Fuck You, Pay Me #1: How to Become a Writer in 12 Easy Steps

The writer at 4

This is part 1 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.

1. Get lucky. Be born. Have English professor parents. Be read to a lot. Learn to read. Read a lot. Go to a weird kindergarten that lets you sit in a box all day, reading books. Be taken to the library. Be taken to bookstores. Watch your father write books. Spend a lot of time on your own in your room, reading books. Cultivate an expansive imagination. Make up stories in your head. Listen to your father crouched down on the floor next to your bed making up bedtime stories that you’ll wish you could remember as an adult but can’t. Decide books are your friends.

2. Look for the helpers. Go to grade school. Go to high school. Bond with various English teachers along the way who tell you or suggest to you or make you feel like you are a good writer and think to yourself: Maybe I am. Drop out of high school in your senior year to the disappointment of pretty much everyone. Attend community college. Transfer to U.C. Berkeley as a junior. Major in English at the same university where your father is a professor. Fall in love with James Joyce. Fall in love with William Faulkner. Fall in love with Jacques Lacan. Consider becoming a writer.

The writer in Austin, Texas

3. Write a lot. Get accepted to a graduate school master’s degree program that is 50% literature and 50% creative writing. Move to Chicago. Make friends with other writers. Read more. Write more. Pen academic essays and short stories in which strange things happen. Graduate. Return to the Bay Area. Have your father die. Realize that you want to be a writer, now that your father (the writer) is dead. Start an online magazine about post-feminism with your friends from graduate school. Interview a porn star. Get invited to a porn set in Los Angeles. Move to L.A.

4. Find a niche. Become a sex writer. Write about the porn business. Appear on TV. Write for glossy magazines. Get hired to be a reporter on a Playboy TV show that’s basically “60 Minutes” on Viagra, a gig that takes you around the world and results in you visiting the Playboy Mansion three times. Date a famous comedian who dumps you. Date an artist who makes fire-breathing robots. Start one of the first sex blogs, which is called The Reverse Cowgirl; the tagline is: “In which a writer attempts to justify the enormity of her porn collection.”

5. Sell out. Leave L.A. for reasons you’ll be unable to understand later. Move to New Orleans, Louisiana. Publish a collection of short stories with a small publisher. Identify Hurricane Katrina is on its way to where you live and leave. Move to Norfolk, Virginia. Sell freelance articles, generate blog posts, and try to write a novel about the porn business but fail repeatedly. Move to Austin, Texas. Become a copywriter. Get hired to be the voice of Pepto-Bismol on social media, something at which you are good. Wonder what you’re doing with your life. Feel unsure.

The writer in Naples, Florida

6. Give up. Move to Chicago, Illinois. Get married. Get breast cancer. Feel like maybe you’re going to die, or maybe you’re not going to die, but either way the chemo makes you feel like you’re dying so what’s the difference. Survive. Write for the Forbes website. Try intermittently to stop writing about sex because you’re married and it seems unseemly. Keep writing about sex anyway. Move to Naples, Florida. Become extremely unsure who you are or what your life has become or what you’re going to do next. Get divorced. Move back to L.A.

7. Try again. Pick up the pieces of your life, attempt to arrange them into something else, and identify it looks like a mess. Start a strategic communications consulting business that you describe as “I tell C-suite guys what to do.” Decide that you’re going to write the memoir that you were trying to write when you were married, which is about how you were a human lab rat in a 30-year longitudinal study of personality starting when you were a kid. Apply for an investigative reporting fellowship at U.C. Berkeley, which is where the study was conducted, so you can research the book. Tell everyone you’ll never get the fellowship. Get the fellowship.

The writer in an experiment room

8. Face your fears. Move back to your hometown. Rent an in-law apartment in a house that’s less than a mile from the house in which you were raised. Start your investigating. Visit the preschool where you were studied. Explore the building in which you were studied. Take a selfie in one of the one-way mirrors through which you were spied on in an experiment room. Begin to wonder how this experience of being studied shaped the person you became. Wonder if people are who they are or if life changes people and if the latter is true, can writing the story or your life change you, too?

9. Write a book. Return to L.A. after the fellowship ends. Craft a book proposal about your human lab rat life. Acquire a literary agent. Sell the book on proposal to one of the big publishing houses on the other side of the country. Watch as the pandemic descends on the globe. Debate the point of writing anything, seeing as the world is coming to an end. Spend a long time writing the book. Have your mother die. Write your mother dying into your manuscript. Hire a freelance editor who helps you finish the book and whom you refer to as your “book doula.” Wait for the book to be published.

10. Believe in yourself. Get the book published. Appear on some book lists. Get some good book reviews. Have an article about you and your book published in a newspaper in which your photograph appears. Promote your book on social media. Do some interviews about your book. See your book in some bookstores. Thank people for buying your book. Hold your book in your hands and experience a mix of pride at your hard-won accomplishment and the clarity that it is far too late for either of your now dead parents to acknowledge it. Put the book on the shelf in your living room. Consider what to do next.

The writer in The New York Post

11. Question everything. Turn into the living embodiment of that meme in which a dog is sitting in a room that is afire and the words say: “This is fine.” If this is a midlife crisis or an existential crisis or some other sort of crisis, it is the quietest crisis ever, a kind of imploding. Who are you and what are you doing and is this who you are supposed to be? These are the same questions you have been asking yourself for a long time, and you still don’t have the answers. Interviewers want you to give them a happy ending to the story of your life when they ask you about your book, but this is your reality. Life goes on.

12. Start all over. Think about how over two decades earlier, you stood on the set of a porn movie and thought: I should write a novel about this. Think about all the times you have tried to write it and failed. Try to write it again. Fail again. Try writing it another way. Fail again for a second time. Think of another way to write it that is new, an idea that sounds like a terrible idea because maybe no one will read it because it’s so totally out there. Think about how the way you shouldn’t do things is exactly how you should do things. Try writing the novel that way. Love it. Keep writing it. Feel better. Keep going. You’re a writer now, after all.

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Data Baby-Inspired Slate Essay Featured in Bloomberg

Bloomberg’s Prognosis newsletter gave a shout out to my recent Slate essay, “I Spent My Childhood as a Guinea Pig for Science. It Was … Great?” My Slate essay was derived from my new memoir, DATA BABY: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. You can read the Bloomberg mention HERE and buy my book HERE.

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The Lost Vagina

“The point is, I started thinking, you know, what if my silicone vagina didn’t have to be lost?” Read the rest of my latest Reverse Cowgirl newsletter here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my newsletter while you’re there.

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A Portrait of the Writer in Solitary Isolation

In April, The New York Times asked readers to submit short essays on what it was like to live alone during the coronavirus pandemic. I submitted my story, but it wasn’t chosen for publication. (You can see the stories that were chosen here.)

In any case, here’s my story:

After I got divorced in October 2017, I waited a few months, and then I started dating. Since, I've gone out on exactly 22 first dates. I know this because I kept a list. Or, more specifically, I maintained a list of what the men I went out on dates with did for a living.

Initially, my goal was to go on 21 first dates. I decided that was my magical number. I'm an introvert, so going out on first dates isn't the easiest thing for me. To get myself to go out on those dates, which I procured through the dating websites and apps to which I belonged, I made 21 first dates my goal. Surely, if I went out on that many first dates, I'd meet the love of my life. Wouldn't I?

Instead, I went out with six attorneys, three pilots, a political lobbyist, a creative director, the guy who was the prom king of the senior class at Berkeley High School when I was a sophomore, a doctor, a carpenter, an NBA recruiter, an executive at a faucet company, a guy in health marketing, an investment banker, a guy in music marketing, a racehorse trainer, a guy in the cannabis business, and a guy who creates augmented reality projects for art galleries and the entertainment business.

Ultimately, none of those first dates ever really went anywhere. I saw a few more than once, and I dated one of the pilots, who lived in Colorado but flew through Burbank, where I live, on a regular basis, but nothing had legs. I wondered if it was me, or if it was them, or if it was the fact that I was getting older. I thought maybe I was too much, or maybe I wasn't enough, or maybe it was that I'm 6'1" and that kind of narrows my options.

Then the pandemic arrived. I kept browsing the dating apps, but I let go of the fantasy that I might meet someone at such a great remove under such calamitous circumstances. Instead, I focused on other things. I started writing more. I vacuumed the floor. I created some art. I quit coloring my hair. I stopped waxing my brows. For four weeks, I shaved neither my legs nor my armpits. Left to my own devices, I was going feral.

In the bubble of my apartment, which is located in a complex that was built in the sixties and has a pale yellow stove and a baby pink tiled bathroom, I felt the way I'd wanted to feel on all those first dates with all those guys: like I was enough. When the dates stopped, the world disappeared. It was just me, alone, at last, in these rooms of my own, creating, recreating, and transforming into whoever I'll be when we reemerge.

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Topping from the Bottom

🔮

I wrote an essay about cancer, sex, and what happens when you can’t get away from you for Roxane Gay’s Gay Magazine on Medium: “Topping from the Bottom.”

“Maybe you’re getting too old for this shit. Maybe you’re not drunk enough. Maybe no matter what you do, no matter how many guys you fuck or how many times they leave you bruised, you still can’t escape yourself.”

Read the rest here.

[Image via my Instagram feed]

Buy a copy of my latest digital story: “The Tumor” —“a masterpiece of short fiction.”

An Excerpt From an Unpublished Essay

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."

You Must Bookmark This

“A Year in Reading: Lydia Kiesling” on The Millions is terrific. You have to read it. So do it.

I became obsessed with Norwegian and Swedish social policies. Back with Karl Ove, I underlined every part where he scoffed at Swedish sanctimony and hypocrisy. TRY LIVING HERE, I would scream in my head, to no one. I couldn’t help noting that this reading assignment was the corner office in the women’s work of thinking about men who are not thinking about you.

Buy "The Tumor" — my short story that’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."

You Should Wait for It

I have an essay forthcoming in the “Fine Lines” series on Longreads. It’s called “Ravaged,” and the series itself is about aging. This piece isn’t like anything I’ve written … in a while? … ever? After the last round of edits I did on it, I clicked send to the editor and then thought, Well, I’ll never get another date or another job after this gets published. But that’s probably a sign of good writing. Or at least writing at the risk of embarrassment. I’ll post a link here when it’s online.

Buy "The Tumor" — my short story that’s been called "a masterpiece of short fiction."

How Much I Got Paid: #9

Title: "Blood Sacrifice"

Publication: The Billfold

Date: May 4, 2015

Word count: 1,246

Payment: $30

Notes: I haven't done a "How Much I Got Paid" in a while. I was surprised to see that I'd done eight of them, and that the last one I did was in August of 2014. In any case, I've got some catching up to do. Today's installment in this series -- in which I consider a piece of freelance work I did and how much I got paid to do it -- we're taking a look at a personal essay I wrote that ran this week on The Billfold, "Blood Sacrifice." In April, I had the amazing opportunity to eat at Next. Suffice to say, dinner there runs you $350. As with my previous Grant Achatz-borne experience (see: "The Best Drink I Ever Had") at Aviary, I found the entire event to be transformative, moving, and awesome. So, when I got home, I decided I'd write about it. I pitched the story idea I had to a dozen places, including The New York Times, Aeon, Matter, The Atlantic, Chicago Magazine, Esquire, The New Yorker, Harper's Bazaar, The Hairpin, Vogue, The Awl, and The Billfold. Because most editors are worthless fucking shitbags who are too busy jacking off or reapplying lipstick to do their jobs, most didn't even respond to pass, and the lone interested party was The Billfold. Luckily, I like The Billfold. And not only do I like The Billfold, I read it. (As a sidenote, I have this weird affection for the fact that the link to their next pages reads "There's more to read, if you want!" Endearing.) In any case, I heard back from Mike Dang, who edits the site. He's a nice guy. "Definitely interested in this and would love to work with you," Dang replied. Great! "We’d be able to pay $30 for the essay." Ooh, that smarts. That is some horrendous pay. Of course, I wasn't expecting much, but that was just painful. Anyway! Whatever. They wanted the piece, and I wanted to write it. I think it took about two or three hours to do it. I like the way it came out. The part about Ouroboros is my favorite part.

Conclusion: You are what you eat. (You are not what you are paid.)

[How Much I Got Paid]

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My Bloody Sacrifice

I've got a new personal essay up, this one on The Billfold: "Blood Sacrifice."

I fantasized that if I went, on the night that I was there, by some strange coincidence, Achatz would be there. Achatz, I knew, had had cancer, too, and, in my daydream, Achatz would come by the table, and I would motion to him, and he would bend down low, and I would tell him, in a murmuring voice, that I had had cancer, and I knew that he had had cancer, too. He would smile knowingly at me, and I would smile knowingly at him, and then he would disappear into the kitchen, and he would emerge with a plate of something that looked like a tumor splattered across porcelain, and I would eat it, and whatever it was made of (rhubarb? venison? something else entirely?), it would be delicious, and I would have eaten the tumor that had tried to eat me, metaphorically, of course, and the cycle of life would close upon itself, completing itself, like Ouroboros with his tail in his mouth rolling down a street like a wheel.

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The 12-Year Deadline

I've never been great with deadlines, but when I set out to write The Fetish Alphabet, I had no idea it would take me 12 years to finish it. But, it did.

In 2002 (as I recall it, and since this story covers many years, it's possible I'm misremembering parts of it), I reached out to Andrew Gallix at 3:AM Magazine. Andrew teaches at the Sorbonne, and 3:AM's slogan is "Whatever it is, we're against it," a phrase I wouldn't mind having pounded into my gravestone. (You can read more about 3:AM's illustrious history here.) I believe I pitched him the idea of a fetish alphabet. An alphabet. Of fetishes. A series of flash fictions exploring erotic derangements. He must've said yes because at some point off we went. A Google search reveals I wrote six installments -- A through F -- which were published between August and November of 2002. And then, for reasons I can no longer recall, I stopped.

A year later, I published You're a Bad Man, Aren't You? with Future Tense Books. It was a collection of short stories I'd written and included a few of the fetish stories. That same year, I worked with artist Anthony Ventura on an illustrated version of The Fetish Alphabet. He beautifully illustrated the stories I'd written, and I wrote some more. I mean, look at this illustration for "A Is for Anthropophagy." Amazing. Some recent poking about online indicates I rewrote some of the letters -- for example, I changed "B Is for Bestiality" to "B Is for Bukkake" -- and I believe we got as far as O. And then, for reasons I can no longer recall, I stopped.

Of course, this always bugged me -- the whole lot of it. That I had started it and not finished it. That it had been one thing and then another thing but never a finished thing. That I had said I would do it, yet in the end I had not. Over the following years, life happened. I moved, and I was broke, and I got sideswiped by Hurricane Katrina, and I moved again, and I worked as a waitress, and I moved again, and I got married, and I had cancer, and I got better, and we moved, and so on and so on. Buffeted by the waves, I suppose, or perhaps more like a drunk weaving back and forth across the road of life. Depends on how you look at it.

One day this year, I woke up, and I wasn't moving anymore, and I wasn't broke anymore, and I wasn't single anymore, and I wasn't sick anymore, and I wasn't in the eye of a storm anymore. Still, I had spent a lot of this year feeling like I was failing at things. Or at least not particularly succeeding at things. I wanted to do one thing and finish it. One. Thing. For fuck's sake. So I would know that I could. In that spirit, in November, I undertook a 30-day yoga challenge, and, to my quasi-surprise, I finished it. And then I set out to write 30 fictions in 30 days on my blog, and I did that, too. And after the former and during the latter, I emailed Andrew again, 12 years after the fact, and I asked if he would be interested in me finishing The Fetish Alphabet, and, luckily enough, he was kind enough and generous enough to give me the space to do it. The subject of my email to him on November 21: "An indecent proposal."

Today, the alphabet is done through W. I found a few of the ones I'd written along the way -- H, M, and O -- and the rest were lost. As of this writing, you can read The Fetish Alphabet through Q at 3:AM. A lovely woman named Emma posts them. That means X, Y, and Z are the only ones left. I told Andrew I'd do one every day, and for a while I did, but I ended up missing a few days here and there. Right now, that 12-year deadline is so close I can taste it, and you know what it tastes like? It tastes like rich New Orleans soil and bloody surgical gloves, aviation fuel perfume and prickly south Texas cacti, plastic bags filled with lavender air and the inside of an over-worn wedding ring. Surely, there are fetishes for all these things, including finishing things.

[The Fetish Alphabet]

The Lemon

I wrote a piece for Men's Health about being married and having cancer and not having cancer. After I published this post, they asked me to write a longer version.

"Thankfully, my husband had been through worse: two deployments to Iraq with the United States Marine Corps. Cancer would be a cakewalk, the malignancy a microscopic terrorist cell that had set up shop in his spouse. It was just a matter of bombing the deadly sect into oblivion."

[Men's Health]