Writing, Drunk and Naked

Meaning of title? We'll get to that. Baby Doe, the first novel I've written, was published five years ago. Since then two more novels in the NICU series have appeared with Eli Kurz MD, my somewhat feckless doppelganger, alter ego, clone-equivalent, proxy, or stand-in. He's a recurring character like Reacher in the Lee Child novels, or Rusty Sabich in Scott Turow's recent novels. But Kurz's niche is medicine not combat or the law. The fourth novel in the standalone NICU series is entitled "Sula's Sacrifice" and should be in print this fall.

In 2010 Adair Lara wrote a very good book titled, Drunk and Naked Writing, helpfully subtitled "Shed your Inhibitions and Craft a Compelling Memoir or Personal Essay," though it's unlikely that a draft of anything written both drunk and naked will be considered "crafted". I prefer the way I revised her title to head this post as an attention-grabber.

My point? Family members (all male) and some friends (all male), knowing I write fiction often aver that they don't read fiction, implying that it's of lesser (or no) importance when compared with history, memoir, politics, finance, or biography.

I am not going to mount a spirited defense of fiction, but only remind you that Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "fiction reveals truth that reality obscures," and Kurz along with his much more famous fictional contemporaries, Reacher and Sabich, all inevitably have much to say about their authors.

As a nod to the those who prefer nonfiction, you can scroll through the 90 or so blogs on this website that describe my late entry into the writing of fiction and my interests thereof. Since this blog, like almost all the others, is a smallish essay, I offer my hat tip to Adair Lara by saying that though I'm not drunk, I am naked from the waist up. It's hot today in Jerusalem.

Feeling somewhat guilty like Maureen Dowd seemingly maligning all men for not reading fiction.