Talk:Memoirs of a Cam-Girl - PART 1: Initial Transcripts/@comment-24966092-20150606214641/@comment-5774809-20151217053705

The mask is actually a patchwork of matte-black gaffing tape shaped into a rough oval and then I cut the strap off an old hockey mask and stapled it to the back.

As for the "he's coming" double entendre, it was intended to make you laugh. Well, I had actually intended for more of an uneasy chuckle than laugh per say, which is why it only shows up during the most fucked-up moments.

So, t his next part might actually explain a lot and I'm sharing it with you specifically because of how much this story seemed to irk you:

When I wrote the first draft of Cam Girl, I was under the impression that no one outside of my weekly Creative Writing workshop would ever read it. And that's because it started out as homework. The workshop assigment for that week had been to "write a story that defies genre" which is of course impossible, but that's sort of the point. Anyway, that's why Cam-Girl's tone seems downright schitzophrenic at times.

Several other writers at the workshop had asked me to email them the story because they'd enjoyed it that much and said they wanted to read it again (which probably baffled me even more than it did you.) Then one of them suggested that I posted the story on Reddit, which I was pretty sure was the worst idea ever, but it turned out people liked it on there too. Then Thought Catalog approached me about publishing it.

Which was awesome; don't get me wrong. But the truth is that I can sympathize with your frustration. I spent YEARS writing horror stories that I'd spent weeks, sometimes months, pondering and researching and plotting and RE-plotting and I never had any problem showing those stories to people because I specifically geared them for human consumption. And though they usually always recieved positive comments, no one really seemed to care.

Then I spend four days churning out an insane tale about cam-girls and penis-monsters that uses tropes like the Evolution of Dance dance uses arm-gestures and suddenly I'm recieving multiple offers to write horror stories for a living. I mean seriously, WTF?

That said, I'm still really proud of the story and how much it's meant to some people. And that's the craziest part: almost everyone who reads it has some form of extreme reaction to it. A lot of people absolutely love it (I had a smoking-hot 28 year-old copyright attorney fly from Boston to New Orleans just to spend the weekend with me because she loved the story THAT MUCH.) But then the people who hate it seem to REALLY FUCKING HATE IT. I'm not sure what that means exactly but I thought, for being a trooper and reading through all four chapters when you didn't even enjoy the first one, that you deserved an explanation.