of pornography across India has transformed the perception of masculinity in India. “I suspect that before internet became so readily available, most men aspired to be like Bollywood superstars because they consumed a lot more Bollywood/Hollywood films,” Gill emailed me. “Now their desires (and sense of masculine achievement) is driven by the form of media they consume most frequently, which is free porn on the internet.” The problem for these men, as Gill sees it, isn’t porn: It’s that “there’s a complete lack of discussion or sex-positive sex-education being offered in families and educational institutions” in India.

Let's Get Lean

Better view

"Better view"

Here's a quote I left out of my profile of a young entrepreneur making a cup for getting high:

Me: Who's your hero in business?

Him: Bernie Madoff. He sold dreams and thin air. That has to be applauded on some level.