My Copywriting Portfolio

Last Friday, I put together a copywriting portfolio that I can send to prospect hires. It's called "10 Reasons You Should Hire Me." I think the strongest part is the video referral from the Old Spice Guy.

Forbes Blog Monthly Stats #2

You can read Forbes Blog Monthly Stats #1 here.

The month of June was a real fail whale of a month for my Forbes blog. In May, my total monthly visitors was 98,340. In June, it was 62,925. Shakira's hips don't lie, and neither do those numbers. What went wrong? Let's discuss.

In my last post, I wrote: "In June, I'm aiming to post five times a week, as a way of building my traffic." Instead of doing so, I posted a grand total of seven times out of a possible twenty-two times. Simply put, when the initial posts I wrote didn't "pop," traffic-wise, I got frustrated and wandered off in another direction. Another reason this didn't "work" is that "quality over quantity" is probably the better mantra here, not "quantity over quality." Most of the posts I wrote got crap traffic. The one that got the most traffic was one about Trophy Wife Barbie, which was fun to do. 

Of course, one can always look for things to blame. Blogging is slower in the summer! My mojo was off! I was too busy working on my book proposal! And yet when one blogs, one has no one to blame but oneself, and so I shall bear the burden of my blogging failure.

Image via Ironing Board Collective

A couple days ago, I put together a short list of five posts that I thought could do well traffic-wise. More "interesting ideas" than "churn and burn." The first of those posts will run next week. I think it will be a good one.

Let's hope for a better performance in July.

Final monthly stats:

Pageviews: 80,648

Total Monthly Visitors: 62,925

One-time Visitors: 60,673

Repeat Visitors: 2,252

Comments: 18

Posts: 7

Current Recency Score: for some reason my recency score isn't appearing on my dashboard

So come back next month and see if I can get quality over quantity to get this thing going again.

Different Jobs to Which I Have Applied Lately

Social media manager

Copywriter

Executive producer

Publicist

Reporter

(Interested in hiring me? Check out my LinkedIn and email me.)

Things I Learned at Muay Thai Today

1. My upper body strength is hell.

2. I do better when I try and kick the boxing head gear off the top of the stand than when I'm trying to kick the air.

3. Those walking lunges are tiring.

4. I have about 25 minutes of go before I think: Oh, no.

5. I really, really like it, mostly because it's physically and mentally challenging.

6. My hips are tight.

7. Most of the other people at the gym are men. But not all of them.

8. If I go to ladies kickboxing class on Thursday night, I will get better faster.

9. Boxing is fun!

10. Working up a good sweat is a good thing.

Plants

🌺

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I planted these pots this weekend. I went to Home Depot, and I asked the plant expert what to get, and I picked out five plants and five pots. I also got some potting soil and some Miracle-Gro. At home, I put some dirt in the pots, and then the plants in the pots, and then some more dirt around the plants in the pots. Then I walked around for a while and decided where I wanted to put them. Then I watered the plants in the pots. I got dirt everywhere, including on my knees, but my husband vacuumed it up for me. After that, it rained.

Bow Down, Boys

I wrote kind of a fun post about what strippers can learn from CEOs on my Forbes blog:

She steps out from behind the curtain. She’s wearing a black bra and black panties, and that’s it (unless you count the towering heels upon which she’s balancing). At the other end of the stage, a dozen white males are waiting for her. One of them has stuffed several George Washingtons into the waistband of his pants, to which he is pointing.

Girls who Box

Muay Thai boxing is my spirit animal #muaythai #boxing #girlswhobox

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I've taken up Muai Thai boxing and really love it. Here's why.

It's all about aggression

I think as a woman sometimes it's not OK to be aggressive. Even if you're six-foot-plus. Or maybe especially if you're six-foot-plus. In a way, Muay Thai boxing is all about aggression. But it's not about being angry. It's about focusing intensity for maximum effect.

It's a great workout

My sit-ups and jumping jacks aren't too bad, but, my god, my pushups are an exercise in humiliation. Apparently, I have no upper body strength. Muay Thai boxing is great for being long and lean, for losing fat, and for building muscle. All good things.

It's fun

I would probably be at a total loss if I hadn't done karate several decades ago. Because I did, I get some of the basics. And I'm not too twitchy about striking someone. At the same time, there are some things I learned that I'm now having to unlearn. That's the hard part.

Journalism Is a Boys Club

Last week, I attended the Investigative Reporters & Editors conference in New Orleans. Here are some thoughts about my experience there. tl;dr Journalism is a boys' club.

What's up, dicks up

There are many reasons why I'm not really an ideal fit for a conference like this. I'm a freelancer, and many of the attendees were institutionalized, which is to say with bigger media outlets. I'm an introvert, and there were something like over 1,800 people in attendance. The event took place in New Orleans, and the last time I was there was in 2005, when I got wiped out by a hurricane.

A lot of the time that I was there, I felt sort of overwhelmed: staring at the long, snaking line to register on the first day, sitting in the back of conference rooms while panelists mumbled on about PowerPoints, milling around mixers trying to read the name tags of people I didn't know. If fashion is branding, there was a real lack of people in black, girls with rings through their noses, and interesting tattoos. The fleet of beings that most fascinated me where the Broadcast Girls, who stomped from presentation to presentation in skintight, primary-colored sleeveless dresses, their hair styled just so, their makeup on like pancake spackle. I suppose their investigative journalism falls into the category of HOW YOUR LOCAL BUSINESS IS RIPPING YOU OFF!! but who am I to judge? I was the one in the Gap men's khakis wondering what the fuck I was doing.

There was a reception on the second night I was there. It was at the aquarium. I went by myself because I didn't really know anybody, and eventually, mostly because my husband told me to via text, I managed to start walking up to people and talking to them. I am six feet tall (more than that, actually), but I am shy. I got to talk to people with various cool outlets: stringers for the New York Times, and a shooter for the Washington Post, and a nice man who wrote an entire book on the Pulitzer Prize. The fish floated in their tanks, and a shark darted through the water, and at one point I got into a HURRICANE SIMULATOR and paid a few dollars to find out what it was like to stand in 70+ per mile an hour winds and mostly just smiled inside its plastic tube. At least with the hurricane winds, I didn't have to talk to anybody.

Somewhere along the way, between the panels I loved hosted by the Dart Center, and the advice about how to be a better business person with your freelancing career, and the stories about the data journalism and the FOIA chatter, I realized that this was a boys club. Sure, there were women in attendance. Yes, there were ladies on the panels. I met some really cool chicks there. But there was something distinctly bonerific about the entire event. I think that was in part because of the investigative aspect. It was like the media's version of having a professional erection. Like, you had to prove how manly or how tough you were by doing battle with some giant lummox, and that, let's face it, at least how I understood it, was a man's job.

The most helpful time I had there was at an event at a bar in the French Quarter that was for freelancers. I ended up sitting across from a woman at a long table, and while she and I had very different beats, and we lived in different parts of the country, we had a great conversation. Here's what she did: she listened. Right now, I'm working on two book proposals: one is about X, and one is about Y. This is me; this is two versions of me. X is more wild. Y is more academic. This is how we compartmentalize. This is how women compartmentalize. I am X, I am Y. This is who I am. But it is hard to be two people, isn't it? What this woman made me realize, by asking wonderful questions and by listening really, really hard, was that maybe I should be working on one chimera of a proposal, and that proposal is XY. Or, no, maybe it is Z. The end of the alphabet. Like, you know, the conclusion of everything. So that's what I'm going to try: combine the two into one. Because who wants to exist in a fractured existence? I know I don't.

I get it. Sure, I've got it wrong about the conference. Journalism really isn't a boys club, and while my experience is valid it's probably wrong. Or, you know, maybe I'm right. The data boyz with their FOIA bonerz seemed to be engaged more in some sort of locker room battle over the lengths of their dicks than their ability to ... write. In fact, that is what I missed most and heard so little about at this conference: writing. Even with your data buckets and your FOIA requests, you still have to turn the thing into a fucking story. Where is your narrative? What's your meaning? Or maybe for you guys it's all just posturing. I'm looking for something bigger, something deeper than that. Something not quantifiable but ultimately far more real.

I was going to write some other sections of this, but that's all she wrote, fellas.

After the Storm

This is the place where I was living in New Orleans when Hurricane Katrina arrived. This style of house is called a shotgun because you can stand at the front door and shoot a shotgun straight through it. I evacuated the day before the storm made landfall. We fled west, and the traffic was stopped for miles, and the shitty little car in which I'd gotten a ride broke down by the side of the highway, and the first bands were starting to hit, and a sheriff stopped because no one else would, and when he rolled down his window, I said: "Please don't leave me by the side of the road." It was days before we realized we couldn't return. My best friend bought me a plane ticket and told me to come to her, so I did. It was a couple months in Virginia before I got up the nerve to go back. In Louisiana, I rented a car and drove through the city. It looked like a woman that had been raped. There were dead refrigerators on sidewalks like tombstones. The place had been ravaged. I was there to get what was left. The satellite photos made it look like parts of the roof were missing, and that was right. I stood in the living room and stared up through the slats at the blue sky and wondered at the size of a storm that could tear the hundred year old pecan tree in the backyard, at the base of which I'd buried a lucky horseshoe upright so the luck wouldn't run out, from the ground and toss it like a toothpick. Most of my things were lost to black mold crawling across the walls like lace and the asbestos roof shingles. I took what I could and left. On the drive out, there were boats in yards, and at one point across the lake the bridge was there and then it wasn't. This week was my first time back since then. You can't see it so much--the storm--anymore. It's gotten hidden. I remember what I remember, though. I got my heartbroken in this house. I had a nervous breakdown in this house. I almost killed myself in this house. Today, I had the cab driver wait while I took a few photos. "How long will you be?" he said, as I got out of the car. "Not long," I said. And I wasn't. #neworleans #nola #hurricanekatrina

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Last week, I went to the Investigative Reporters and Editors conference in New Orleans. It was the first time I'd been back to the city since 2005, when I was pushed out by Hurricane Katrina. I wrote a mini-Instagram essay on it, which I've reposted here.

48 + Filtered

48 + filtered #selfie

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The First Time I Saw a Porn Movie: I Was Somewhere North/South of 16

i was somewhere north/south of 16 when a movie came to town, and that would be palo alto, ca. i can't remember as to how i heard of this hapnin, but mind you, this was in the 60's, long before this medium and all its red headed step cousins swam upstream. it was a russ meyer film at a small theater off university ave. so i went, probably on my bike.

At 64, the tailings of that night are as fog. nothing substantial, for sure, but perhaps a seed was cast. i remember it , in that they seemingly were hiding some best parts, or just teasing me in a fashion we don't do today. so that's it, it was a provocative film for its time, and I was there.

But then that memory triggered a snap shot of another episode contained within that same chapter. I can't remember whose idea it was, but [redacted], a bro at [redacted] high, played the leading role. we went to a bookstore of sorts.  this was not brick and mortar by todays standard, rather a lovely victorian, just a house with many books for sale. so we made our way in and [redacted] - I think- grabbed the book.

Within some minutes after leaving, and I do recall this, we were laying in the shade of some grand ole tree with [redacted] reading. oh my, this might have been the seed yet. it was erotic. he read so well, and we all laughed that laugh of innocence.

So for me, it is not so much the eye candy as I write you, rather, [redacted] reading well spun erotica in some summer of my youth that is perhaps a certain cornerstone of where I abide today.

"The First Time I Saw a Porn Movie" is a digital project. Want to share your story anonymously? Email susannahbreslin@gmail.com.

A Nice Way to End the Week

☀️

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Boobs

I went to a breast cancer support group last night. I've been cancer free for four years, but I felt like going back to a group. Sometimes I think the business of that still lingers, and I'm interested in getting rid of it. It was interesting. It makes you remember how it's so common, and everyone is different, and everyone is the same. It was raining outside. There were only six of us inside. In a way, it was a bit like a war veterans meeting: everyone with their missing pieces, and their invisible wounds, and their unloading of the past.

Ya'll Been Pornified

I wrote a post for Forbes about who people working in the adult business want for president, but it's also about how this is the first election where, it seems, porn is a total non-issue. It used to be that there was more anxiety during election season regarding how a new president would impact the adult community. Would he pursue obscenity convictions or not? Now it seems a moot point.

"Nowadays, though, porn is part of American pop culture. And the Internet has obliterated the concept of 'community standards' altogether. Increasingly, porn has lost its taboo stature, and the War on Porn is largely considered to be over and done. (tl;dr the U.S. government lost) At the same time, the adult movie industry that once purportedly produced 80 percent of all adult videos has been wholly disrupted by technology. Cam girls are the new porn stars. Bedrooms in flyover states serve as adult movie backdrops. Tube sites offer X-rated content for free."

Get Em, Girl!

I came across this amazing photo by Ted Streshinsky for Corbis while doing some research.

Here's the caption:

1969: National guardsmen, called out by Governor Reagan to quell demonstrations, surround a Vietnam war protester during the People’s Park riot. The guardsmen herded protesters into a carpark with bayonets

Untitled

"I'm not an abstractionist. I'm not interested in the relationship of color or form or anything else. I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on." -- #markrothko

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I Am Fat

Somewhere along the way, I gained ten pounds. Here's what I'm doing about that.

More yoga: I'm a Gordian knot.

More walking: I'm a flaneur.

More exercises: I'm a machine.

The First Time I Saw a Porn Movie: I Was in College

"Fortunate or not, I was in college when The Devil in Miss Jones was released to porn's first popular audience. My roommates and I treated it as a joke, of course, since we’d never seen porn before. We giggled on our way to the University auditorium where the U.C. Regents were screening it (during REAGAN's stint as California governor - his signature is on my U.C. Lit Degree).   And we're not girls, then or now, who giggle. The auditorium was packed, of course, with sweaty red faced college men and discomfited college women. I wondered who watched these things. I had an active fantasy life by then, my junior year. Maybe it was the big screen but fantasy is so intimate and this piece of porn was so BIG, weirdly more anonymous than my anonymous fantasies, and, of course, focused on mechanics rather than relationship, even when one’s 'relationship' fantasies don’t include any one-on-one you'd actually care to experience. I pretty much signed off porn forever after that, preferring The Story of O and Kate Millet’s critiques of sex-authoring men like Henry Miller and Norman Mailer - a worn paperback copy of Sexual Politics that I'd pilfered from the radical feminist women’s center I volunteered at."

"The First Time I Saw a Porn Movie" is a digital project. Want to share your story anonymously? Email susannahbreslin@gmail.com.