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Lusty Lady

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Monday, January 15, 2007

My breasts for sale

Well, not really, though if there were an easy way to make money off my tits, I'd be all ears, though I'd much rather make money off my writing. To that end, I've taken out an ad at the fabulous Viviane's Sex Carnival using a photo of me topless. It's one of the few of me topless that I actually like.

It's funny because I am SO much more of a voyeur than an exhibitionist, and for our sequel to Caught Looking I'm writing a story that may wind up under a pseudonym that's about something that happened to me but from the other person's point of view. For me, kindof like writing in the second person, that shift in perspective frees me up to be really dirty. Because it was really dirty and totally hot, in ways that I don't know if I could write about here or anywhere in the first person and not be misunderstood. Part of why I envy so many of the bloggers and authors I read is that they can easily own up to their complexity and seemingly not have to worry about any consequences. Or just take those risks. But I don't know that I can. Some people would find the idea of putting topless photos or even nude ones online risky as well, but to me, that's different. Once the photo exists, on some level, that ceases to be "me." It's a photo of me, yes, but the person I am today may be totally different from who I was when I took those photos.

I guess the challenge for me, especially as a single woman, is to find people, both friends and otherwise, who get the difference, who get the separation, who get the need to show off some things and to keep some things private. Who get that there is so much more going on inside me than I'll ever be able to or want to write down, even though I have that urge, almost always, to put some words down to help make sense of things. When I have weekends like I did this past one, when I look forward to Monday because it means forcing myself out of the house, where I just sleep and sleep and sleep because that's easier than getting up and facing all the feelings of doubt and rejection and lethargy, well, it makes me realize that trying to whore out some book I edited is easy compared to so many other things.

In some ways I'm really glad to be free of the awful baggage and stigma that comes with being a "sex columnist." Not that I would've quit or would've wanted it to end this way or thought I might feel in any way freed by it, but still. I think I always have at the back of my mind that everything will fall apart, I'll be jobless, homeless, ruined, basically. I kinda did that already once, going into that massive debt, flunking out of law school, even before that, becoming this utterly undesirable job candidate, and ever since hitting that low, I've been very slowly rising out of that. It's taught me things I probably couldn't have learned barreling through grad school at 20 years old and hoping to figure out where to land.

Right now, even as I'm actively seeking out new gigs which will likely center around sex writing, I'm also hoping that whatever comes next broadens me as a writer, like the Voice column did but without getting so attached to that role. Because that's all it was for me in the end, a role, one I clearly clung to too tightly because the separate feels weird. It felt weird to have to change my bios in my new books to say "wrote" instead of "writes." It feels weird to have notebook pages filled with dates and topics that are now dead ends, half-formed ideas that may never get any further than those jotted title scribbles. And yet, I feel kindof calm. Not because everyone has told me I'm much better off without all that nonsense, but because maybe it's time I got on with my life and figured out what I'm meant to be doing and writing. I think it's easy to get and stay in ruts, especially for me, and the biggest thing I want is the one that the more I chase it, the farther away it seems. So I will have to balance living in the day-to-day reality with figuring out how to get to where I want to be. And if in the process I'm trying to also figure out how to make a little money at this madness that is the book publishing industry, so be it.

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