I'm The Fixer

In addition to writing books and producing journalism, I’m a creative consultant. As The Fixer, I do a little bit of everything that has to do with words. From ghostwriting books to editing manuscripts to crafting website content, I help my clients with their word-based projects. Are you a busy CEO who needs a ghostwriter? I can do that. Are you a writer who needs someone to assist you in getting your writing where it should be? I can do that. Are you a marketing company in search of someone who can create compelling copy? I can do that. Book a one-hour introductory consultation here or email me to schedule your session here, and let’s get started.

SERVICES

• Ghostwriting

• Website content

• Editing

• Speechwriting

• Journalism

• Marketing and branding copy

• Press releases

• Copywriting

• Feature writing

• Social media content

• Blog posts

• Newsletters

CLIENTS

• WarnerMedia

• Playboy Enterprises

• FX Networks

• Procter & Gamble

• “Conan” on TBS

• Publicis Groupe

• Weber Shandwick

REVIEWS

• "Susannah is utterly brilliant. She's a highly experienced strategic thinker who brings bold new ideas and perspectives to the table, from brand positioning and messaging to ambitious content initiatives. I look forward to working with her again." — executive producer / GM

• "There are few people I have come across in my 30 years of working with leaders all over the world with the level of intelligence and work ethic as Susannah. I am very picky who I choose to collaborate with; Susannah is exceptional." — change management consultant

• "Susannah is brilliant at cutting through the noise and locating what's needed with a laser focus. Her ability to help people see themselves more clearly, identify weaknesses and gaps, and provide a productive critique to course correct is extraordinary." — chief operating officer

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Fuck You, Pay Me #8: Some of My Favorite Things I've Ever Written (Fiction Edition)

This is part 8 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.

I thought I’d list some of my favorite things I’ve ever written in terms of fiction. Obviously, I’ve excluded my memoir, Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. But I’ve included my short story collection, You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You?, and my novel-in-progress, (which I’ll refer to here as) Untitled Porn Novel-in-Progress.

1. You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You? In 2003, I published my short story collection through Future Tense Books. The collection is comprised of fourteen stories, among them: “Apartment,” “He Was Probably in Jail,” and “Hey Doll.” These stories were written when I was in graduate school, after I graduated, and during the course of my writing career. The subject matter is nuts and often about weird sex fetishes, dysfunctional relationships, and things that happen when you find yourself working in Porn Valley. You can buy it on Amazon for $80.

   Standout quote: “You could call him nullified, or orchidectomized, or emasculated, or a eunuch, but he was simply the possessor of a penectomy, a person who no longer bore his own penis, a man undeniably lacking in what he had previously carried in his lower basket.”

   Year published and publisher: 2003, Future Tense Books

2. Untitled Porn Novel-in-Progress Currently, I’m working on a novel that’s set in the adult film industry. It focuses on a single character and is a real pleasure to write. As I have shared in interviews, writing my memoir was a slog, and I really wanted to undo that experience and create something that was amusing and exciting and fresh. I’ve written nearly 25% of this novel so far, and every time I re-read it I laugh out loud. It’s a delight.

   Standout quote: “Of course, there were freaks of nature that worked the adult business like sideshow acts, men preternaturally gifted with eye-popping appendages who had carved out a niche for themselves by starring in movies with titles that trumpeted their larger-than-life anatomies, but those guys were outliers.”

   Year published and publisher: TBD, TBD

3. “The Tumor“ In 2015, I self-published this short story. It’s about an anthropomorphic tumor, a troubled marriage, and a bad man. I had the cover designed, the layout designed, and the formats designed. I really enjoyed this process, as it gave me the ability to control the process from soup to nuts. You can buy it on Gumroad for $1. To date, I’ve earned a total of $884.50 selling this product through Gumroad, using the Pay What You Want option.

   Standout quote: “My original idea was that we take her out in the yard, and that I, an expert marksman, shoot her in the breast at the site to which she had pointed, thereby destroying the tumor.”

   Year published and publisher: 2015, self-published

4. “Spike” In 2020, Bending Genres published this short story of mine which is about a male porn star who is struggling with performance anxiety. I wrote this story some years earlier, and I submitted it many times to many literary journals, and no one wanted to publish it until Bending Genres came along. I love this story and think it’s hilarious.

   Standout quote: “Then he’d seen an ad for a cattle call in the San Fernando Valley, and when the guy in the wood paneled room in the second-story office asked him to drop his pants so they could take a Polaroid that would crop out his head entirely and feature his cock prominently, he did what the man said.”

   Year published and publisher: 2020, Bending Genres

5. “Necking Team Button” In 2009, Joshua Glenn and Rob Walker asked me to write a short story for their Significant Objects project, which was a literary experiment that involved pairing writers with found objects. The experiment prompted the interrogation of how narratives shape the perceived value of objects and culminated in an auction. (You can read how the project worked here.) The writers of these stories included Jonathan Lethem, Sheila Heti, and Colson Whitehead. Eventually, the project became an anthology, which you can buy on Amazon. My story combines fiction and nonfiction.

   Standout quote: “Looking down at the pin staring up at me like a Cyclops, looking through this portal into a time wherein I was nothing but a flickering flash in one of my father’s constellation of neurons, I wondered who this all-star necker was: my father, a young man not unlike myself, or something else altogether—a man beyond my understanding now relegated to a past that lay on the other side of a bridge where the land was so dark that I could no longer see him.”

   Year published and publisher: 2009, Significant Objects; 2012, Fantagraphics

6. “She Is a Girl” I wrote this story in 2005, when I was living in New Orleans. It was published in the very cool Maisonneuve. Like a lot of my fiction, this story interweaves fact and fiction, and in some ways it exists as a very early draft of my memoir. Also like a lot of my fiction, and some of my nonfiction, including my memoir, it has surrealist elements. The story is about what it’s like to be a girl and what it’s like to be a woman and the stuff that happens in between. I think this story is kind of sweet.

   Standout quote: “The tectonic plates of her ribs lying protectively over her heart can hardly contain whatever it is thumping inside her.”

   Year published and publisher: 2005, Maisonneuve

7. “The Flesh Eaters” This story was published in 2018 on Construction, which was a literary magazine, but maybe that publication no longer exists. Anyway, you can read the story by clicking the title, thanks to the Wayback Machine. This story is one of a series of short stories I’ve been doing over the years that take place in Porn Valley. In case you haven’t noticed, Porn Valley is my Yoknapatawpha County. The tale features Dolores, who works for a company in the San Fernando Valley that makes silicone vaginas. I think the idea came to me after I visited an adult toy manufacturer in North Hollywood and also because I used to own a silicone vagina, although I lost it.

   Standout quote: “Dolores didn’t expect to spend the last year sewing pubic hair into a disembodied silicone vagina, but that’s the way it happened.”

   Year published and publisher: 2018, Construction

8. “Hey Doll” If you’re looking for Susannah Breslin brand fiction, this is it. It was published by Nerve in 2002, if you’re old enough to remember that site. Thanks again to the Wayback Machine for providing a link to it in archived form. I don’t want to say too much about this story other than to say it was inspired by real events, and dating in Los Angeles is crazy, and in Hollywood truth and fiction are one and the same.

   Standout quote: “All of a sudden, before she knew it, he was naked down on the floor, and the bottom of her boot was across the back of his neck, and his tongue was on the top of her other boot, licking it, and she was shouting at him, You're licking my boot because that's the only thing that you're good enough to do!”

   Year published and publisher: 2002, Nerve

9. “The Boy Who Wore His Heart on His Sleeve“ This is a charming bit of flash fiction that appeared on A Shaded View on Fashion Fiction. It dates back to 2010. A Shaded View on Fashion is the brainchild of Diane Pernet, who is the coolest. I was really delighted to have anything of mine associated with anything of hers.

   Standout quote: “The boy had no idea if he could singlehandedly un-pin his heart, stuff it back into his chest, and darn up the sweater in such a way that no one would ever know that he had stood in his kitchen in the fading light and removed his heart from his chest with a serrated steak knife, all for a woman whom he had yet to meet, a glowing collection of pixels that was her smiling out at him from the computer screen.”

   Year published and publisher: 2010, A Shaded View on Fashion Fiction

10. “Revenge of the Cum Dumpster” It’s hard to believe that a story I wrote with this title has struggled to find a publisher. The story itself focuses on a pornographer who is not a very nice guy, who says something mean about the young woman who finds herself the subject of his current film project, and the swift consequences of karma on a porn movie set. I think it has yet to find a publisher because it has cum dumpster in the title and because people are so afraid of being cancelled these days for who knows what reason. Anyway, if you’re interested in publishing this seminal work, let me know.

    Standout quote: “The men had surrounded her in a half-circle, their penises a forest of trees in which she was lost.”

    Year published and publisher: TBD, TBD

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Meet The Strip Club CEO Who Wants To Get Guys Off Their Phones And Into The Clubs

This article was originally published on Forbes.com on May 9, 2022.

“Everybody wants to party.” That’s how Eric Langan, the CEO, president, and chairman of the board of RCI Hospitality Holdings, Inc., the only publicly traded company that owns gentleman’s clubs, describes the state of his business today. Pandemic? Fuggedaboutit. Two years of dark news, quarantining, and masks have resulted in a surge of consumers who want to go out and have fun. The strip club business may not be pandemic proof, but according to Langan, it’s pandemic resistant. After an initial dip early on in the pandemic, the company has come roaring back and is doing better than ever. According to Langan, its suite of businesses are on track to generate between $260 million and $280 million in revenue in 2022.

You might not have heard of RCI Hospitality Holdings, which trades on Nasdaq under the symbol RICK, but you may have heard of its establishments, which include over forty strip clubs and restaurants. Among its gentleman’s clubs are Rick’s Cabaret and Vivid Cabaret in New York City; Club Onyx, which has outposts in Houston, Charlotte, St. Louis, and Indianapolis; and Tootsie’s Cabaret in Miami. (“The place is so big they've got a giant room in the back for making the furniture upon which the laps get their dances,” this reporter discovered during a 2015 visit.) There’s also Bombshells, a military-themed chain of restaurants and bars (think: Hooters, but the servers wear fake ammunition belts instead of orange shorts) with multiple locations across Texas. The company brand is a mix of food, booze, and attractive women. The company went public, as Rick’s Cabaret International, in 1995 and hasn’t looked back since.

“They’re having fun,” he notes of the twenty-something to forty-something customers who are frequenting his establishments. “They’re way more into experiences than things. They want human interaction. They want to be seen. They want to be heard. They want to flex in front of their friends. It’s about being out and feeling like you’re somebody.” The pandemic isolated people, restricted their freedom, kept them apart. “This is just a retaliation against that lack of freedom,” he observes. “Now they’re expressing their freedom in every way they can. I think it’s great.”

So, how do you pry the young men whom comprise his customer base off their sofas, away from their Netflix shows, out of their homes and into his clubs and restaurants to spend their money? Thanks in part to Langan’s son Colby, the company’s director of administrative operations, who introduced his father to NFTs, “the crypto world,” and web3, RCI Hospitality Holdings is strategically employing a series of tech-focused initiatives. There’s AdmireMe, a kind of OnlyFans for dancers—or “entertainers,” as Langan refers to them—that connects dancers to customers; Tip-N-Strip, an NFT-based points-program with VIP benefits; and the company’s next earnings call, on Monday, May 9, 2022, at 4:30 p.m. ET, will be held on Twitter Spaces.

“We’ve become a mainstream company,” Langan asserts. “Yes, we have strip clubs, but really we’re in the cash flow business.” Of course, his job isn’t like every other CEO’s job. (“I’m the head janitor,” he says.) Active on Twitter, he’s not one for holding back. “Diamond Cabaret Denver has so many beautiful entertainers tonight,” he tweeted not long ago. “I can’t decide if it should be a blonde or brunette kinda night. What do you think ?” In another tweet, he advised his followers: “Just remember you can take the stripper out of the club but you can’t take the club out of the stripper !!!” No matter. In the end, this is the strip club (and restaurant) business. After the Twitter Spaces earnings call, he’ll be mingling with investors at Tootsie’s, along with a few dancers.

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I, A Middle-Aged Woman, Went On A Sugar Daddy Dating Website

This article was originally published on Forbes.com on June 2, 2022.

I, a middle-aged single woman, have spent the last several years looking for love, a connection, something on dating websites and apps. You name them, I’ve been on them: Bumble, Tinder, Hinge. Over that period I’ve gone on 30 or so blind dates, with pilots and attorneys and one carpenter, most of them somewhere between mildly boring and temporarily entertaining, but nothing has really stuck. So the other night, after I’d deleted another dating app in frustration—Bumble, probably—I wondered what would happen if I signed up for Seeking Arrangement, a so-called “sugar daddy” dating website that earlier this year rebranded itself as Seeking and announced itself “the largest dating website for successful and attractive people.” (The unsuccessful and unattractive need not apply, one imagines.)

Seeking Arrangement had long been the dating site of choice for young women and older men hoping to find a connection that involved the exchange of money; what that money was exchanged for was up to its users. Now Seeking, which claims it has over 36 million users worldwide, was trying to sell itself as one more dating site. Was Seeking comprised of mostly forty-something sugar daddies searching for twenty-something sugar babies? Or could I, a middle-aged women, find something more romantic than transactional on the site? There was only one way to find out: gonzo journalism. “Start Dating Up,” which Seeking has trademarked, the website beckoned. I paid $19.99 for a 30-day subscription and created a profile.

In a way, Seeking isn’t that different from other dating websites. In fact, I recognized some of the men’s profiles from regular dating websites and apps I’d been on. Many of the men were younger than I’d expected. I’d thought the male users would be middle-aged, moneyed types on the prowl for young woman that appreciated the simplicity of a tit-for-tat exchange. Instead, I found a mix of tech nerds who’d struck it rich and whose screen names occasionally underscored their love of the blockchain and bitcoin, average Joe types hunting for something quick who figured it was easier to find it on Seeking than at a bar, and successful executives who seemed to be interested in a relationship they believed they could control through money.

But were these guys as wealthy as they claimed? On their profiles, they could share their net worth and quite a few claimed to have a net worth of $100 million or more, which seemed unlikely, given that a 2015 report from the Boston Consulting Group found that there were over 5,000 households in the U.S. worth $100 million or more. Some of the men wanted a sugar baby and said so. Some wanted something that might start out transactional but would turn into something more, even marriage, down the line. One, who was married, was looking for a woman who would move in with him and his wife. Another, a handsome young man who related he’d done well when he’d sold his last company, no longer had to work and wanted to find a girl who would travel the world with him on his dime.

I got a few messages, but only a handful. While the site had been rebranded, it was clear that most of the guys were looking for women who were far younger than me. Then I came across the profile of an older man who was looking for tall women with big feet. I’m 6’1” and wear a size 11 shoe. He was looking for The One, he wrote. Was I it? I tried to picture how it might work, me with my tall body and my big feet, and him, far away, with his interests and his self-proclaimed successes.

It was easy to get sucked into thinking about romance as transactional on Seeking, a place where it was normal to calculate one’s worth and then try to sell it. But something stopped me. Seeking was one more dating website, but one where sex and love were commodities. I began to feel grim and a bit cynical, which wasn’t how I wanted to feel. So I deleted my profile.

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Fuck you, pay me #5: 19 Ways to Make Money as a Writer

This is part 5 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.

There’s been a lot of talk lately about the death of journalism. Reporters are being laid off. Journalists are out of work. I’ve been a writer for over 20 years. Throughout, I’ve been able to sustain my writing career by diversifying my talents. Here are some of the ways that I’ve made money by using my writer skills.

1. Copywriter. As I have written on this blog, I got paid $100 an hour pretending to be the personality of Pepto-Bismol on social media. This was a fun job. Sometimes I wish that I could do it again. According to my notes: “social media engagement [increased] by 500% and market share [grew] by 11%” during the time period in which I was pretending to be Pepto.

2. Journalist. Reporter. Journalist. Investigative whatever you want to call it. I’ve done pretty much every type of journalism there is. People say journalism dying. Maybe they’re right, but I doubt it. I’m probably best known for “They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They?,” an investigation of the Great Recession’s impact on the adult film industry. My reporting has been described as “unflinching and devastating.”

3. Author. Last year, I published a memoir: Data Baby: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. Twenty years earlier, I published a short story collection: You’re a Bad Man, Aren’t You? I got an advance for the former; I didn’t get an advance for the latter. Books are a long game hustle. They may pay more money, but they may cost you a great deal of time.

4. Editor. I’ve been an editor for from Forbes.com, where I was the founding editor of the Vices section, and The Frisky, a site for women that was owned by Turner. These roles involved interfacing with other writers and editing their work, so if you’re incapable of those things, don’t be an editor. These days, sometimes someone who has an “editor” title is really just a writer; why this is, I have no idea.

5. Publicist. One of my first jobs after graduate school was doing PR for a book publisher. Being a publicist is a tough job because you do a lot of pitching, and oftentimes your pitches are ignored or declined. But being a publicist is one of the most important jobs I’ve ever had because I learned how to publicize myself. That skill came in handy when my memoir came out, and I worked hard to promote it.

6. Traffic driver. I’m not sure what to call this gig, even though I’ve done it for big companies. Organizations hire me to drive traffic to their digital platforms. I’ve found I obtain the best results when I function as both an editor and / or content creator in addition to driving traffic. For example, when I was at The Frisky, I grew the site from startup to 4M+ unique visitors and 22M+ page views a month.

7. Consultant. My consulting work as The Fixer is my highest-paid work. Typically my client is a CEO / founder / venture capitalist. They have a problem, and they hire me to fix it. This covers a range of issues, from getting media coverage to assisting in business development to strategic growth. Truth be told, I am better at this than anything else and have added millions of dollars to clients’ portfolios.

8. Essayist. I wrote “I Spent My Childhood as a Guinea Pig for Science. It Was … Great?” — on spec. I avoid writing on spec, because it sucks, but I knew the essay would help me promote my memoir. Once I was done, I shopped the essay around to a dozen outlets. Two were interested. I went back and forth on contract terms with the first, and we were unable to resolve them. The essay ended up at Slate, where I had a great editor, it got an excellent title, and I was happy.

9. Fiction writer. I write short stories, and I have had many of them published. I was paid for some of the short stories that were published, and I was not paid for others. Currently, I’m writing a novel that is set in the San Fernando Valley’s adult film industry, and I’m really excited about that.

10. Screenwriter / Producer. I’ve done some writing and producing for TV. This includes developing documentary and scripted TV series, including true crime, outdoor adventure, and miniseries. I was also a consultant for a movie directed by an Oscar-winning director. The TV business is not for the faint of heart. If you’re writing your own TV or movie project, please register it with the WGA.

11. Fellow. From 2018 to 2019, I was the Lawrence Grauman Jr. Post-graduate Fellow at the Investigative Reporting Program at the Graduate School of Journalism at U.C. Berkeley. This was a salaried role with benefits. At the time, the IRP’s leadership was in flux, but that has since changed for the better. I used my time as a fellow there to work on my memoir, which includes investigative reporting.

12. Teacher. When I was in grad school, I had a fellowship. My tuition was waived, I received a stipend, and I taught one undergraduate course per semester. I taught freshman composition and writing the research paper. After I graduated, I taught at various community colleges around the Bay Area (aka a gypsy scholar). Sometimes I think about getting my doctorate but haven’t decided yet.

13. Photographer. Over the course of my career, I have had some of my photos published in media outlets. These include Men’s Health, Forbes.com, Le Journale de la Photographie, mashKULTURE, Nerve, and Arthur. I can’t recall if I was paid for any of these photos, but I do enjoy taking pictures.

14. Ghost. I’ve been a ghostwriter in various incarnations, from ghostwriting tweets for celebrities to ghostwriting speeches for CEOs. I haven’t ghostwritten a book, although I imagine at some point I will. Everyone wants to be an author nowadays. They just don’t want to write the book. Recently, I enjoyed reading a story about a ghostwriter conference: “Ghostwriters Emerge From the Shadows.”

15. Blogger. I started blogging in 2002. I had a very popular blog called The Reverse Cowgirl. It was one of the internet’s first sex blogs. In 2008, Time.com named it one of the best blogs of the year. These days The Reverse Cowgirl is the name of my Substack newsletter, which I plan to monetize.

16. Project-er. I create independent projects. The Letters Project series was conducted over five years. I shared anonymous letters sent to me from johns, working girls, strip club patrons, cheaters, and porn-watchers. These projects were covered by Salon, Newsweek, and CBC Radio, among other outlets.

17. Talker. I’ve been a speaker on various panels, presented my work at conferences, and read my writing at literary events. Some of these events have been paid; some of them have not. Quite a few of them have connected me with other writers, and that experience has been invaluable.

18. Seller. This is a sector to which I hope to devote more attention moving forward. I have a Gumroad store where I sell a short story that I self-published, signed copies of my memoir, and my consulting services. Gumroad is a very simple, easy platform to use, and I highly recommend it.

19. On camera reporter. Years ago, I was an on camera reporter for Playboy TV’s “Sexcetera.” I did this gig for five years, I got paid well for my time, and I traveled the world. I saw very wild things, and I wrote some of my own scripts, and I got to visit the Playboy Mansion three times. Being on camera taught me a lot about myself. It also boosted my confidence. And for that I have Hef to thank.

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IWMF Instagram Stories Data Baby Takeover

Recently, the International Women’s Media Foundation allowed me to takeover their Instagram Stories to post about my new memoir, DATA BABY: My Life in a Psychological Experiment. The IWMF’s Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists provided grant support for my book. I really enjoyed doing this, as Stories is one of my favorite mediums. You can’t see it here, but the layering enables you to combine images and text and music and little cartoons of people doing things. In other words, the stories come alive.

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Me & Iggy

For my latest post on Forbes, I wrote about how rapper Iggy Azalea is making money on Only Fans.

An excerpt:

Curious to check out Azalea’s project, I signed up for OnlyFans and paid $25 to subscribe to her content stream. At the top of her feed, a small green circle appeared next to her avatar (which was an image of Azalea licking a cherry); next to her OnlyFans handle, it read: “Available now.” Was Azalea actually live on the site? Was I more proximate to her than I had been before handing over my money? It seemed possible.

Read the rest here.

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The Hidden Pervert

My latest newsletter is out. It features the perversions of dead people’s houses. Read it here. Subscribe here.

I’d assumed the place had belonged to an older gay man who had spent his final years contentedly rendering artistic homages to the penis, but when I got to the bedroom, I realized the deceased resident had been an older woman.

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Hire Me!

THREAD: Hire me! I’m looking for full-time, part-time, or consulting work. An employer once described me as a “Swiss Army knife.” I do a lot of things! Here are a few ways that I can add value. *Please RT!* (1/7) pic.twitter.com/UpcIdqPPEO

— Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) August 31, 2020

I wrote a Twitter thread about ways in which you can hire me. Retweet it here.

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The Interview Process

Currently, I’m interviewing for three different roles at three different companies. These are all roles that I applied to on LinkedIn, a platform I’ve previously bashed as being worthless. (Guess I was wrong.) All the roles are at tech companies. All the roles have six-figure salaries. For two of the roles, I’m on the second round of interviews. The roles involve content, strategy, branding, editorial, and / or marketing. It’s unclear what the outcome will be, but I’ll update here.

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The Interrupters

Great piece by Betty Márquez Rosales for The New York Times, featuring “the Interrupters” in Stockton, where “Covid-19 and the issue of police brutality have intertwined with the existing problems of gun violence and unemployment to create fresh ways of ensnaring young Black and Latino men.”

An excerpt:

“Stockton sits in the vast agricultural flatlands of central California, about 80 miles east of San Francisco. It is a working-class community that fell into steep decline after the Great Recession. A universal basic income project, investments in its downtown, and the election of its youngest and first Black mayor have generated optimism in the city. But violence remains a challenge. A 2018 F.B.I. report found that Stockton’s violent crime rate was the highest of 70 California cities with more than 100,000 residents. ‘A lot of folks in our community were in a crisis before the coronavirus crisis,’ Michael Tubbs, Stockton’s mayor, said.”

Read it here.

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The Wannabe Woodsmen

I get maybe 3 of these a week 😒

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Two or three times a week, I get an email from someone somewhere in the world who wants to be a male porn star. I don’t respond. My advice? Pick another profession. The woodsman’s job isn’t an easy one. He must get it up and get it off on command while a semicircle of bored male crew members and the camera watch him. God forbid he should have “wood problems,” as it’s known in the business—he might never work again. On top of the pressure, the pay isn’t that great. In this line of work, his female costar is likely making more than he is.

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Growth

📈

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Things I've Done for Money

In this week’s newsletter, I recount Things I’ve Done for Money, including pretend to be a bottle of pink bismuth, interview male porn stars, and tell executives what to do. I was inspired to write it after updating my Services page, which outlines the consulting work I do. Read my newsletter here. Subscribe here.

An excerpt:

“It made very clear that some men who are very powerful and very wealthy feel better when a beautiful, strong woman is beating the shit out of them. In any case, executive coaching is the art of telling wealthy, powerful men how to do their jobs.”

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I Get Email

i want to become pornstar...... and I'm ready to sell my body for money [redacted] is my number please contact me

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How to Make a Living as a Writer

Over the last year, as the Lawrence Grauman Jr. Post-graduate Fellow at the Investigative Reporting Program at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, I had the opportunity to mentor graduate students in journalism. What question did they ask me most often?

How do you make a living?

For me, the answer was simple. I wasn’t precious about writing. I do one thing well, and nothing else well: I am a very, very good writer. One could say writing is my superpower. Writing is the tool I use to make money. How I use that tool is up to me. There is no one correct way to use the tool. There is you, and the tool, and how you use the tool is your business.

At this point, I’ve been a writer for over two decades. Which is a pretty long time to make a living at something. Along the way, I’ve been many things, but all of them involve writing. I’ve been an investigative journalist, a copywriter, a TV producer, a branding consultant, a publicist, and a speaker, to name a few.

While I know that I can write and well, I have a sort of shrugging attitude as to how I’ve applied that talent.

• In 2010, a communications company hired me to be the voice of Pepto-Bismol on Facebook. If you’re not aware, Pepto on social media is a personality. P&G was unhappy with what this company had done to give Pepto a persona. It was up to me to provide that. So, I did. One of the most popular posts I wrote featured the caption: “I partied so hard my cup fell off.” The photo featured Pepto with its cup next to it.

• In 2009, I wrote and published a 10,000-word investigation of the Great Recession’s impact on the adult movie industry: “They Shoot Porn Stars, Don’t They?” Slate included it in their "Seven Great Stories About Paying for Sex and Being Paid to Have It,” and Longform called it “unflinching and devastating.” Subsequently, an essay I wrote about the project, "The Numbers On Self-Publishing Long-Form Journalism," was taught in “Media, Politics & Power in the Digital Age” at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and the Studio 20 program at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University.

• In 2008, I was an editor for a Time Warner-owned digital vertical for 18-to-34-year-old women. During that tenure, I wrote nearly 1,400 posts, oversaw a team of freelance contributors, and directed the site’s digital outreach program, helping grow the site’s traffic from startup to 4 million unique visitors and 22 million page views a month.

So, who am I? A copywriter? An investigative journalist? An editor? Pretending to be Pepto made $100 an hour and earned me thousands of dollars every month. The porn investigation I published “made” no money but was read by thousands and thousands of people and, according to one reader, “changed the way I think about the business of making pornography.” As an editor, I made over $80,000 a year and learned slideshows are the easiest way to maximize page views. I’ve also developed TV shows, consulted on films, and worked as a branding consultant and a publicist. Was one job better than the other? Was one a waste of my time? Was one meaningful and the rest not? Does it matter? To me, it’s all the same. I’m a writer.

Awhile back, I published a digital short story: “The Tumor.” I had it professionally designed and edited. Every month, people buy copies of it on Gumroad, where consumers can pay they want ($1+) for it. It might be a bizarre fiction inspired by reality and populated by a monster, but it’s also unequivocally mine.

To young journalists, I want to say: Do whatever you want—as long as its yours.

Buy my digital short story, “The Tumor” … “a masterpiece of short fiction.”

What's the Ratio

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."

Girls Write Now

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."

Don't Give Away Your Right To Negotiate For Yourself (Updated)

Nowadays, it’s not uncommon to find a clause like this in a contract for a freelance article.

(*see below for an update)

Image via Magic: The Gathering

1. Read your contract in full before signing it. Don’t skim-read it on autopilot.

2. Do not agree to terms like these. You are giving away your right to negotiate.

3. Explain the clause must be removed from this contract in order for you to sign it.

“10. Film/TV/Audiovisual Works: You hereby grant and assign to [redacted] exclusive decision-making, signing authority, and rights with respect to feature film, motion picture, video game, mobile application, television, episodic programming, and any other audiovisual work based on or derived from the Work.

[Redacted] agrees to make good faith efforts to consult with you before signing any such ancillary rights agreements.

Any monies actually received by [Redacted] upon optioning and/or selling the Work (after deduction of [Redacted]’s actual, out-of-pocket costs and expenses, including, without limitation, agency fees and other fees and expenses related to sale and exploitation thereof) will be distributed as follows:

Fixed Compensation.

i) Option Fees/Purchase Price: 50% to [Redacted], 50% to you 
ii) Royalties and/or Series Sales Bonuses (if any): 50% to [Redacted], 50% to you 
iii) Contributor Writing or Consulting Fee (if any): 100% to you 
iv) Executive Producer, Producer, or Similar Fees for [Redacted] or its employees/contractors (if any): 100% to [Redacted].

Contingent Compensation and box office bonuses (if any): 50% to [Redacted], 50% to You

It’s acknowledged that [Redacted] may have a first look or overall deal with a third party, and any guaranteed fees associated with such an agreement are expressly excluded.

Accounting statements with respect to any ancillary exploitation of rights pursuant to this Section and payments, if any, will be delivered to you within 90 days following receipt by [Redacted] of the actual monies and such statements from third party purchasers or licensees of such rights.

It is agreed and understood that the services you are furnishing under this Agreement are extraordinary, unique, and not replaceable, and that there is no fully adequate remedy at law in the event of your breach of this Agreement, and that in the event of such a breach, [Redacted] shall be entitled to equitable relief by way of injunction or otherwise. You also recognize and confirm that in the event of a breach by [Redacted] of its obligations under this Agreement, the damage, if any, caused to you by [Redacted] is not irreparable or sufficient to entitle you to injunctive or other equitable relief. Consequently, your rights and remedies are limited to the right, if any, to obtain damages at law and you will not have any right in such event to terminate or rescind this Agreement or any of the rights granted by you hereunder or to enjoin or restrain the development, production and exploitation of the rights granted pursuant to this Agreement.”

I requested the clause be removed. The editor declined, describing the contract as “writer-friendly.” I declined to sign.

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

The Hustle of Financial Domination

Awhile back, a friend of mine told me that a publication was looking for a writer to do a story on financial domination. Financial domination is a very curious thing. I wrote a story about it, and I have to say, I'm not sure I understand it. Why would a man give a woman thousands of dollars to tell him that he was worthless? It defies the capacity of my brain to comprehend. In any case, I talked to a handful of women who've done it about the who, what, why, where, when, and how's.

From "The Hustle of Financial Domination":

You can call her Goddess Haven—although, on Twitter, her handle is @Haven_TheGreat—and if you’re what’s known in the curious world of financial domination as a “pay pig,” you’re going to have to offer her a “tribute,” if you want her to even acknowledge that you exist.

In “findom,” as it’s known, it’s all about the money. Or, as Haven puts it in her Twitter profile: “Pay first, learn about me later.”

Buy a copy of my digital short story "The Tumor"! It's been called "a masterpiece."