Friday night was the Center for Sex and Culture, run by the one and only Dr. Carol Queen.  It was Sex Worker Literati Night   It was kind of a preview from the anthology that we just sold to Soft Skull Press called Ho’s, Hookers, Callgirls and Rentboys: Prostitutes and Sex Workers Writing on Life, Love, Money, and Yes, Sex.  It was a fantastic lineup.  DR. CAROL QUEEN sexy ho, DAVID HENRY STERRY golf ho, MELISSA GIRA GRANT techno ho, RJ MARTIN badass and co-editor ho, LORELEI LEE absolutely fabulous ho, SCOTT UPPER hunky ho, CARLA CRANDALL heart o’ gold ho, SAM FORMO sassy ho, ALVIN ORLOFF fashion ho.  Most of whom are in the anthology.  It was so great to get to watch all these amazing writers perform after having been reading their words for several years now.   It gave me such hope for this book.  To see  the book come to life, right before my eyes.  It was such a diverse evening.  So many different colors of so many different rainbows.  Funny, sad, tragic, inspiring.  I’m really going to mount a Sex Worker Literati tour with this new book, this anthology.  I want to do it at colleges and universities.  In bars and nightclubs.  Again, we drew a big crowd, without one scrap of advertising.  Nothing.  And I feel like this is also my job as a writer.  To be planting the seeds for the promotion of my next book, even as I’m actively promoting the one that just came out.

Saturday morning, 10 a.m., October 18, Barnes & Noble Jack London Square Oakland.  I was definitely bleary for this one.  Luckily I got there early enough so I could have a big breakfast.  That was essential.  The breakfast itself was not that good.  But it was  so good just to eat.  Because I was so hungry.  That’s what it’s like to be on tour.  Sometimes even a mediocre meal when it’s really needed, becomes magically wonderful thing.  I’m not saying I advocate always eating expedient mediocre food on the road.  Au contraire.  I learned about this from Arielle.  Only one on tour with Putting Your Passion Into Print, every city we went to, she ferreted out the best restaurant, and we went to eat there.  We had some mind blowing, transcendent, life-changing meals.  Meals that make you believe in God. 

So this event in Oakland was in conjunction with the California writers club.  Alan Black had worked at the Edinburgh Castle the night before until three o’clock in the morning.  He was definitely at half mast and massively unshaven when he showed up, sucking down caffeine, his magnificent Scottish growl filled with even more gravel and broken glass.  But he showed up.  On time.  And gave a fantastic performance.  This is the mark of a true professional.  Someone who can get up sleep-deprived, bleary-eyed, feeling like cold shite, and rise to the occasion.  I got a whole new respect for Alan Black that morning at Jack London Square Barnes & Noble in Oakland.

Besides the community relations manager Barbara, I, at 51, was the oldest person in the room by 20 years.  Or so it seemed.  There were probably 20 writers in that room.  And every single one of them bought a book.  In fact, I sold out.  Five people came up to me and asked me to buy a copy of Master of Ceremonies and have me sign it, but I couldn’t because there were no more copies left.  Barbara, community relations manager, was shocked: “We never get people to come to events here,” she said. And again, this is without any publicity.  Imagine if we’d actually been able to get the word out. Which began just proves how many people in America want to write books in general, and books about themselves specifically.

Then I went and did the weirdest interview of my life.  I took the BART into the mission.  Saturday afternoon.  It was teeming with life.  Mexican mamacitas, trendy white people in colored Mohawks, trendy black people in tight pants, lipstick lesbians and slick haired chollo homeboys.  I finally got to the studio, actually it was a storefront.  With a couple of microphones in the console in a glass in room in the back.  Pirate Cat Radio.  Melinda Adams, DJ and activist extraordinaire, was the host.  And with me was Lady Monster, who I had shared a bill with once before at Torchlight, the fandamntastic storytelling event put together and hosted by the lovely and talented Beth Lisick and Arlene Klatt.  Pirate Cat is an independent radio station.  They broadcast to San Francisco, part of Los Angeles, and Berlin.  Go figure.  It’s a show about sexual liberation I guess, with really cool music, very sex worker friendly.  But they’re not really on the grid.  Which means two things.  You can say anything you want.  And no one is going to be listening.  I had a blast.  Just going off.  At 1 point I was talking about the media, and suddenly I was saying, Did you know that Barak Obama used to be a sex worker?  Melinda shot me a look like, Is that true?  I totally got her.  But I think I made my point.  I have a link somewhere.  I need to edit the thing.  Because it’s very long.  One more thing on my to do list.

Monday night, was Kepler’s, in Menlo Park, by Palo Alto.  Again, we got a great crowd.  Again Alan Black and Beth Lisick shone like the stars they are.  During the Q&A, there was one woman in the crowd who seemed like she wanted to pick a fight.  You occasionally get people like this at an event.  After we had all finished reading, her hand shot up and she said in this stern scolding way, “What do you want us to learn from your memoirs?  I mean, you want us to learn something from your memoirs Don’t you?  What is it I’m going to learn from reading your memoir?”  Alan Black, impish devil may care contrarian Scottish glint gleam in his eye, leaned forward and said in heavy growly full throated brogue, “I don’t want you to learn anything from my memoir.”  The way he said it, this great rhythmic deadpan, totally lit a fire under the crowd, and they ignited in laughter.  And I laughed perhaps the loudest of anyone.  Beth Lisick said that she didn’t write her memoir thinking that she wanted someone to learn something from it.  She wanted to tell her story.  To entertain people.  And you could see, this agitated lady was getting more and more agitated.  She wasn’t getting what she wanted.  But of course me, being the big kiss ass, since it was my event, and I want to sell books, I tried to give her what she wanted.  And in truth, I did learn alot from writing my story.  Not that I sat and thought, Well I want my reader to learn great valuable lessons about life, while I was actually writing the thing.  But in the end it did prove very instructive.  For me.  But my goal was to tell my story exactly as I remember it, with as much economy and style and sadness and humor and truth as I possibly could.  But Agitated Lady just kept getting more and more upset.  She finally got up with a tut and a huge disapproving sigh, practically stomping her little feet, and walked right out.  Like she was really showing us.  It was weird.  It was definitely something we laughed about later over drinks.  But again, a grand time was had by all (except Agitated Lady).  And we sold a bunch of books.

The next day was Lyon’s Books in Chico California, set up by my amazing friend Susan Wooldridge, of poemcrazy fame. It was great to take a road trip with Alan Black, as Chico is about two hours away from the Bay Area.  You get to know somebody in a very different way when you take a trip in a car with them.  I’ve always said that no one should get married until they get in the car and drive all the way across the country with their betrothed.  That’s when you really find out if your compatible with somebody.  That’s when it gets up close and personal.  And we had to go early, to do an interview on Public Radio at KCHO, with Nancy Wiegman.   She’s from the south and has that wonderful southern warmness, I spent large chunks of my life in the Deep South, and I do find it quite comforting, real genuine Southern Charm.  It was very easy to talk to her.  She made it very easy.  Very graceful socially.  And it was great to banter with Alan.  I’m really looking forward to listening to that interview.  Again, this is the interesting thing about going on tour.  I couldn’t get on any radio in San Francisco.  Or Berkeley.  Or Oakland.  Or Menlo Park.  When we go to Chico, we get on Public Radio.  

Again, we had a great crowd.  I actually love going to Chico to do events.  I used to think it was just a hick town, full of small-town rubes.  But I was so wrong.  This is the second event I’ve done there, and each one has been fantastically attended, full of smart, interesting, articulate, book readers.  And lots of writers too.  So again, we had a fantastic event.  Sold lots of books.  Then Alan Black and I roadtripped back to the Bay Area.  Talked about his crazy family.  Talk about my crazy family.  We came of age during the same period, I understand his people, but he understands mine.  He’s just a funny, well read thinker whose brain works different than everybody else.  I just love hanging out with the guy, and I really really enjoyed getting to know him more.  I wish we lived closer together.  This is one of my goals in the next year.  To make more friends where I live.  Good luck right? 

Gliding out of Chico time went by so fast.  Suddenly, there it was, the spectacular Bay Area, with the skyline of San Francisco, whipping over the Bay Bridge,  with the Golden Gate lit up a cross the moon shining water.  I just love that place.  And Alan was so nice.  He took me all the way home.  He didn’t have to do that.  But that’s the kind of person he is.  Very generous.  Warmhearted.  And yet still salty and brutally sarcastic.  And he wouldn’t let me pay for gas or anything.  Didn’t try to take advantage of me when he dropped me off at my hotel.  He is a cheap date a true gentleman.

The last stop on the tour was San Francisco State University.  Alice LaPlante, who is an amazing teacher and writer, and the person who hooked us up to teach Putting Your Passion Into Printed at Stanford, was the instructor.  We went out to an Indian dinner beforehand, with some of her graduate students, and the other guy who was speaking that night in front of the class, which is what I was doing.  He was a screenwriter.  He was a very interesting, thoughtful, humble fellow.  And he has sold a lot of scripts.  I was totally impressed.  And yet, not one of his scripts is ever been made into a movie.  That’s why I stopped being a screenwriter.  I found it so ridiculously hard to get any of my scripts turned into movies.  Of course that’s because most of them sucked.  It’s embarrassing to look back at them now.  I was trying to write something I thought would be popular.  Rather than something that I was passionate about, that was totally unique to me, that was brave and smart and unapologetic.  I found out how to do all that stuff when I started writing books.  There were over 200,000 books published last year.  And about 400 movies I got distribution.  Do the math.  But I love the movie so much.  I want to figure out in this next year, I can start working with moving pictures in a meaningful way.

It always fascinates me to be around writers who are in the academic world. They just have no understanding of the actual business of publishing, the actual making and selling of books in the marketplace.  Their world is so small.   And that environment discourages writers from going out into the world.  It manifests in this kind of myopic view of writing.  Where the idea of making money is almost a dirty thing.  It’s very puzzling to me.  Writers go to these programs to get trained.  But they get no training in how to make money at the craft.  It would be like going to plumbing school and distaining making a living as a plumber.  Just doesn’t make sense to me.  Mind you, many of these people are very smart.  Very learned.  Well read.  Articulate.  Full of ideas, willing to listen.  But they have no idea how to hustle.  This is where I feel lucky to have been trained as an industrial sex technician.  I learned how hostile.  In any business if you can hustle, you can always make a buck.  And by hustle I mean, figure out how to find out where the money is, figure out what you have to do to get it.

I did an experiment when I presented.  I divided the world of books, the commercial world of books I should say, into all these categories.  The hole in the market.  What your passion is.  The competition.  The audience.  I tried to explain the process of figuring out how to take the things you love in life and make money of constructing a book around these passions.  I don’t know if I was successful.  I think it was entertaining.  I did read some from my book.  That was fun.  I feel like I’ve finally got a great rhythm for the piece I was reading, after having done it so many times now.   That is very gratifying and satisfying. 

I’m just afraid I may have overwhelmed these students, because they didn’t really ask very many questions.  I got this terrible feeling that many of them already felt beaten down by the prospect of going out and hustling their writing.  Of packaging themselves and their manuscripts in a way that would fill a hole in the marketplace.  Trying to get an agent.  Promoting their book.  Maybe I’m wrong.   Maybe that’s just me projecting.  But they seemed like a discouraged group.  By the way, this class for writers who are undergraduates who are just about to graduate.  When Alice asked how many thought they would make a living as a writer, almost none raised their hands.  When she asked how many wanted to, almost all of them raised their hands.  So already be gap between achieving a dream and failure seemed insurmountable to many of these 21-year-olds.  Made me sad.  I also wrote down all the books I’ve sold in the last seven years.  11 books.  I put how much I got for each of them next to the book.  I just wanted them to see what was possible.  Afterwards, several student writers came up to me very enthusiastically, and said how inspired they were.  So that was nice.  I did not sell one single book.  But I did have a very good time.

Now, all this while, I have been developing these two short pieces.  One about voting by Memoir, and the other about the economic collapse and my relationship to it vis-à-vis drug addiction and Chippendales and my book.  I was doing this because I was getting so little love from anybody in the media.  All anyone could focus on was the economic collapse and the presidential race.  I mean, in truth, that’s all I could really think about a certain way.  So I was trying to figure out a way to spin these things so is that they related to my book.  I had done a piece for Public Radio in San Francisco for a show called Perspectives with Mark Trautwein, who has proven to be an absolute mensch.  They are two-minute pieces that you record, they get played on Public Radio, been put in the archive.  So I called and called and e-mailed and e-mailed Mark, because he’s a very busy guy, especially so at this time in history.  I sent him my piece.  And finally, he got back to me.  He really liked it.  But he said it was way too long.  That he didn’t think I could cut it down.  Well, he didn’t quite realize who he was talking to.  I edited the shit out of the piece.  Kept polishing cutting buffing shaving away around the edges.  Until finally, I got it to be exactly 2 minutes.  Having been a voiceover artist for so many years I seem to have this internal clock.  As I learn how to do a piece of copy, I begin to understand exactly how long it is.  I can make it exactly 30 seconds.  Or exactly 28 seconds.  Or whatever.  It’s a strange talent, or skill, or gift.  I don’t really get to use it in real life very often.  But as a voiceover artists, naturally, it is invaluable. 

Remember, I was only in town for a few more days when I finally got Mark to read the piece.  So I got the revised version back to him posthaste.  I did it for him over the phone.  And he gave me the thumbs up.  So I got to record at KQED, which is public broadcasting system’s fortress in San Francisco. 

I must say I love this process.  Polishing on a piece until you just can’t take one more single word out of it.  It’s a wonderful intellectual exercise that really excites me.  And then after having worked on it for so long, going in silent sanctuary of the glass wall.  Putting on the headphones.  Adjusting the microphone.  The anticipation.  Your heart rate goes up.  The adrenaline glands start kicking in, and the excitement of performance takes over.  But there’s a freedom also because you’re all alone, and you know you get to do it as many times as you want to get it right.  So even as your pulses races, there is a Zen calm at the core of it all.  Then The technician does his thing and it gives you the signal and BOOM! you enter the Zone and you can hear all the words coming back into your ears your voice fills the whole world and if you’re lucky to get swept away by the words and they flow through you and you are connected to the life force that flows through all living things.  I really enjoyed being back in the recording studio.  I did love being a voiceover actor.  I’ve always said, if the best part-time job in America.  Again, this craft, this ability to spin these words in certain rhythms, racehorsing through certain parts, and then slowing down at just the right moment then punching a word at the end of a sentence.  But as I think about it, and again this is why I like writing stuff down, I enjoy performing my own writing as a voice artist much more than I ever did doing other people’s stupid lame commercials.  Even doing animation voices was not nearly as fun as getting to record my own stuff.  I just love it.  I feel like this is what I was born to do.  So I had a fantastic time recording this piece, it’s down below.  You can listen to it if you want.

I also was trying frantically to get hold of Alan Farley, who works at another public radio station, KALW.  He had me on when Chicken came out.  Again, I e-mailed and called over and over again.  I finally got him.  And he agreed.  So then I did an interview with him.  It was really fun.  He is a very skillful interviewer.  He knows just when to step in.  And just when to shut up.  He has a very light touch.  Very sensitive to rhythm and nuance.  It’s an art.  Not many people are good at it.  Interviewing someone.  But I had a blast with Alan Farley.

The only thing that I cansay bad about this tour, is that I missed my daughter Olive so much it actually hurt physically.  Starting in my heart, and radiating out from my whole body.  I feel this blood connection with Olive.  It’s unlike anything I’ve ever experienced before in my life.  It’s hard for me to understand how my own father could’ve walked out on his four children.  How for all these years he’s been unable or unwilling to maintain a connection with his blood.  It baffles me.  It makes me sad.

Again, this is why I like writing all this stuff down.  I find it so liberating.  To get to  meditate on who I am, who I was, where I came from, where I want to go, and who I want to be.  This is what writing down all this stuff does for me.

I had an absolutely fantastic time on my tour.  I actually managed to get a bunch of media.  To sell a bunch of books.  This system that Arielle and I described in Putting Your Passion Into Print, it really works.  It’s very very hard work.  But if you apply these principles on a daily basis, that’s the key, on a daily basis, that’s where I think so many people make their mistake, they do a bunch of work when they get inspired.  But then nothing happens and they kind of give up.  Move on to something else.  But it doesn’t happen right away.  It took me years to develop these contacts.  It took me years to learn how to write this book.   Took me years to develop the skills to be able to read something I wrote effectively on the radio.  It took so much persistence and perseverance and follow-up to set all these events, to get these fantastic writers to perform with me, to get interviewed on the radio. 

Finally, I was able to take the memoir and economic collapse pieces, and with the help of Laura Schenone, great friend and neighbor, and Pamela Redmond Satran, of Montclair Editors and Writers, a fantastic organization which has been very welcoming to me ever since I moved from California to New Jersey, get them published on the Huffington Post.  Again, the links are down below.

I really really loved being on tour.  But there’s no place like home.  There’s no place like home.  There’s no place like home.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-henry-sterry/dj-vu-all-over-again_b_137599.html

http://www.kqed.org/epArchive/R810270737

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/david-henry-sterry/truth-or-fiction-voting-b_b_139053.html