Don’t Write Alone | Columns

How’s the Writing Going, Mike Albo?

“It’s taken me fifty-three years to be able to understand how to say what I want, or say who I am, or say what I believe.”

This is a column called How’s the Writing Going? It’s the question no writer wants to be asked—but which every writer wants to ask others. We want to know that other people are struggling the same way we are or to learn other writers’ hacks and antidotes for blocks and other challenges.

Here I chat with Mike Albo about the writing hustle, being a Gen X writer, and his most recent projects.

Mike Albo’s new novel, Another Dimension of Us, arrives January 2023 from Penguin Workshop. He is the author of Hornito (HarperCollins), considered one of the 50 Essential Works of LGBT Fiction by Flavorwire, and The Underminer: The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life (Bloomsbury USA, cowritten with Virginia Heffernan). His other works include the ebooks The Junket and Spermhood: Diary of a Donor. He has written for The New Yorker, New York Magazine, GQ, TED, Elle Decor, Southern Living, AARP, and numerous other magazines and websites. He was the Critical Shopper columnist for The New York Times. He has performed nine solo shows and comedy shows across the US, Canada, the UK, and Europe. His solo shows include “Spermhood: Diary of a Donor” and “The Junket,” which ran off-Broadway at the Lynn Redgrave Theater in 2014. He is also a part of the long-running comedy trio Unitard and the legendary (in their own minds) dance collective The Dazzle Dancers.

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Sari Botton: A few months ago I tweeted about how exhausting it is to constantly hustle as a freelancer—how I’ve been hustling my whole thirty-plus year career, and it never stops, and I’m so tired of it, but it’s the only way to move forward with everything I’m doing. You replied and said, “I would love to chat about the hustle.” And so I thought, Let’s chat about the hustle! We’re roughly around the same age, I believe. How old are you?

Mike Albo: I’m fifty-three.

SB: I’m fifty-six. And I’m tired. I feel like no matter how much I hustle, I still have to do it more. Every time I create something new, whether it’s my book or a newsletter post or an essay I’ve published, I have to be my own publicist. It’s exhausting, and it’s kind of embarrassing. Like, “Hey, look at me! Now look at me again! And again!” I want to hear about your hustle. But first I want to stop and say that I think of you as someone who is underappreciated as a writer and performer. I see you hustling and I think, why does this guy have to keep hustling? He’s a genius.

MA: That’s nice of you to say! There’s so much to say about the hustle. First of all, we could divide the hustle into different buckets of hustling. There’s the freelance-writing hustle/the daily work-grind hustle, and then there’s what you are going through right now, and what I’m about to go through, which is the book-promotion hustle for my YA novel, Another Dimension of Us, which is a whole different kind of hustle. Which hustle do you want to talk about first?

SB: Let’s talk about what it means to wear many different hats. You and I both have lots of different kinds of output. We’re both multi-hyphenates. I have freelance writing, I have my three newsletters, I have a new book out, I lead workshops that need to be publicized. You do all different kinds of things too—articles, books, comedy shows, videos. For me, part of that is just about survival. Some of my work I do just because I just need to make a living; I wouldn’t do a lot of it if I didn’t need to. Is that also true for you?

MA: Absolutely. I did have a little bit of a fortunate change to my money-making situation the past two years, though. I had a corporate copywriting job with PricewaterhouseCoopers. Finally, I was getting paid big blobs of money for the kind of work I’ve been doing for twenty-five years. And it was amazing. The people were great. It was a corporate job, of course. You just write for them and hope that one word gets through. It was actually a really noble effort that they were pursuing. It wasn’t evil work. And it was really a full-time job. It was starting early in the morning, writing all day, having to be there on camera, on Zoom. I can’t say that it ruined my writing schedule, because during that time I was also writing Another Dimension of Us. It was one of those things where you give a busy person something to do, and they do it. Job ends at five p.m., so five to seven I’m gonna write, boom, boom, boom. I hope I’m able to take that calendar psychoticness back into my freelance life now that the job has ended. Hilariously, like you, I’m juggling five thousand jobs at once. While I had that job, I was still writing articles because I didn’t want to give up anything. Because there’s the fear that if you say, “I’m sorry, I can’t do that article,” you’ll never get hired to write anything again.

SB: I totally feel that. I’m afraid to turn anything down, ever.

MA: Oh, and I have this job as a copy editor for this beauty website. I make like two hundred dollars a month doing it, but I still do it. Gotta do my ‘How to take off your French nails’ article! Gotta copy edit it! I think in terms of psychology, this is the “scarcity model” that you brought up in And You May Find Yourself. Our parents were from the Silent Generation—the Depression era. We have inherited their psychology in some weird way. For me, what that looks like is that I will not turn down a job. I’ll say yes to everything.

SB: I think there’s something to that. Our parents’ anxiety got carried over. But I also think there’s a harsh reality behind it. I saw something recently suggesting that Generation X got screwed out of bigger, more stable opportunities because boomers wouldn’t retire. They kept hanging on. And then the millennials came along and got hired. I was like, Wait a minute. Maybe that is part of what’s happened to me! On some level, I feel like I never got my chance to have the career I was supposed to have, or that I was aiming for. Although I was also aiming for several different careers, because if I want to be a writer, I also need to make a living as an editor and teacher. But maybe there’s something to the idea that there wasn’t room for us Gen Xers.

MA: Absolutely. I do feel overlooked, honestly. I often now can’t believe how much queer comedy I did before queer comedy was cool. And all the bits that I was doing in the ’90s, before there was TikTok. My work from then isn’t really appreciated because those performances were live. So another hustle for me is fighting for my legacy. That can sound so cocky and self-absorbed, but I do really feel like I have to make sure my website is up to date. I need to get all my archives of videos, of shows that I did in the ’90s and the 2000s up on the web so that people can see them and understand that I was doing short-form parodies before other people were doing them. It gets me into a really angry emotional state that I really don’t like. I want to feel grateful, and I’m also very happy for other people who have success in so-called queer comedy. But I feel overlooked and it’s a really sad feeling.

SB: Yeah, I have that feeling too. Sometimes, if somebody younger is writing about something I’ve written about in the past as if it’s this brand new idea, I will post the old related piece of mine on Twitter. But then I’ll feel embarrassed that I did that. But I often feel that way about posting new work too. Generally, I feel uncomfortable constantly promoting myself. But if I don’t, how will I keep going and getting more work? I mean, nobody else is going to promote my work for me. How do you feel about that? Does it feel icky to you to constantly be like, “Look at me here! Look at me there! Buy my book!”

MA: When I started seeing the millennial hurricane of publicity and success coming my way and washing over me, I realized I’m not going to ever be the constant blogger, the constant Substacker, the constant out-putter. And I chose instead to focus on quality and the long game. I’m saying that, but I still do sketch comedy, I still love to perform and love to do short articles.

This is a little off the subject, but a friend of mine who’s a classics professor said, “If you ever want to write something that matters and that has longevity, write poetry.” I think you can extend that to mean writing something lyrical, writing something that really has weight to it. Not like “Here’s why bangs are bad for 2022.” I spent twenty years writing those articles. I think that’s over for me. Although I do feel that, now that I have to hustle my book, I’m going to have to try to find an op-ed to write as a companion piece to publicize the book. An op-ed that’ll be like, “Why swimming is good for you.”

SB: What is your book about? It’s a YA novel, right? And is it about why swimming is good for you?

MA: I’m gonna give you the long answer. Have you been to Los Angeles?

SB: Yes.

MA: Do you remember the Bodhi Tree bookstore?

SB: Yes. I loved that place.

MA: Every time I went to LA, I would go there and pick up some new age book. I have a kitschy new age obsession, and I love books about psychic protection and witchcraft and crystal healing. I believe in them, but I also love them as kitsch objects too. There’s this one book that I picked up about the art and practice of astral projection, and it’s got this fabulous groovy cover. And it was a used book, so there’s all this underlining and scrawls in red marker in it. It sparked an idea for a story about people who find a book and learn how to astrally project from it. The story is about these kids in the ’80s—a gay kid who’s in love with his best friend, and they learn how to astrally project, and the best friend goes off and gets lost in the astral plane. The protagonist has to try to save him. It also takes place in the future. And there’s these other kids who are also having their problems, and they meet in the astral plane and they have to fight a demon and it’s very emotional. It goes there. I just sort of let my mind go.

SB: Oh, awesome. That sounds amazing.

MA: I’m happy with it. It took a lot of work, but I’m happy with it.

SB: Oh, good. The book comes out in January?

MA: January 17.

SB: I used to ghostwrite new age books. Talk about gigs you take on just because you need the money. I ghostwrote Aveda Rituals for Horst Rechelbacher, who founded Aveda. It started out as a really kooky book, more of like a service-y memoir. And then while we were writing it, Estée Lauder bought Aveda and we had to make it all about, like, how to make curly hair look nice using Aveda products.

MA: Wow.

SB: But at first, while we were writing it, he was like, “I will tell you how to have the kind of orgasm that will make you feel like you are in a new world,” which I guess is a kind of astral projection? And then suddenly, after Estée Lauder bought the company, all that kind of thing had to be edited out and replaced with beauty tips. I also ghostwrote one for a psychic, called Spa Magic, about how to cast spells from your bathtub. Then I applied to ghostwrite a book for a palm reader, but she took one look at my palm and was like, “No, you hold on to things for too long. I can’t work with you.”

MA: Hilarious!

SB: So, you’re always promoting different kinds of things. Tonight it’s a sketch comedy show at Joe’s pub and soon it will be a book. Is it both a blessing and a curse to be both a performer and a writer? And who is ever going to have enough time to only work on the one thing that they love?

MA: There are pros and cons to being a multi-hyphenate person. And there is a presentation of myself that I’ve had to work on. A few years ago, I was talking with Emily Gould about this book that I had started working on a long time before, and which is finally out being shopped now. She was like, “You’ve got to change the way you’re being perceived.” For a long time, I’ve been seen as a comedian, a funny guy, which has a little triviality to it. Emily brought up Michelle Tea as a good example of someone who shaped their public persona. And I do think, because we live in such a gross marketing world, you’ve got to think about that kind of stuff. I think my challenge right now is to move my self-presentation into something that has a little bit more weight to it.

SB: That’s good advice. Emily is good like that. She gives good advice and can be very reassuring. By the way, she was my “tattoula” when I got my first tattoo. She sat with me and held my hand and stopped me from completely freaking out.

MA: Oh my God.

SB: I think about perception a lot too. Sometimes you have to move away from the things that peg you as someone you don’t want to be seen as. I had a piece here on Catapult recently about what I wish I knew when I was starting out and all the bad advice I received early on. Some of it led me into a nine-year stretch of working only for trade magazines—business magazines that cover particular industries and are only read by people in those industries. It took so much energy to change my perception in the world. I would go on interviews at Condé Nast and the HR people would say, “Oh, you’re a trade writer.” It takes a lot to redefine yourself. I love that you found that corporate gig with PricewaterhouseCoopers, where probably your name wasn’t on any of that copy. So you were able to sustain yourself with that work without having it interfere with the perception of you as a writer and performer and artist.

MA: Again, I think this is a very Gen X plight. I think millennials and generation ABC, whatever is coming up, are really so much more educated about the way that they present. They’re kind of—almost to a fault—preternaturally media savvy. Their media training is in their DNA or something. I’ve noticed that comes with a con too, because one thing our generation is okay with is being a little sloppy. I think the best way I can point that out is through drag queen culture. The drag queens of my generation took years to perfect their faces and perfect their characters. Like you see Linda Simpson, my favorite . . .

SB: My former neighbor on my floor in the East Village!

MA: Linda’s the best. Linda has these amazing photos of her and other drag queens of my age range. You see the early photos and their makeup’s a little off, and they haven’t really gotten their look down, or their character down, or their whole persona down. And now you go on RuPaul’s Drag Race and they’re just ready. They’re young and ready and everything’s in place. And they have to be so articulate and media savvy. And it’s taken me fifty-three years to be able to understand how to say what I want, or say who I am, or say what I believe. So I think in a way we were lucky because we had a lot of time to make mistakes, and be people, and we realized that kindness is important.

There are pros and cons to being a multi-hyphenate person.

SB: I also think that our generation is obsessed with authenticity. I know that I prefer messiness. I prefer when you can see the real person behind the art. With some younger people, it almost feels more like artifice than an authentic presentation of themselves. But you know, we’re also trying to appeal to not only our age group with our work. We’re trying to sell to everybody. And we are competing with people who are a lot more polished than we are. So that’s a little bit of a challenge.

So, are you at all daunted about going out with this new book?

MA: Oh my God, I feel like a hurricane’s coming and I don’t have all my supplies yet. It’s coming out in January, and I have to start to do this. I have to up my social media presence. I have to make a plan. I have to be posting three times a week. Carrie Seim, who published her YA novel Horse Girl with the same imprint I’m at, Penguin Workshop, gave me some advice. She said, “You know, press doesn’t move books. Do your press, of course. But what moves books is grassroots contact. Getting on Facebook and talking to all the mothers of kids you know.” Contests too. It’s a lot. I’ve got to start. I’ve got to get my sandwich board on my body and go out there and peddle this book, which luckily I believe in. I believe in the product. I’m very proud of this book. It’s from my heart. So I’m happy to do it, but I’m very daunted about it for sure.

SB: That’s a great attitude to come out of the gate with. From the time I got out of college, I have been hearing the words “you need to build platform.” Not a platform, but “platform”—this general category of thing. I’ve been obsessed with trying to build platform. For so long I was building platform but not creating. But despite all the platform I’ve built, I feel like I still have a hard time being seen and known for what I do. And if people do know who I am, I’m kind of old news. It’s gotten more competitive, with more people vying for fewer and fewer spots, like a game of musical chairs. Do you feel any of that?

MA: I do. I guess one example of that is this manuscript that’s out with editors right now. My agent, Kent Wolf, was like, “Pack a lunch and stay hydrated because it takes forever for people to read things now.” And we had to line edit this draft. Kent and I were working really closely on the drafts of this book. And he’s like, “This is how it is.” You’ve got to get it super tight for people to even read it. Gone are the days of smoking hash or taking speed and sitting at a typewriter like William Burroughs. You’ve got to Mary Lou Retton–land that book in an editor’s lap perfectly. Because there are more people, and more product, and there’s less time, there’s less eyeball space. Less money.

SB: It’s good that you have a good relationship with your agent, that your agent believes in you and is willing to put in that work. What is this book that’s out on submission?

MA: It’s a book that I started in 2010, maybe 2008. It’s science fiction. It’s about a girl who lives in an alternate universe who’s looking for love. It’s a virtual world that was created here, but she doesn’t know that she’s in a virtual world. Her best friend’s dating a butterfly. She’s very old-school—she likes humans. So she’s just longing for love. And she doesn’t know who her mother is. I’ve been chipping away at this book for fifteen years. It’s very weird. Hopefully someone will be interested in publishing it.

SB: Is it for adults or for young adults?

MA: This is very adult. Maybe a little controversial-adult.

SB: My last question for you: Do you ever feel like Mike the performer is competing with Mike the author, and if you had to choose between them, which would you choose?

MA: Yes. There were, like, two months when I had Los Angeles longings. I don’t think I have the steely resolve it takes to be an actor. I love being onstage. I love performing. I’d love to act more. I feel like I’m finally good at it after all these years. But that whole game scares the shit out of me. My friends who are actors, they are really in it. You have to be really in it to do that.

SB: That’s a whole other game of musical chairs, like totally pro-level musical chairs.

MA: I am much better and more confident hustling my writing than hustling my performing. I don’t know why I perform. I just like to do it. It’s fun. To me, it’s all about communication and trying to find the right vehicle for the message or the idea that you have. I learned a lot about writing from performing, just in how to be concise and find the right language. But during the pandemic, my stand-up comedian friends, like Marga Gomez and Ophira Eisenberg, they were virtually out there, doing weekly Zoom shows. It’s built into their systems to express themselves that way. And I think it’s so impressive. I was more like, I think I’m gonna go write a book now.

SB: In a way, maybe the pandemic freed you up to shift in that direction.

MA: It might have finally been the quiet time that I needed. I didn’t have to say yes to a million things.