Male Nudity!!! Now That I Have Your Attention...

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I came home from LA to mail galore, of both the electronic and snail varieties.  The electronic is proving to be my bane--I'm still responding to it.  But I'm good with snail mail, systematically sorting, filing, recycling.  I was a well-oiled machine by the time I reached my last piece of mail, a padded envelope.  With no time to flip the package over and check the return address, I opened it up and slid out a catalog with this cover:

Why is Thunder Down Under sending me a catalog? I mused.  Did Sara B. give them my address?

But no.  As you may note from the small Penguin logo just below the front guy's crotch, this was my publisher's spring catalog, sent to booksellers near and far.   And to me, because it contains a page devoted to BACK WHEN YOU WERE EASIER TO LOVE (released from the Dutton imprint of Penguin on April 28th).  Of course, I was excited to find my page.  But I have to admit, the other part of my brain was trying to figure out if a World Wide Wrestling picture book was going to be on shelves soon.  Alas, while I found my page (59, not that it matters) I was unable to locate anything referencing the vague, verging-on-creepy  photo on the back cover, with its lack of book-related details.  Hmm.

Meanwhile, savvy readers may have noticed that my countdown widget is at zero because The Contemps officially launches today!  Add the site to your Google Reader or Follow Us or  do whatever you have to do so that you can keep up with us.   Oh, and we're on Facebook , Twitter, GoodReads--we're like the wind!  (everywhere).  Expect much, much more Contemps awesomeness to come.

Now, most importantly :  Writing for Charity, an event this Saturday, August 21 in Sandy, Utah at the Waterford School.    An event so big, I was going to put it at the top of my post.  But this is their image:

Just to recap, this is the image I went with:

You can see I had no choice.

But seriously, if you don't have plans this Saturday, or even if you do, go to Writing for Charity.  I'm going to be at both the Writer's Workshop during the day and the Evening Extravaganza from 6:00 to 8:30, so I'm planning on a full twelve hours of fun.  And if you haven't experienced twelve hours of fun with me...or  for that matter ANY of the local authors who are going to be there...well, you should.  You want to.  Plus it's for a good cause.  If you haven't visited the site yet, even when I so conveniently hyper-linked it for you, all the proceeds will go to getting books into the hands of  kids.  This is a great (cheap!) opportunity to learn more about the craft and  mingle with other book lovers.

AND if you stay for the evening, there'll be tunes, laughs (okay, so there will be laughs all day, but these laughs will be courtesy of the Divine Comedy Troupe), and  a few mystery guests.  Okay, so the guests aren't a mystery, but I'm still not typing their names here.  You'll have to check out the website.  Kids are invited to this part, so if you want a night out for the family, come one, come all.  You don't have to be a writer--just be ready to PARTY in the name of literature.

Booyah.

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