Unencumbered Initiatives

It was that Monday-morning cold call, decades ago now, that got me started – the call on my office phone when the friend of a former student asked me how much I’d accept to perform a striptease at her friend’s bachelorette party. Yep, nope, I still can’t believe that happened either, but it did. Truth stranger than fiction. And since, at the time, I had recently had my first experience at a nude beach, I was motivated to start writing about nudity and contexts for being naked. I didn’t know what would become of what I began to write, but I wrote anyway. About ten years later, it became my first naturist novel, Co-ed Naked Philosophy.

When I published it in 2011, I thought I was finished with novel-writing. But soon enough, the beginnings of what would become my second novel, Aglow, started to form in my notebooks. Of all the stories in that novel, the first I heard was Amana’s: “The cry of a baby rent the rainforest night. Soon there were two babies crying. Barely had Amana finished cleaning them and attending to their exhausted mother, barely had she severed their twin cords, when she felt herself lifted, bound, and muzzled as the babies cried on.” That passage ended up appearing on page 152 of the print version of the novel, which goes to show that when you get an idea, just go with it. You’ll figure out where it goes later.

After I published Aglow in 2016, I thought I was done. Yet within a week I had eight pages of notes of what has become Skinners, my third novel, which I am trying to get out still this month. Here is a sneak peek at a stage of the cover art – my friend Bernard Perroud’s preliminary rendition of the main character, Eddie Fife:

I’ve finished the final edit of Skinners. The last step is the formatting of the page numbers and other last-minute elements of the book’s structure – a process that differs from paper version to electronic version. Watch for an announcement soon!

Will there be more naturist novels after Skinners? Yes! This time, I already have pages and pages of notes on several different ideas. Who knows? Maybe I will finally catch up to the uber-prolific P. Z. Walker! That would be impossible, lol, but I am happy to have so many ideas going forward.

Also coming out soon will be the third anthology in the “Nudist Colony” collection, Holiday at the Nudist Colony! More great news!