We trust that many of you will be celebrating this fine, fun, freezing cold month of January in true calendar style…with Angie Abdou in her skis, of course!

And if by chance you haven’t managed to get a calendar yet, never fear! We have a limited quantity of calendars still available, and now that we’re into 2014, the calendars are officially 50% off. That’s right–YOU TOO could enjoy twelve months of sexeh Canadian author hotness for the low, low price of $10 per calendar, plus shipping!

It’s definitely a deal of deals, kids. So get ‘em while they’re hot! Follow this link for calendars shipped within Canada, and this one here for calendars shipped to the US and internationally.

In the meantime, stay tuned for some fun giveaways and Angie-related news over the course of the month. And thanks, as always, for all of your enthusiasm and support! Here’s to a great year of Canadian literature ahead — we can’t wait!

Amanda & Allegra

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If you’d like a copy of the beautiful, gorgeous, amazingly fantastic 2014 BIFB calendar and you live in Canada, go here. If you’d like a copy of the beautiful, gorgeous, amazingly fantastic 2014 BIFB calendar and you live anywhere else on this lovely planet, including the States (sorry, guys, but for shipping purposes you’re international too), please go here.

Please allow 2-4 weeks for your calendar to arrive. We will try to get them out as fast as we can, but we are two tiny people (well, Allegra is lovely and tall, but Amanda is definitely more on the tiny side) and can only mail so many things in one day. Have mercy.

Onwards!

Lots of literary love, as always,

Amanda & Allegra

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Cover and interior calendar design by Troy Palmer. Isn’t he a genius? We love him so, so much!

Hard to believe, guys, but the moment has finally come. After a year of hard work, we got the chance to show off the beautiful, beautiful, BEAUTIFUL Bare It For Books calendar at the 2013 Eden Mills Writers’ Festival this past weekend. It was, in a word, awesome.

Allegra picked the calendars up, fresh from the printer, early on Saturday morning. Here’s the text that she sent to Amanda upon seeing them:

Needless to say, we were a little excited! Amanda arrived at Eden Mills the next morning, anxiously anticipating the arrival of the calendars. Here’s the sign that marked our table on Publishers’ Way:

And really, with a start to the day that was as auspicious as that, how could things not be completely wonderful? They were. Allegra arrived, we set up our BIFB table (with a tad bit more merchandise and professional swag than we had a last year’s fest!), and off we went. Here are a few pictures of people checking out the CanLit goods…

We have a banner! We are officially official!

Grace O’Connell, Iain Reid, and Ms. November herself, Saleema Nawaz, checking everything out.

Sheree Fitch! THE ACTUAL SHEREE FITCH! HOLDING A CALENDAR! Oh my goodness.

And here’s a picture of your friendly literature lovers, happy as clams, almost a year to the day that we started it all in Eden Mills…

Huge thanks, as always, to the wonderful folk at EMWF for being so spectacular in their enthusiasm and support for this project. And thanks to everyone who came out, and carried their opened calendars around to various readings on the day, drumming up excitement and enthusiasm for the campaign. It was a spectacular day.

Next up: WOTS Toronto! We’ll be chilling (figuratively, not literally — at least we very much hope so) at next weekend’s WOTS festival as part of Literacy Lane. If you’re in the area, please consider dropping by. This is, after all, your chance to get the calendars before they’re fully released to the public! The calendars themselves will go on sale through our website and through select independent bookstores across Canada as of October 3rd. Keep an eye on this website and on our Twitter account — we’ll be tweeting the names of participating bookstores closer to the release date. Of course, if you can’t wait to get your hands on a copy, you can always pre-order the calendar here.

Remember: all proceeds from the sale of the 2014 calendar will be donated to PEN Canada. And now that we’ve held it in our hands, we can say that it’s more beautiful — and even more sexy — than we could possibly have imagined. Trust us, dear friends — THIS is the way you want to keep track of 2014. Absolutely!

BIGGEST SMILES EVER.

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We are four short days away from debuting the 2014 Bare It For Books calendar at this year’s Eden Mills Writers Festival. Four short days! AMAZING!

As mentioned on Twitter, we’ll be selling the calendars in person on Sunday, September 15th at the EMWF, and then again at WOTS Toronto on Sunday the 22nd of September. And then the calendar itself will be available for purchase, both through our website and via a variety of independent bookstores across Canada, after October 2nd, when we officially launch the calendar at Ben McNally Books in Toronto.

If you’re interested in pre-ordering a calendar, check out the link under our “Buy It!” tab — this will give you instructions about pre-ordering. The calendars will then be shipped out to you as soon as they become available. Voilà!

Four days, people. FOUR DAYS!!!

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Hop onto Twitter and tell us (@bareitforbooks) what new Canadian book you’ve picked up this summer, or give us the name of a new Canadian author you’ve discovered this year. It doesn’t have to be a first-time writer — though that’s always nice — just someone new to you! And tell us why you love them. That’s it! We’ll be taking answers and keeping track of your outpourings of CanLit love all this week, right up until 11:59pm on Sunday, August 11th. We’ll pick a winner (bonus points for enthusiasm!) the next morning and announce on Twitter on Monday, August 12.

In honour of our glorious Canadian summer, the winner will be showered with some select, cottage-inspired CanLit titles, a goody bag filled with “naked” (i.e. unwrapped) LUSH products, and some summery pairings of DAVIDs tea. The perfect summer treat!

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Yesterday, as most of you know by now, our Indiegogo campaign came to a close. While we didn’t manage to make our original goal of $20,000, we had a rush of support in the last week of the campaign and saw our total jump considerably, and for that we are grateful beyond words.

Even though we didn’t make our goal, we’ve succeeded in getting word about the campaign out to all booklovers across the country. We’ve had a tremendous amount of help and support from a wide variety of talented individuals across Canada (like Trent McClellan and Gordon Pinsent–not to mention our fabulous authors!), and we’ve been humbled and thrilled to no end by the offers of help and cool suggestions that people have given to the campaign. There are so many people looking forward to the Bare It For Books calendar, and we’re absolutely thrilled to bring it to everyone who’s shown an interest!

We’re still set on bringing you a sexy, classy, and professional-as-can-be 2014 calendar filled with the authors that you know and love. So don’t worry — that calendar will definitely make its way to you.

We’re on track to have all of our calendar photos ready by the summer, and will work on having the calendar designed and ready for sale by the beginning of the fall. Keep checking back here for updates on the calendar progress, more author posts, and other BIFB fun. And in the meantime, we’d like to thank every single one of you for cheering us on this far. We couldn’t have done it without you!

Amanda & Allegra

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Happy Friday, all! Here’s a little treat as we head into the weekend. By now most of you know Trent McLellan as the passionate, winning defender of this year’s Canada Reads competition. Lucky for us, he’s also hopped on board as a Bare It For Books promoter! Watch Trent become a passionate defender of Bare It For Books above.

To commemorate the video, we’ll be holding a contest starting at 2pm today, April 5th. Leave a comment on the video’s YouTube page or RT the video links that we’re tweeting over at our Twitter account.  We’ll compile all of the comments and RTs and select a winner at random. The lucky winner will snag themselves a copy of February, by Lisa Moore, as well as 50 grams of Whiskey White from DAVIDs Tea!

The contest will run until 11:59pm tonight, and we’ll announce the winner tomorrow. Good luck everybody, and remember: our Indiegogo campaign is live for exactly two more weeks, and we’d appreciate any and all of the love you’d like to show us.

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Hi guys! We’ve been keeping busy since last we spoke to you — now that the initial flurry of announcements for Bare It For Books has passed, we’re back hard at work on bringing you the calendar that you’re going to love. Keep checking back for more author guest posts and (hint) some cool giveaways in the weeks to come.

In the meantime, though, we’re happy to say that we’ve reached the $2500 mark for our Indiegogo campaign! It’s so wonderful to know that so many of you are just as excited about this campaign as we are.

We also wanted to share a few bits of news:

- Bare It For Books was lucky enough to do a guest blog for Kerri Cull, the lovely lady behind The Book Fridge. Check it out!

- Terry Fallis has done some blogging of his own, and let us in on what’s he’s doing in preparation for his own journey along the road to baring it for books.

- Farzana Doctor talks about baring it for books over here.

- Miranda Hill talks about baring, blushes, and bods over here.

- Saleema Nawaz talks nerves and baring it for books over here.

Still more to come soon, folks! In the meantime, happy Tuesday everybody, and don’t forget to point your friends in the direction of our Indiegogo campaign — it’s only live for 32 more days!

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Photo by Shelagh Howard

Sure, like anyone, I have a shyness about certain aspects of my body — hell, I just turned 53 — but when Amanda Leduc asked me if I’d be interested in posing in the barely concealed buff for a calendar to support PEN Canada, I didn’t hesitate. There are a few reasons why.

First of all, I knew Amanda, so I knew her to be someone who has great ideas and makes them fly. That was important — you don’t want to strip in support of a cause only to have the pictures wind up no further than a drawer or a hard drive. When Amanda teamed up with music producer Allegra Young, someone with smarts who understood how to market artistic projects, I knew she was on the right track.

Second, I’m a sucker for a catchy name: “Bare it for Books.” Has a ring to it.

Third, I think Canadian artists should be willing to put themselves out there for artistic projects, and sometimes that means doing more than putting your name on a petition or twenty bucks in a slot. Sometimes it means getting in front of people and exposing your, er, convictions. PEN Canada is a great cause to support. But my involvement wasn’t determined by the choice of charity. I just think writers should DO stuff, break out from behind their desks and from under their protective blankets of solitude and work with other artists, contribute their minds and, yes, their bodies, be part of a larger artistic community.

Fourth, it sounded like fun. A lark. It reminded me of the summer of 1968, when my actor father decided we were a family of nudists and should all ditch our clothes and live the life nature intended. That was the sort of thing that happened around the summer of ’68, when you were an artist or the son of one. I was eight at the time and it seemed fine by me. My mother, I recall, was less impressed.

The shoot happened in my Toronto apartment — comfy warm only because I can’t seem to get the radiators to keep to the precise working cool that I prefer — with photographer Shelagh Howard at the other end of an impressive Nikon. With the help of her assistant, Carole, we moved a few pieces of furniture around, and I, in my terry cloth robe, got into position. When Shelagh and Carole turned around for a moment, the robe went.

There had to be a prop. When you’re shooting a semi-nude picture, there must always be a prop. One of sufficient size and opacity. I’m not going to claim that it had to be extraordinarily large or anything, but it had to do the job. And ideally, it had to have some reason for being there.

We chose a typical garden shovel. Though it seems anomalous in the context of a Toronto apartment, it has a connection to my third novel, Practical Jean, in which — spoiler alert — a shovel is used as a murder weapon.

So there I was, just my shovel and me, as Shelagh’s camera clicked. There was less of me than there would have been a year before — in the previous months I’d lost about 40 pounds — and I have to say I was rather glad, in that moment, that I’d had the foresight.

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Photo by Kevan WIlkie of 6:8 Photography

In 2006, I published my first book, a collection of stories about miscommunication, dysfunctional relationships, and infidelity. I had recently gone through a divorce, and I liked to announce that the book, called Anything Boys Can Do, was about “the death of the institution of marriage!” and “the absurdity of life-long monogamy!” These earnest declarations morphed into satire by the time I finally took to the road for the book tour – gigantically pregnant and very happily (and monogamously) remarried.

Reviewers, few as they were, called the book raw and edgy. The Victoria Times Colonist praised it for its original and honest take on female sexuality: “For centuries, terms to describe female sexuality have been along the lines of Slut, Tart and Whore. There are, sadly, no words that describe female desire that are not pejorative, and this lack of available vocabulary is one reason why Angie Abdou’s debut short story collection, Anything Boys Can Do, is important. Most of Abdou’s stories focus on female protagonists who wholeheartedly pursue sexual relationships.”

That’s all great, obviously, except for a minor detail: I have parents. They know how to read.

This is where things get tricky. People tell aspiring writers to kick potential audiences out of their heads during the writing process.

“Don’t worry about what people will think!”

“Don’t censor yourself!”

Wonderful advice, sure, but the reality of being a published writer sure comes crashing down hard when you see your new husband’s grandmother lined-up at your book-signing table, clutching her freshly purchased copy.

The truth is that people will read what you write. Moreover, people will judge you based on what you write, and I don’t just mean judge your writing. I mean they will judge you.

One of my mother’s best friends read Anything Boys Can Do and responded, “Being a writer must be hard. It must be kind of like walking into the middle of Main Street, pulling down your pants, and yelling ‘Hey everyone!! What do you think?!!”

Yep. It is kind of like that. And it gets a little more like that with each new book. It also gets more challenging during the writing process to forget about that uncomfortable element of exposure that comes with publication.

Above my writing desk, I’ve taped Hemingway’s advice to “Write hard and clear about what hurts.” I recognize that quality in the writing that holds me fast to the page. The fiction I most admire deals with emotions, ideas, and subjects that really matter to the writer at a deep and personal level. Such personal investment creates a rawness and energy that a writer can’t create from a safe distance. But it also leaves a writer vulnerable and exposed.

When it came time to take my BIFB picture, I was nervous. I wondered if I could go through with it. I thought it would be difficult, even humiliating.

It wasn’t. I bare it for books every day at my writing desk as I strive to write hard and clear about what hurts. That is difficult. Taking off my clothes, jumping up on that desk, and letting someone snap a photograph? It’s the easiest thing I’ve ever done in that office.

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