Drinking coffee and taking my clothes off

If you want to do drugs without doing drugs, stop drinking coffee for two weeks and then have two in a row. The only days where I have more than one coffee are if I’m participating in a running event, or if I’m making pornography.

Some weekends I block out the dates in my calendar for filming. A couple of weeks before then I’ll advertise that I’m taking orders. I try to get about $1000 worth of work before closing it off. In theory I should be able to bash it out in a day but I always have a back-up second day, and nearly always need it.

I’m supposed to get up early but I usually don’t. I drink my two coffees and still dawdle. By the time I’ve finished hair and makeup it’s 11am-12pm. If I’m organised I will have gotten all my gear out the night before and copied each request into a separate notepad window with some notes. Sometimes I do the easiest one first, sometimes the hardest.

I don’t have any professional lighting, but I improvise one or two softboxes and use a lamp with a pink scarf over it for fill light. I just realised the other day that I can also improvise a ring light, but I’m not sure if I like the effect yet. It’s hard for me to get the usual bright, flat, saturated porn lighting at home so I’ve been going for something more moody and dimensional the past couple of years.

Once I’ve got passable lighting I start filming. I use my phone with an external USB mic. I don’t have a particularly good phone, I’m just lazy. I have maybe 4-12 false starts per clip. It’s all part of the process. I make up the words as I go and I flub them all the time. I get interrupted by sirens, helicopters and the music studio next door because I live in the city. Once I get in the zone and have a relatively quiet spell I can get through a whole clip, or a segment of one if I need to change shots or positions.

The performance is kind of the least interesting part. Quite possibly the main skill involved is spinning it out for so long without becoming stiff and unnatural. Sometimes it’s more verbal, sometimes it’s more physical. I’ve never preferred one over the other. There are some things I find really tedious, for instance when someone wants me to perform a multi-part series over time and also wants me to write the scenarios. By the time I’m picking it up again I’ve forgotten what’s already happened and also I deeply, deeply do not care. I don’t need the money so I can turn down anything that’s just stupid or offensive.

The day usually goes better once I’m on a roll. I finish up around 5 or 6pm. I try not to go straight into exporting the video and editing, it’s probably healthier if I go outside or have some company. It’s a bit intense to be shut inside all day talking to the camera, even for only one day. But later on in the evening I import my files and queue them in Handbrake. If I’m not doing anything else I work until around midnight doing the editing.

I have a pirated version of Premiere Pro from 2018. I play back the footage of myself at 4x speed. It’s honestly way too boring to watch properly, but I have to watch it all in case there’s something I need to cut out or add in. Sometimes I add in sound effects, that’s pretty fun. Be your own foley artist. I always use this curve thing from the lumetri effects to wash out my skin tone. When there’s less contrast it helps to hide any cellulite, pigmentation etc. And it’s just kind of the image I’ve always gone for. Bright white skin looks good in thumbnails. It’s not like I can ever serve California girl so I’ve got to lean in.

I always thought I’d stop doing this by the time I was 30 because I thought I’d be old and ugly by then (!). I did retire for a while, but I came back to it because at it’s best it’s like getting free money and the creativity involved is something I don’t really have in other parts of my life. Sometimes I do get upset about how insanely good I looked at my peak, but then I remember that I never looked like that in my everyday life. And I can still make some pretty nice images now. Maybe I’m always hot, maybe I’m always ugly.

I’ve never been one of the minority of performers who make tens of thousands of dollars a month, but I’ve also never been one of the majority of people who never really get it off the ground. It was a good job for me when I was a student and for some years afterwards and I’m still very interested in picking up an extra thousand bucks. I don’t regret missing those crucial years in my 20s when I should have been grinding away at a career. I like how I’ve turned out from not doing that. If I wanted to be a lawyer or something I’d just do it now. Life is long and selling sex is a pretty interesting side quest.