Naked women with writing on them

And it is their covers that are the topic of this post. Other than their retro feel and bold type-face there is one thing in particular that appears to bind each of these covers together, regardless of the plot or author, and, it seems silly for me to have to point this out, that is the adornment of an either scantily clad or entirely naked woman on each. I cannot tell you that I was not a little shocked by the cover, which bore a women all but naked except for a cleverly positioned towel. When I first saw these covers in a group such as this, however, I had to check my calendar. It is right? OK, so it may not have been for long but regardless, it is the 21st century.

Susan Millar Du Mars: Raymond Carver once said that his writing started to be successful when he stopped thinking of it as self-expression and instead thought of it as communication. I was in town to give a reading from my new book, Naked, and two naked men walked into Starbucks right behind me. I asked one of the men if I could take his picture, and he consented. This was in the Castro, the famously gay neighborhood in San Francisco. The men were in their sixties or possibly They were tan and very fit. I say they were naked, but each had a small bit of cloth wrapped around his penis.

What he meant, he explained, was that writers should let themselves feel vulnerable and exposed—because that will make our writing more honest, vivid and powerful. We stumble out of bed, stare at our computer all day, and lose ourselves inside our own imaginations. We wander around talking to ourselves, sometimes out loud, and we can go whole days without talking to other people. Heck, we can go whole days without changing out of our pyjamas. This makes it dangerously easy for us to think of ourselves as just a brain, and to forget that our brain is attached to a body.

I just realized I forgot to share with you that I received the most motivating rejection letter. The only way to get here is by traveling a dirt road for minutes—with no cell reception. I have no cell service, spotty WiFi, and yesterday morning I had no heat. One of the agents I pitched at the Writers Digest Conference in August sent me a thoughtful rejection letter.