Alison Brie, one of my favorite actors on Mad Men (she plays Trudy, Pete’s wife) has a graphic and hilariously cheerful sex essay on Nerve.  Wow, she’s… nothing like her character on the show.

Do you read YA fiction?  If not, why not?  Did you read it when you were younger, and then stop?  On some level do you consider it “less respectable” to read or write it than to read/write literary fiction for adults?  Can you define the difference?  If you wrote a novel intended for adults with an adolescent protagonist and a publisher said they’d take it but only if they could market it as a YA novel, would that be cool with you?

It is a good day for First Amendment advocates… but kind of a troubling one for dog lovers.

Tickets now on sale (basically for free) to the LA Times Book Fest, which is next weekend.  I’m going to check out a bunch of these panels, looks interesting.

The NYT website has a prominently featured piece titled “In Sleepless Nights, a Hope for Treating Depression”… I read it with interest as I’ve from time to time had brutal, grinding insomnia (as have many other writers I know).  Extended periods of insomnia do not in my experience alleviate depression in any way.  On the other hand–and this is not insomnia–there are those nights (rather, mornings) when dawn breaks and you’ve been writing nonstop all night and your exhaustion becomes a kind of euphoria.  Writing as a profession or lifestyle can be disruptive to circadian rhythms because of those nights–they can fuck up your sleep schedule for a week.  (This just happened to me in the last few days, totally disoriented my mind and body in relation to time of day, and may or may not have contributed to a minor car accident.)  But those nights are actually one of my favorite parts of being a writer–those nights are when you get the pure joy of creative endeavor unadulterated by the logistical headaches of publishing and promoting and etc etc etc.