I get email

Greetings Dear,

my name is miss maway simon, i saw your email contact address during my searching for soul mate, i became interested to make friend with you.Some friends are remembered because of their smile.Some friends are remembered because of their style.But you are remembered because you are so nice to remember.pls i will like to know more about you.

if you can contact me through my private email address here
I really look forward to reading from you soon.
Thanks
Yours Truly friends

[redacted]

Come with me

I wrote a big piece for my Forbes blog about a porn convention I attended.

It's called: "The Porn Convention."

Jenna Jameson’s unattainability, her Barbie-on-a-pedestal unknowability, has been replaced by an independent contractor who works from home and is paying off her college debt with your virtual tips by having virtual sex with you. She’s a bombshell or the girl next door, the naughty teacher or the punk rocker, the MILF or whatever it is that your wife isn’t, that you don’t have, that you can’t get, that brought you right here, right now, rather than watching some stale free clip on an X-rated tube site that stole their content from a porn producer who is on the verge of declaring bankruptcy in a Chatsworth office park, thanks to you.

Read it, won't you?

[READ]

An excerpt

Here's an excerpt from my "cancer novel" in progress. I wrote most of the first 30,000 words while doing chemo. Why, yes, I do experience everything as a competition. Thanks for asking.

The best thing about getting married, she had found, was that after you got married, it was like everything else in your life had never happened, and that was what she had always wanted.

Sometimes she watched the husband sleep at night. His arms up over his head like a little boy. His dark lashes on his pale cheeks. His breathing like he was pretending he was a freight train in his dreams.

The husband was always there.

"You used to live in a tuna can," the husband liked to say. "I found you by the side of the road. I call it the grand experiment."

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What I'm reading

Gay Talese, Thy Neighbor's Wife

Ryan Holiday, Trust Me, I'm Lying

Lydia Netzer, Shine Shine Shine

Damon Brown, Playboy's Greatest Covers

How to make friends in advertising

I got a ton of traffic here recently because of a link from THE BLOG OF TIM FERRIS, thanks to Ryan Holiday, who wrote this new book he wants you to buy.

The post references the now infamous Sasha Grey American Apparel ads that ran on this site many moons ago. Look how racy they are here.

I'm not sure what my point is. Something about how things have changed, or how they haven't.

I still like the ads. I don't think they're shocking.

I think they're cool because they show not enough of too much. 

I get email

Hi.. I read this blog and found an interest in the man that wrote it like maybe I can help him ... Is there anyway you can help me reach him

[IMAGE]

Gang

Mannequins, Chicago, Illinois

This is significant

This is my copy of a new book that features a piece of fiction I wrote. The book is called Significant Objects. It's co-edited by Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn, and it features work by Jonathan Lethem, Curtis Sittenfeld, Neil LaBute, Sheila Heti, Kurt Anderson, Ben Greenman, Lydia Millet, and William Gibson.

Here's how it worked, from the Significant Objects Tumblr:

The project auctioned off thrift-store objects via eBay; for item descriptions, short stories purpose-written by over 200 contributing writers ... were substituted.

The objects, purchased for $1.25 apiece on average, sold for nearly $8,000.00 in total. (Proceeds were distributed to the contributors, and to nonprofit creative writing organizations.)

The story I wrote for it is about a necking team.

Buy it.

Porn is your teacher

My latest on Forbes: "What Your Business Can Learn from the Porn Business."

Here to help, kids!

I took this photo and some of the other photos I'm posting here at a porn convention I went to last weekend. Right now, I'm working on a longer piece on that for my Forbes blog.

I don't think I've done a piece like this since I did "They Shoot Porn Stars, Don't They?"

This time, I went in trying to do too much. I was thinking about the Forbes post, the nonfiction book I'm writing about the adult movie industry for which this will be the first chapter, and taking photographs.

I should've just thrown that all out the window when I walked in and followed my porn intuition. That's what serves me best in situations like this.

Will it play in Peoria?

That's a line from this piece I'm doing now. 

[READ]

Seesaw

 Porn convention, Chicago, Illinois

Buy this book

Today is the publication day of my awesome friend Lydia Netzer's terrific novel: Shine Shine Shine.

Buy it immediately.

It's already critically acclaimed, having scored a rave from Janet Maslin in the New York Times: "it is so full of oddities that no simple summary will do it justice."

It has something for everyone: a bald woman, a lost astronaut, math equations, robots, strange children, and time travel.

Tonight, you can attend the book's virtual launch party from the comfort of your very own home. Lydia's got the info here. I will be there.

It took Lydia ten years to write it, so get a copy, dammit.

I get email

Hello sir i want to be a porn star so i want to make a porn movie.
I m from dehli, india
So plz reply as soon as possible thnks

Scanning

"How Porn Went from Boom to Bust" is like a preface for the story I'll be working on this weekend. Definitely stay tuned there for more to come.

Yesterday, I got scanned by this machine. You put your arms in the holders, and then they feed you in and out of the doughnut.

At the end, you lie there while a nurse dabs ink onto you and then pushes a needle in real quick.

"This is like a prison tattoo, right?" I asked.

The nurse laughed.

[READ]

I get email

Hello Susana am Joshua and I have been reading through your articles but have not accessed any platform that can help me get a job online. any help please?

[IMAGE]

How to be a unicorn

I've always been the master of self-reinvention.

It's gotten a bit harder lately, because I've gotten older, because a cat only has so many lives, and because the last few months have left me tired.

But here I go again.

One thing I would like to do is finally write the definitive nonfiction book about the adult movie industry. I've been covering the industry for 15 years, from boom to bust, and if I don't write that book, no one will, or at least not as well.

I'm chronicling that journey on my Forbes blog.

In the last several months, I'd been writing a lot of content on my Forbes blog that eventually made my stomach turn. Work advice. Self-help. "How to Whatever."

People who dole out advice are those most in need of it.

I think the last straw was when I was considering writing a post called "How to Be a Unicorn." It made my skin crawl. I mean, really? Unicorns? How far the mighty have fallen.

Probably the way to be a unicorn is by acting like one, not by coughing up crap that lets people believe that by doing nothing, that by reading about doing something, they are doing anything at all.

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All porn links, all the time

Read this -- my latest on Forbes -- if you want to read about porn.

This morning, I had someone stick some radioactive dye in me. Then they stuck me in a machine.

When the machine was done, the woman announced, "I'm going to check your images." Then she walked out of the room.

The bed I was lying on wasn't fully out of the machine, so after she walked out, I kept sliding out on this bed. Which wouldn't have been a problem. Except the wires connected to the electrodes stuck to my chest got caught on something.

As I rolled out, the heart monitor got disconnected, and I flatlined.

[IMAGE]

The return of journalism sausage

A series I was doing on my Forbes blog last year is back. It's called "How Your Journalism Sausage Gets Made," and while it started out as one thing, I've transformed it into something else.

Find out my new focus in "How Your Journalism Sausage Gets Made, Part 13: Starting Over."

The man with the legs

There was an old guy riding a bike pulling a cart at the Fourth of July parade. In the cart, there was a very old merry-go-round horse and a pair of upside down mannequin legs with a giant plastic fly on the crotch and a giant plastic cricket on the inner-thigh.

I asked the guy what he had going on there.

"This is my float," he said.

She shining

My pal Lydia Netzer has a new novel coming out, and it just got a rave review from Janet Maslin in the New York Times.

“Shine Shine Shine” is able to draw readers into its tender, not-quite-human scheme of things because Ms. Netzer treats this as the only reasonable way to look at the world. “Sunny had come up bald from the cradle, and stayed bald throughout her life,” she writes unfussily. “She had been born at some point, and at some point in the future she would die. What happened in between was one long, hairless episode.” 

Buy it now before everyone else does.

Thongs

Thongs, Chicago, Illinois

No advice

I think "Miss Advised" is one of the saddest shows on TV. I was auditioned for it, and I guess I used to be one of those sex writer/relationship advice types of people, sort of, so I have a strange, special interest in it.

Since I got married late last year, I think I feel especially bad for these women. I would hate to have had a crew of cameras following me through my blundering dating. The thing you see most clearly is how miserable they are. Maybe so miserable that The One wouldn't make a difference, but sometimes I think, watching the show, that a program produced by Ashley Tisdale is a brutal meditation on how terrible aloneness really is.

They try too hard, they talk too much, they want to be funny and are not. They're lost but claim they're not, they obsess about men but can't land one, they don't know what to do but are willing to go public to show the depths of how sad they really are.

I get email

Hey Susannah, regarding your article on working, from home, I was wondering what your thoughts are on whether I should consider taking my cousin's opinion to take one of those work from home jobs, I graduated high school last year, I never actually worked when I was in high school, but recently at her place, she was basically just talking to me about it, so I can get a job. So I am just wondering if I do this, should I put this on a resume, or would it look ridiculous. And would it look like a good first job, or should I just seek a regular job at like McDonalds, Best Buy, etc. By the way I just turned 20 a few months ago, and my cousin's in her 40's. She works for this company: [redacted], I think the company name is [redacted].

Regards,

[redacted]