OrgasmQuest founder Crista Anne is raising money for her custody battle

Remember Crista Anne and her OrgasmQuest?



Well, now she's raising money via Rally to hire a lawyer to fight for custody of her kids along wit her husband, whose ex sounds like a horrible person. Here's the beginning of their story:

Two and a half years ago, my abusive ex left us in a field in NY with our newborn baby and a two year old, cancelled our credit cards, took off for VA in the family vehicle, kidnapping our other two children and hiding them away for over a month before she “let” me see them, based on the fact that I told her I was no longer willing to stand for her continued threats and beatings.

The full story is horrific, and there's more on Crista's blog. If you can help, please do.

Writers, you will always be your own best advocate

The biggest lesson I've learned since getting laid off in October 2011, and most especially in the last year or so, is that I am always my own best advocate. No editor, publisher, agent or anyone else, no matter how wonderful they may be, will ever be you. That's really the bottom line, and it's in your best interests to always be looking out for your bottom line. Case in point: my male and female nudity column from last week got cut from the print edition of Philadelphia City Paper due to space considerations. It didn't occur to me to ask until it was too late to have them put a line in the paper saying readers could find my column on the website, but I've now done so in the event that happens again.

It's not that I would have gotten paid more for that or that it truly matters in the long-term, but the more readers, the broader my reach, the more my work is being seen and that can potentially lead to future work and more people who are familiar with me. Otherwise someone night have think my column had ended (as they will find out this week, it hasn't). So that's one example. Another is me contacting publications and asking them to credit my OrgasmQuest column and link to it. So far everyone I've asked has said yes, and the reason I do that is both because I know the powers that be care about readership, but even more, because I broke that story. Generally, online, most places will link to the source of a story, as Jezebel and Bustle did, including some of my words along with the basics of what's going on. Again, that isn't necessarily in my job description as a sex columnist, but for me it's important.

I always scour my books' Amazon listings to make sure things like the correct book cover, book description and other identifying information are included, and when they're not, I advocate to get them changed. This isn't so much because I don't think people will by the book if there's one stray mistake, but those listings represent me and my name and brand and I want them to be as accurate as possible. Of course, you have to balance these sorts of things with earning a living. Even though I have Google alerts on my name and variations of it and I do try my best to pay attention to what's going on related to my work, I'm sure I miss plenty of things. That's okay too.

But I fully believe that nobody else will be watching out for you the way you will be, and rather than just sulking that something's wrong, I see part of my job in the broader sense as working to fix those things. To me it's all part of what your goals are for your work as a writer and how you go about building that brand, something we will be discussing more of in my upcoming Erotica 101 and Sex Writing 101 classes (I'm working on getting more online classes in the mix after March!), because I think they are part of what help you further your career goals. I learned a ton about how to promote myself over the course of promoting readings, starting with the very first one I organized, a Best Lesbian Erotica 2001 reading at Bluestockings, through the five years of In The Flesh Reading Series in New York and now through assorted writing workshops and readings. All of that is information I use pretty much every day to make sure that I'm doing myself justice, that the pieces I spend time on are read by as many people as possible. That's how I think of it, and reading The Desire Map: A Guide to Creating Goals with Soul by Danielle LaPorte has helped me get clear on why I do what I do and what my mission is with it. I have emails drafted to people I respect about a story that will run tonight that I think is an important one, not because I wrote it, but because the whole reason I did is that I think it's an important feminist sexuality issue that we should be paying attention to. LaPorte has helped me understand that in advocating for myself, I'm also advocating for what I'm putting out into the world. If I wasn't proud of that, all this would be pointless.

The Sex Writing Career Advice I Learned from Amanda Palmer's book The Art of Asking

Remember my OrgasmQuest column, aka, my most-read column for Philadelphia City Paper? What I thought was my little alt weekly column has since blown up all over the internet, with this appearance by Crista Anne on Dr. Drew's show capping it off last week (this is a snippet of a longer segment):



And, today, her own It Happened To Me essay at xoJane.

At Thought Catalog, I wrote about my new approach to shameless self promotion and how it helped kick off the column going viral, why I consider it now a vital part of my sex columnist and freelance writing job, and how The Art of Asking by Amanda Palmer helped guide me.

Can orgasm cure depression? Mental health, masturbation and an Orgasm Quest in this week's Philadelphia City Paper sex column

Mental health is a topic that's very important to me, so I knew I wanted to write about the ways it intersects with sexuality and in this week's Philadelphia City Paper sex column, "Cheering for a mom who's on an orgasm quest", I did. It's also about the vital importance of masturbation to sanity and what masturbation can offer that partner sex can't and what the link is between sex and mental health.



If you like the column, please pass it on, and if you have suggestions for future columns, please let me know at rachelkb at gmail.com with "City Paper" in the subject line.

So far I've covered slut shaming, campus sex ed, the best time to get it on, an erotic salon, couples' sex toys, pegging, blowjobs, sex gratitude, talking dirty, porn censorship, Catholic virginity, lube, spanking, swinging and now, mental health. The beauty/struggle of a weekly column is there's a new topic every week so I have to stay on my toes and plan ahead. I also have been forced to reign in my instinct to talk to everyone who's ever so much as thought about a given subject because my word count is short short short, so I have to focus more on personal stories, and that's been a gift to my working process as well.

This week I got a happy surprise that free paper Metro picked up my spanking column. It was ironic because that is the one out of all of them I struggled the most over. Like, couldn't sleep, would wake up in a panic, put it off and off, almost scrapped it to write about a different topic. Isn't that always the way? I'm trying to keep that in mind these days when writing is a challenge, which is far more often than I'd like.