My essay on Kim Kardashian West's White House meeting with Trump and slut-shaming

This is my month of Medium, where I aim to post 30 essays or articles, which averages out to once a day. I can't commit to once a day because I'll be in Berlin for part of the trip and attempting to be offline, but I'm pretty sure I can do 30, especially given all the ideas floating around in my mind. Today's post is about Kim Kardashian's recent White House visit to meet with President Trump about prison reform. Specifically, it's about all the people who slut-shame her and act like because she's a "porn star" she can't have opinions. If you like the piece, please consider sharing and/or clapping (holding down the hands button at the left of the essay for 1-50 times), which helps it get viewed by more people.



Also, to be forthright about my writing rejections, this essay got three of them from the places I submitted it to starting Thursday morning around six a.m. Two rejections via email, one from an editor I'd never worked with and one from an editor I have, both asking me to pitch again. The third outlet I didn't get a response from, but I submitted it as a pitch late Thursday, around five p.m., after the first rejection, and said I'd shop it around if I didn't hear back by Friday at 5 p.m. So then I decided to post it on Medium since its timeliness is waning.

My Rolling Stone article on erotica writers and publishers resisting Trump

I wrote about anti-Trump political erotica for Rolling Stone, talking to erotic writers and publishers including Chuck Tingle, Go Deeper Press, Coming Together and the writers behind Kickstarter funded anthology NASTY: Fetish Fights Back, whose content and motivations are explicitly about resisting our new administration and its policies. Their books benefit organizations lie the ACLU, Planned Parenthood and MoveOn. If you like the article, I'd appreciate if you'd share it.

I wrote about my partner not telling me who they're voting for

I'm a little late getting this posted (I do post all relevant links on Twitter and Facebook), but I wrote a piece for the wonderful DAME (I highly recommend bookmarking the site) about how it feels to be supporting Hillary Clinton but my partner not wanting to tell me who he's voting for for president, which could be Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, a third party candidate, a write in candidate, or nobody. I miss writing essays and have been trying to carve out time to write more of them, but this is a start.



On the career front, I'm mostly a copywriter these days, and I'm proud of learning a new skill/career path at 40, but I don't want to give up "me" writing entirely, though the steady paycheck thing more than makes up for any downsides. It's a daily challenge to figure out what's feasible in terms of managing my time, what's worthwhile financially, what matters to me. I'm catching up on pieces that have fallen by the wayside so I can make room for new ones. I'm also getting ready for what I hope is my biggest, best and most successful book launch ever (December 13th is the big day!). Though my books, thankfully, have long legs and tend to sell even years after their release, that first release month is so vital and I dread messing it up. So that's what I'm up to, and trying to make writing from the heart something I practice more often. I'll be at writing conference BinderCon in New York this weekend, so if you're there, say hello, and if you're interested in this fabulous event for women and gender nonconforming writers, check it out. They also hold an L.A. version in March. I'll be doing something I've never done before, a theme for me of this year: pitching editors in person.

If you haven't watched Baratunde Thurston's Trump response video, here it is

And see his accompanying blog post and here's a Q&A at Village Voice Runnin' Scared blog.