24 Likes, 1 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "Crushing it in comics class, obvi 😂"
If you’re a writer, art class is great because you don’t have to use any fucking words.
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She’s on Twitter and she has a name, asshole @abigaildisney https://t.co/8obt2s58vt
— Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) April 2, 2019
I got ratioed here — and, surely, I was out of line — but I was annoyed. I’d recently read this interview with Abigail Disney, and I found her really charming: humble, shrewd, and filled with moxie. In any case, she ended up responding to his tweet in a far more sophisticated way than I did, so there you go.
Thank you so much for helping me remember her name in such a friendly way. https://t.co/wKKsooEcom
— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) April 2, 2019
Thanks @KevinMKruse my plate's pretty full with what I'm doing-what's kinda sad is the folks out there with way more $$ than I have using it just to make more $$. The structure is the problem, and yes, journalism dying will only make that worse. I wish I could do this! https://t.co/HOM8iDKFCv
— Abigail Disney (@abigaildisney) April 2, 2019
Want more? Buy "The Tumor." It’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
Over on Facebook, I’m raising money for Girls Write Now, which helps “underserved young women to find their voices through the power of writing and community.” So far, I’ve raised $255 of my $1,00 goal. Donate! It’s a great organization.
According to GWN:
“We are a community of women writers—educators, editors, poets, novelists, playwrights, journalists, literary agents, publishers, and more—on a mission. Since 1998 we’ve provided guidance, support, and opportunities for New York City's high school girls to develop their creative, independent voices, explore careers in professional writing, and learn how to make healthy choices in school, career, and life.”
Want more? Buy "The Tumor." It’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
Tinder: Dicks.
Bumble: Betas.
Match: Maritals.
Coffee Meets Bagel: Pass.
OkCupid: Youngs.
The League: Elites.
Hinge: Yawns.
eHarmony: Serious.
Zoosk: Abysmals.
Want more? Buy "The Tumor." It’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
In case you were wondering about the current state of journalism …
Enjoy my work? Get "The Tumor." It’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
Image via YouTube
“Hi boss can supply drugs”
Want more? Download "The Tumor." It’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
Wow. What a nutty movie. “Destroyer.” A bare-faced Nicole Kidman lunges across Los Angeles in pursuit of bad guys. Honestly, it’s been over a week, and I can’t even summarize the plot. All I remember is Kidman plowing through the world like it owed her something, and the debt holder had to pay. This movie was directed by a woman. It’s not for everyone. It’s for people who think life is a crock—and then you’re dead.
(Go see it.)
Enjoy my work? Get "The Tumor." It’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
“Soon, the solitary, woeful figure that I am will vanish from this earth, where I have always been a spectator, an outsider among men.” https://t.co/QSFVCcsiit via @KarenAbbott
— Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) February 12, 2019
19 Likes, 0 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "Signing up for a comics making class for no reason other than to blow @youngmattc out of the water..."
Not long ago, I signed up for a comics-making class. I’ve made some comics in the past and had several published, and I thought it would be a good idea to have an outlet for expression that wasn’t just words. I’ve always made comics by taking photos and using digital means to manipulate them into what looked more like art. This time I’m going to try actually drawing. Unfortunately, I’m not very good at it. I’m good at the words, and the storytelling, but my art is not strong. It’s not even close. I’ve made a few ahead of time, and I bought some colored pencils. So far, they’re pretty ugly. Maybe that’s the point. Maybe that’s what you tolerate.
Enjoy my work? Buy "The Tumor." It’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
Awhile back, I wrote that I’d be sharing the latest developments that I have regarding my investigation into the sexing of a war hero pigeon named Cher Ami who may be a hen or a cock. This issue is important for several reasons, including that the bird is identified as a cock at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, where the bird is stuffed and on display. If the plaque that identifies the bird as a male is incorrect, it matters, given how many people visit there every year: 4.3M visitors in 2018, apparently. In any case, here’s an email I got from a reader and fellow Person Interested in Cher Ami—I hereby christen us: PICAs—who came across my posts: Dr. Marianne M. Gilchrist. Also, I’m excited to report I’ve gotten a very interesting lead from the National Archives. So, more to come. Thank you, Dr. Gilchrist! You can find the full thread of my Cher Ami posts here.
___
Email subject header: Cher Ami the Pigeon
Date: November 17, 2018
Hi, Susannah!
Having recently discovered Cher Ami's story, and your blog thread on her, and being very fond of pigeons, I just thought I'd add an observation on gender:
While it's difficult to be sure, given that the bird is stuffed, and taxidermists can change an animal's shape, my suspicion is she's a hen. Cock pigeons are chunkier and tend to have a thicker neck, with thicker feathers that they can puff out as a ruff in courtship dances. Cher Ami's neck is more slender. Cocks also have bigger ceres (the white 'nose') above their beaks.
I found these images online that demonstrate sex dimorphism in pigeons. Cher Ami looks to me more like a girl pidgie.
best wishes,
Marianne
___
[My reply on January 17, 2019]
Thanks, Marianne, and apologies for the delayed response. Would you mind if I posted your email on my blog? I could use your name or not.
___
[Dr. Gilchrist’s reply on January 18, 2019]
Hi!
Yes! I've also read that she was discovered to be a hen when she was stuffed.
I wonder if the stresses of war had stopped her laying eggs? She was an adult bird.
best,
Marianne
Enjoy my work? Buy "The Tumor." It’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
Image via Rakuten
ForbesLife did a roundup of their most popular posts for 2018, which included my coverage of France’s first sex doll brothel. As of this writing, that post has 97,096 views. Here are a few thoughts on making content clickable.
People tend to write for themselves. In the click economy, that’s not so smart. You must consider your content as seen through the eyes of the readers. Readers suffer from the paradox of choice. Why should they click on your content instead of others’ content? If you think about topic and titles from their perspective, rather than your own, they’ll choose you.
Content doesn’t sit in a series of discreet buckets. It’s not binary. It’s fluid. Feature writing, copy writing, and long-form journalism pull from the same well to fill various vessels. Borrow and merge. Remix and redeliver. Stop being a snob about your words and care to be read.
The external real audience is just a projection of the audience inside your head. The critic, the fan, the artist, the voyeur, the flaneur. They’re in the world, but they’re in you, too. The path to finding your true self winds through them like trees, their boughs brushing as you pass.
Enjoy my work? Buy "The Tumor." It’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
45 Likes, 3 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "💰BAN BILLIONAIRES💰 hoodie by my buddy 🖤@claytoncubitt🖤 #banbillionaires #getmoney"
My photographer friend Clayton Cubitt is producing some amazing works-for-sale as of late. I had to own his BAN BILLIONAIRES hoodie. The design is slick, and the sweatshirt is a cool cut and the softest material ever.
Enjoy my work? Buy "The Tumor." It’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
21 Likes, 1 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "Got photographed by @smeetamahanti today 📷"
The other day I got photographed by Smeeta Mahanti, who took this bad-ass photo you may have seen.
Enjoy my work? Buy "The Tumor." It’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
1 Likes, 0 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "Graphic novel of Paul Auster's City of Glass 🏙"
The nice folks over at Seriocomic have asked me to write a short piece about the comic of my choice. Seriocomic is “a weekly series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of our favorite comic books, comic strips, and graphic novels.” My contribution will be appearing in the spring. For my “comic,” I chose the graphic novel version of Paul Auster’s City of Glass.
Enjoy my work? Buy "The Tumor." It’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
Image via Adriana Sassoon
As I mentioned yesterday, I’ll be posting some updates to my investigation into the gender of a famous war hero pigeon named Cher Ami who’s stuffed and on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History. In the meantime, I’ll share this automatic response I got when I replied at an email sent awhile back from an archives specialist at the National Archives at College Park who saw my tweets about Cher Ami on Twitter. In my email to him, I asked if I could share the research he’d sent me, but I got this in response instead:
“The National Archives and Records Administration is closed to normal operations due to a lack of appropriations. I will be out of the office until I am authorized to return and will respond to your inquiry at that time. Thank you.”
Basically, the only thing standing between you and learning more about Cher Ami is Donald Trump.
Enjoy my work? Buy "The Tumor." It’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
@susannahbreslin Hi, I've become very interested in your 2017 posts about Cher Ami, but I can't find any followup posts to https://t.co/fTHxGezNWS . Did you ever find any proof regarding the bird's sex?
— the trap gf himself (@HuskyLannister) January 17, 2019
Some time back, I got interested in trying to figure out if a war hero pigeon that’s stuffed at the Smithsonian is a cock or a hen. In the interim, I’ve gotten various emails from various people, from a bird expert to a pigeon fancier to a fan, and I’ll be updating this blog with that information in the coming days and weeks.
Buy my short story "The Tumor" — it’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
This is an excerpt from a porn comic that I was working on in 2018. It’s about a woman who moves back to Porn Valley after a long time away, what she sees there, and how things have changed and are the same.
Buy my short story "The Tumor" — it’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
13 Likes, 0 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "💀 #cadillac #hearse"
Every once in a while I have dreams in which I’m back in high school and screwing up. Last weekend offered a variation on that—and usually they are variations. This one I was in college, but a high school-like-college, and I had screwed up something—not doing homework, missing tests, that sort of thing—and I was going to fail all my classes. The tension of these types of dreams tend to revolve around the moment at which the problem becomes too significant to ignore, and the moment at which I address it. In fact, I dropped out of high school in my senior year. I was a bit of a fuck up. Sometimes I think about going back; you know, one could turn that sort of thing into an article. I never got my GED: I took classes at UC Berkeley when I was in high school, I went to junior college, I transferred to and graduated from UC Berkeley, I went to grad school. Despite all those boxes checked, I’m still the girl who has dreams in which I’m screwing everything up all over again.
Buy my short story "The Tumor" — it’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
An excerpt from an unpublished essay:
Image via Harvard Health Publishing
“The tumor was mine. Arguably, it was my malignant baby, for my body had created it, and it was growing inside of me at an aggressive pace. But I did not want it. I wanted it out. There was a lot of debate over the best way to address the monster within me. The first oncologist wanted to chop off both my breasts and yank out my reproductive organs. After that, a plastic surgeon showed me his photo album filled with pictures of women whose heads were clipped out of the frame and whose breasts had been ravaged by cancer, the interior flesh of which had been removed by him, and which had been reconstructed in ways that did not, to my eye, look at all natural. Finally, a physician’s assistant came in the room after the plastic surgeon had left. I said I didn’t realize it would look like that, and he said he understood. He held one hand in the air palm up, and he held the other hand in the air palm down. His top hand made a tent over his bottom hand. He said my breast was like a circus tent and having a mastectomy was like taking away the tent pole. With that, he flattened his top hand against his bottom hand like a circus tent collapsing, crushing all the circus animals, carnival performers, and acrobats in the process.”
Buy my short story "The Tumor" — it’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."
