After I wrote each of my essays about saving sex for marriage in the Tampa Bay Times, I got a lot of emails that I still haven’t deleted. I wanted to use the worst of them to film a Mean Tweets-style promo video for my book, but I never did. Can you imagine?
There’s the one from Miki: “Are the readers of Florida’s largest newspaper and Tampa Bay’s leading news website now better informed, resting comfortably in the knowledge that you are a virgin? Or is this the first onslaught of writers [sic] block and you had nothing else to say? Try again please but in the future choose the subject of your articles with a bit more intelligence.”
Or the one from John: “No offense, but talk about the voice of inexperience. How can you contribute on the very subject you have never participated in?”
But the finale email for the video I never filmed absolutely would have been Eric’s:
“This should be on a bookshelf, not my driveway at 4 o’clock in the morning. … I don’t know where your assignments come from but I can surely tell you that your prose was not news-relevant nor relevant to anyone but you. If you’d like to write a biography … you are free to do so. In the end you clearly made no point about others, your surroundings, hardly even yourself. It was a courageous first type into bigger things than journalism, but dig deeper girl.”
I probably would have said, “TOOK YOUR ADVICE, ERIC!” at the end of the video and then held up a copy of Chastity Is for Lovers.
Hard to believe that this Sunday, Nov. 28, marks seven years since Chastity Is for Lovers actually did hit bookshelves.
I pray it still comforts people who’ve felt alone and that it still makes people who think chastity’s crazy feel uncomfortable enough with the alternative to consider the virtue. I pray it causes breakups that need to happen and engagements that need to happen, too. I pray it equips readers to practice chastity in a culture that isn’t conducive to it. And I pray, if you’ve read it, that it has done that for you.
If you haven’t read it yet, or if you know somebody who should, use code BFCM21 between now and Nov. 29 to get it from Ave Maria Press for under 10 bucks (and free shipping!) here.
For signed copies or to read an excerpt of this book, click here.
And to read the most popular of my sex essays from the Times, click here.