photo via flickr

Some people worry that technology is hindering human communication, creating more distance in relationships, but we think When Parents Text is evidence to the contrary,” write co-authors Lauren Kaelin and Sophia Fraioli about their new book. And we think they’re right — amongst the ALL CAPS and multiple exclamation points and weird over-sharing and awkward attempts at using emoticons, there’s a real sweetness in the excerpted real-life texts in this book. So the next time you get a crushing text rejection from your booty call or an annoying vague text plan from your frenemy, just text your mom and dad and wait to see what they come out with. If it’s really funny, feel free to show us.

Here are some of the conversations in When Parents Text that tickled us:

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On July 31st we got a press release about “29 Days of August,” a “digital novella of appetites” meant to be read throughout the month of August on “the social networks you already use.” Here’s the scoop:

Designed as an accompaniment to the languid, over-heated days of summer, “29 Days of August” follows the adventures of two lovers as they travel in a vintage Porsche 914 through Europe and steal a painting that captured the imagination of 19th century luminaries from Oscar Wilde to Sarah Bernhardt. This couple lives by two simple rules. First, hide nothing—share with radical transparency each moment, each caress. Second, never utter a word about the past—no names, no history, no baggage.

Taking queues from serialized classics such as One Thousand and One Nights, but unlike anything that has come until now in the digital age, 29 Days of August is customized to the reading habits of a wired, mobile world. Broken into 29 bite-size installments, delivered every day at 2 PM EST, from August 1st to the 29th of 2011, the story of this couple’s sexual, aesthetic and gustatory passions will unfold online across all the major digital venues where consumers are already reading. Simply ‘like’ 29 Days of August on Facebook or ‘follow’ it on Twitter and each episode of the story will be delivered to your feed.

Stylistically, the piece is written to respect the most technically limited of online platforms: Twitter. Each paragraph is reduced to the breathless, fractured format of this medium’s 140 character bursts. However, a custom, “flood_stream” algorithm has been developed that will allow posts to be displayed chronologically as multiple tweets, thereby filling a reader’s feed each day with a more lengthy sensual interlude. 29 Days of August is embedded within the fabric of social networks but exists at a slower, vacation-oriented velocity, asking to be relished leisurely through the course of a month.

But we still had some questions, so we asked ORO…

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from the book trailer for “Lola, California”

Last week, we gave you a first look at the new novel from Edie Meidav, “Lola, California,” called one of “the most anticipated novels of 2011″ by TheMillions.com. This week, a second excerpt: this one a glimpse into the world of stripping, as two female friends navigate that seedy terrain for the first time. To read Meidav is to enter a world of beauty, depth and detail; to hear her speak about her craft is to realize that world is not merely a concoction or a slight of hand — Meidave lives and breathes her art. So if her book tour happens to take her to your neck of the woods, go. (Her tour dates and locations are listed here and after the excerpt below):

Obedient to the renewed law of Lola, Rose auditions in a room in a strip mall for two short guys, Dick-and-Dan, Dan-and-Dick, their names interchangeable as their rapid-fire commodity argot, though one is tall and bald-pated, loose-jointed while the other is a smaller, toupeed version peering with suspicion over glasses, stiff in shirt-sleeves as if someone had just appointed him footman for the queen of Romania. The two Ds say they love that Rose is a coed or whatever she is, shooting talk back and forth in spy code, their back office discolored by fluorescence, two desks presiding over paper piles and sample cans of diet powder, the men clearly keeping themselves from any existential brink as much as the Lolas used to, using suppressed fiendish mirth to answer phones in a great mimicry of masters of industry. Tell her send three! I’m taking my usual because she won’t be bad tonight.

While Rose waits, a minor skirmish occurs when a tabby-cat named Diva refuses to descend from a file cabinet on which is pasted a bulletin board bearing palm-tree postcards from locales to which employees with bubble handwriting and a love of exclamation points have flown for vacation. Sniggering, Dick-and-Dan phone a few people, asking if anyone wishes to take home the kitty. No takers yet! they volley back and forth, no one wants to play daddy to some lost pussy!

And yet exactly which kind of dance the Ds want for Rose’s audition is obscured as if some esoteric task until the taller one puts on a song with a chorus about canasta. Mid-song and sans notice, the Romanian footman asks her to take her shirt off—just one pic—marking the moment beyond which Rose can no longer pretend naïveté, since the beginning or end of a song matters little to the Ds, the song mere pretext, the moment a fizzle, the nudie photo a minor heist. A girl of twenty-something, with little artistry, her other half awaiting news back in the apartment, finds the ounce of stamina that lets her pivot back toward the men.

On their first day the tall one picks the Lolas up at the train station, fuzzy dice hanging from the front of his car. That he has a bag of laundry to drop off makes the girls share a backseat smile. Someone thinks they are dispensable, equivalent to a laundry errand, and this droll fact makes the girls reenter their delicious paradox: they live again at the smack-dab center of irrelevance.

They drive around that day, Rose having asked if she could bring a friend, the two of them delegated to the care of a stringy scion from a fallen New England family, the scion not clocking a single backseat smile and thus unaware of his utter charity, à la Jane Polsby, in helping them etherize back to another heist as Lola One and Two. No one really matters: they go in and out of dressing rooms while the scion bounces a rubber ball against store walls with a tournament player’s dedication.

Because the scion types Rose as babydoll, she tries on foamy confections. “Go white. Lace fishnets, garters, underwear. Men recognize your type plus pervs go ballistic,” he says, never stopping the bounce. “Get your hair in curly pigtails. Stick oversize diaper pins on the lace. When you come onstage, suck a lollipop. Because your face has the hunger of a little girl, you got that sadness in your eyes, plus you could bounce dimes off your butt. You’ll see, babydoll helps, you’ll go like zero to a hundred, make more.”

When Rose emerges his Galatea, he seems pleased, ricocheting his ball off the ceiling. In the meantime he has sized up Lana as a sav-age woman of experience. “You’re leopard, jaguar, ruby red. Start at eighty-five then go slow so you don’t get to a hundred too quickly. I have a girlfriend, she’s a stripper, but I see way too many naked girls so I always say, hey, keep your clothes on, even during lower-case intimacies if you know what I mean. By the way, take off that ratty purse.”

….

Once they get to the bar, five o’clock with Lana still too serious in her leopard print, a red velvet choker across her neck, the scion asks Bev, an oldtimer with long nails and a lemur’s face, to do Lana’s hair in a bedtime bun. Rose stands by in her ridiculous babydoll get-up, suddenly wishing to exit the scene, watching as the oldtimer fingers and sprays Lana’s hair, keeping up a train of talk during which she states she is bi, swings both ways, and her boyfriend doesn’t mind.

“So what’s the thing they keep calling getting to one hundred?” Rose asks oldtimer Bev, who shrugs before jutting her chin stageward where a happy-hour welfare mom sneaks onstage with actual safety-pins seaming her skirt.

“There’s your dead end right there,” says Bev. The welfare mom kneels at the stagelight’s greasy rim, allowing some loner guy who five minutes earlier had been scarfing up twenty-five-cent chicken-wings to now stick a beer bottle into her. “That lady,” says Bev, “don’t get me wrong, loves her kids. Does it for all three. Plus you got to admire the Thai stuff she does, tricks of control. You won’t see me doing them. She can get a whole chain of safety-pins going in and out.”

Overhearing, bouncing his ball against the bar, the scion muses in his Connecticut accent that the birth canal never fails to amaze. Only six o’clock and two friends almost reunite in a smile, ready to rejoin in the deployment of questionable skills, here in a warren just beyond an interstate overpass with a pumping bass driving guhguhguhguhGUH on a collision course toward skull and groin, under lights hazy and gelled red, the scent of spilled beer and smoke in every breath: push it real good.

Bev wants to teach them how to get dollars to slide in more quickly. “Dance together and you’ll get more tips. Older guys especially love love love two girls together, you’ll see.” Lana will dance with Bev the first fifteen minutes, followed by a duet by Lana and Rose for fifteen minutes, finished by solos. “Chat up men at the bar first so they give you quarters to put in the jukebox. There’s your soundtrack. Use the pole and I promise you make fifty percent more. Can’t learn in a day what a lifetime of hard knocks gives. But you two will do okay. You’re the kind has good chemistry.”

Chemistry or not, that first time Rose steps onto the stage with Lana, wrapped by smoke but also the worshipful circle of men’s gazes, she gets it. She has arrived! This moment is a lovechild created by all those moments of Lola and Vic, Vic and his ironic, confusing attendance to the Lolas, the whole thing spun by the secret code of all billboards and magazines.

Only Rose’s new degree twists the coed-a-gogo moment into anything more illogical. B.A., big assumption, barefaced amour, bitter about-face, she plays with the words while waiting in the dark of the stage, teased, ready, music playing, that driving bass of the song that is everywhere that summer, guhguhguhguhGUH chichichichichi. Rose knows she has arrived at the end of some freeway with the choice being to either jump or turn back. Onstage she and Lana will share one last look before the dance begins, the look containing almost everything, locking up their mobile morality, a flock of everyone outside the Lolas, the policemen who used to sigh and wave them off without writing up tickets. Again the Lolas will get off with another dereliction of duty.

Though after that first second Lana never peeks at Rose or out at the crowd, her diffidence so appealing. She acts as if she needs nothing, her system self-sufficient, running on its own juices, Rose seeing for the first time that Lana’s beauty has to do with how she never cops to much, her brown nape forever turning away. While Rose stares out, brazenly curious under the thinnest veil of shyness, her tongue forever inching forward.

At the peak of a certain power, the men’s desire becomes a hand persuaded to move. You find a way to convince this hand to uncurl and respond, to come forth with the bill you tuck into your garter. After their first night, on the train ride back, Rose tries speaking of a hand that Lana doesn’t want to discuss. Why does she love to hide her titillation? She admits to nothing.

Home in the roach-friendly kitchen over the Hudson, they seem to skulk together, pulling damp bills from a paper bag, each George Washington or Abe Lincoln a mark of a second, an exchange of capital, one favor granted and another withheld. “Really, what’s wrong with it,” asks Rose, “given that aren’t all jobs a form of prostitution? You keep yourself from following your bliss for some period of time and then capital squirts toward you. At least we’re performing our dance authentically. Any other job we could get would serve someone else’s system and wouldn’t be true anyway to whatever self we want to believe in. Or what do you think?”

“I don’t know,” says Lana. “Not much. It’s a job. Sorry. It’s just that these days I do better when I don’t think too much.”

“Lola, California” is available today from Amazon.com. Here are Meidav’s tour dates:

• July 9 (Rhinebeck, NY/Oblong)
• July 16: (Woodstock, NY/Kleinart)
• July 20: (Seattle/Elliott Bay)
• July 23 (Mendocino/The Gallery)
• July 28: (Berkeley/Mrs. Dalloway’s)
• July 30: (Gualala/Four-Eyed Frog)
• August 4: (San Francisco/Book Passage)
• August 5: (Montclair/A Great Good Place for Books)

• This post is a part of Sundance Channel’s Naked Love Blog
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The amazing writer Edie Meidav (who also happens to be our friend and neighbor) is out today with a new novel: “Lola, California”, called “brilliant” and “awesome” by Publisher’s Weekly. Meidav is such a force of inspiration that art practically gets spontaneously generated in her wake: above is a beautifully haunting short film created by Snapdragon that’s inspired by “Lola” along with Meidav’s narration; and here is music inspired by the book from Kevin Salem, who calls it “part soundtrack for the reader, part songs inspired by the text … and part music inspired by the cultural identity of the novel.” Below is one of two excerpts from “Lola, California” that Meidav is generously allowing us to publish here — this one about a rape on a Greek island. Stay tuned next week for the second excerpt about two friends go-go dancing. Both are compellingly creepy and deeply moving, even without the context of the full novel:

Chord progression being an island of a moment in Greece bearing two girls, nurtured on American soil and pieties, hitchhiking to get a boat back to the mainland from which they’ll take a bus toward a plane toward home so they can return toward starting the first year of college and all its unknowns. These girls intersect with a native mode: two men of the islands driving a truck on a highway.

The truckers pull over, understanding the girls enough to suggest a destination, asking do the girls mind stopping at a restaurant? Four plates of salad and fish, an afternoon stretching on, a broad continent of arm, a brush of skin, a narrow hand pulled back, continental drift, rough thumbs pressing an apology and offers of endless ouzo. The men drive farther down the road only to pull into another outdoor bar. Drink, dab bread into glistening plates of olive oil, dab hands, a brush of skin, no apology, drink and drive, brush some more, pull into an- other bar.

We got to get to our boat, says one of the girls, it’s getting late. Let’s go check the schedule at the train station. One girl looks around out- side the truck while one slouches inside, contemplating. The afternoon has slipped through their hands, a wild rodent. One man inside, one outside and, a drink-and-dab earlier, the plan must have been hatched: without warning, the man in the truck takes off with only the one girl inside, a tectonic plate shifting.

He is driving her up the mountain road toward, ostensibly, the train station. For no reason the girl can see, he pulls over on the side, of- fering her then that downward arc that will become so familiar: his hand on the back of her neck, pushing her head down toward his lap as if a gentle derrick.

She resists and he pushes farther, deeper toward the core of the earth. Years later another man will explore this similar gravitational potential and she will throw up in his lap, oddly elated. But right now there is the problem of her head’s habit of numbness and the bothersome question that lets her go down more easily: had she wanted this overpowering?

Also and not insignificantly she wants to ace the situation, sur- vive intact. Like that heiress, kidnapped, who immediately saw her kidnappers’ point of view. Could spinelessness be a surprise tactic of strength?

Ravines and clefts in his forearms, along his neck.

Does he do manual labor on the side? She had liked his looks, the delicacy of the eyes, a femininity against harsher angles. His hand not ungentle but insistent on the back of her neck toward his lap where he is conveniently unsprung. She hadn’t chosen to enter this situation but now it has arisen, a pop-up dollhouse. A man’s hand warming her neck and is she willing or not? If she doesn’t want to be doing this, can this son of this country of mothers’ sons tell? How can a man want something not freely given?

Does he tell himself that it is wanted? But maybe she wants. Is it bad if you aren’t the first person to know what you want?

And hadn’t the lolling tongues and technicolor availability of cer- tain magazines, her mother’s creased copies of certain novels, initi- ated her into some permanent hoarfrost of open-lipped readiness?

In ninth grade, on the pastel carpet in the parental bedroom, the televised cartoon of Yellow Submarine playing on the tiny TV set above a pile of tea towels, had she not mouthed for the first time the young and grateful Flynn, seeking to initiate both of them? What was different between her liking for that boy’s good nature, his father- less making-the-best-of-it self, and this moment in a Greek truck? Flynn too young and flimsy to bear the weight of her vague fantasy, not desire, really, but an apery of futurity, an ironic paroxysm.

Her head breaks on the thought. She’s no virgin but in this truck in Greece she wants to choose, choice everything: she could choose rape and then, in a fight with this fellow, wouldn’t she win? If she doesn’t choose, she’ll emit the scent of fear and some unguessed-at contrap- tion might release a lever making the whole moment plummet be- yond danger into irreversibility on a mountain roadside where no one in the world knows the exact coordinates of her body. The mo- ment narrows. She floats above her body, allowing for a certain kind of survival.

After and in the truck’s fish-scent, she rifles through the phrase- book. Trying for let’s go back, though can a person go back? Epeestro- phe, she says.

Her rapist, a man of few words, agrees, drawing dignity back into himself. As if something quite normal has transpired, he drives back, fingers tapping out an idle rhythm on the steering wheel, knuckle hair matted by a wedding band shimmering in the last of the day. At the restaurant bar, her friend runs to the car. To stay safe from the other truckdriver, her friend had hidden atop the restaurant roof if in plain sight of diners and cooks, another chicken avoiding the pan.

Stunned, the two girls grab backpacks, running blind in the dusk only to end up lying in a ditch. The girl who’d gone for the ride hugs the one who’d been left behind, crying: I hate men! Falling still when the two men tramp near holding flashlights, muttering as if they’ve stumbled into an outtake from a war movie, seeking American girls fallen to an earthen trench, parachutes broken. A search party of en- emy soldiers who back away when they find nothing. One girl raped but might as well have happened to both of them.

They will never talk about it. A vessel containing past and future, all the crisp nights when one girl failed to show at the other’s house or the moment when one had cried, saying your friendship means more to me, I didn’t mean to hurt you with that boy, I didn’t know you had a crush on him, he just showed up around my house, throwing rocks at my window at night and I won’t see him if it makes you feel better. Or the moment when one visits the other’s room at college. A debu- tante roommate will say—after seeing the girls’ shared uniform of messy hair, thrift-store patterned skirts and men’s white shirts—to the girl she’d suspected was a witch because of her penchant for standing on her head and burning incense, that, at least, after meet- ing the girl’s friend, she could understand the girl a tiny bit better.

It will contain the night when one of them finishes college and moves to Los Angeles, driving fast at night on Highway Five’s hills toward an art school with an old boyfriend who himself had just fin- ished driving across the country to start over and he’s offering a bite of moo shu vegetables while her favorite song of the moment plays, a latterday version of Lola which happens to have the name Jane in the refrain.

A truth will pop in her mind: that lost bubble. She lives in a post- girlfriend universe, left entirely alone to experience others. She will hold that boyfriend’s hand, drive hard.

“Lola, California” is available today from Amazon.com.


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A few weeks ago we apprised you of the ridiculous and offensive comments made by Nobel laureate and jackass VS Naipaul — basically that all women writers are ‘sentimental’ and ‘unequal to me’. There have been some great reactions to that old-fashioned fart’s blatant sexism. The latest is writer Joanne Elizabeth Valin’s new blog, Love Letters to VS Naipal: “On the occasion of his declaration that no woman writer is, has been, or ever could be his equal.” She’s currently collecting and curating “intelligent letters with intelligent content. Be they spiked with vitriol, awash with sentiment, amused to the point of disbelief, or simply bored with the same old argument, your love letters should both inform and entertain.” The first just went up by author Edie Meidav (whose new novel Lola, California we’ll be excerpting here in the next few weeks) and more will be added soon.

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In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society last week, during which Nobel laureate and jackass VS Naipaul idiotically suggested that women writers are ‘sentimental’ and ‘unequal to me’, he also claimed that ‘I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.’ So the Guardian UK put together a little quiz to see how well people could guess the sex of various passages’ authors. If you skip the quiz and just hit “submit” to see the answers (like we did), you’ll score a 0 out of a possible 10, eliciting the response “Awful. What are you, a girl or something?” Ha ha! (We’ll give you a bit of an edge: the above passage is from The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.)

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Pamela Haag‘s new book “Marriage Confidential” has one of the best subtitles we’ve seen in a long time: “The Post-Romantic Age of Workhorse Wives, Royal Children, Undersexed Spouses, and Rebel Couples Who Are Rewriting the Rules.” That’s a lot to live up to, but the book delivers. And it’s getting good buzz. Below is an excerpt from the section “New Twists on Old Infidelities, Or, The Way We Stray Today”:

….We used to practice a default fidelity in marriage simply because of the expense and inconvenience of an affair (though even with these default obstacles, so many of us still cheated). Now the alignment of access and opportunity on the Web invites an almost default infidelity once you permit yourself that first exploration. Instant messaging, for example, is custom-designed for sexual rogue elements: teenagers and restless married people.

The conventional affair pushes like a tumor against the real life of a marriage. It encroaches on the marriage’s finite, discrete terrain. The new infidelity metaphysic has no boundaries in space or time.

On the one hand, the cheating wife or husband can always be called, always be tracked down through their electronic LoJacks[CE1] . You can actually buy an iPhone “Spouse Tracker” app, for $4.99. The icon shows two gold wedding bands, entwined, and asks, “Is your spouse really at work? At the office party? Where they said they would be? Be 100% sure of your spouse’s location.” The app uses GPS technology to “pinpoint your spouse’s exact location, and sends you an email map of it.” On the other hand, technology creates privacy and possibility across space and on multiple fronts simultaneously; many of us are no longer tethered to the office during the day and the home at night, and we have more potentially free, unaccounted-for time.

The Second Life simulation game, although not at all the exclusive domain of restless married people, allows players to simulate entire identities and relationships through avatars online. “Second life” is an apt term. It’s not an “other” life in a marriage but an added, unobtrusive one, a layer more than a secret. And if one life is added without rippling the surface of the marriage, then why not three, four, or five coexisting lives? It requires only a neophyte’s skills at prevarication, multitasking, compartmentalization, and a few free Yahoo accounts.

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The nameless narrator of David Levithan’s novel The Lover’s Dictionary narrates his relationship in the form of dictionary definitions of words, from aberrant to zenith. Some definitions are a page long, others just a sentence. Which makes it sound gimmicky and cute and Twitterific, but this book is anything but. It’s moving, hilarious, heartbreaking and smart. It’s also something of a guessing game, because the definitions leap back and forth across the span of the relationship. This book is a poignant reminder that words can say everything and nothing — and the same goes for the spaces and the pauses between them. Levithan’s is a spare tale and yet it feels universal, especially because the narrator addresses his partner as a nameless, gender-less “you.” But enough with all this wordiness, let’s just show you what we mean with a few of our favorite entries:

arduous, adj.

Sometimes during sex, I wish there was a button on the small of your back that I could press and cause you to be done with it already.

arrears, n.

My faithfulness was as unthinking as your lapse. Of all the things I thought could go wrong, I never thought it would be that.

“It was a mistake,” you said. But the cruel thing was, it felt like the mistake was mine, for trusting you.

basis, n.

There has to be a moment at the beginning when you wonder whether you’re in love with the person or in love with the feeling of love itself. If the moment doesn’t pass, that’s it — you’re done. And if the moment does pass, it never goes that far. It stands in the distance, ready for whenever you want it back. Sometimes it’s even there when you thought you were searching for something else, like an escape route, or your lover’s face.

catharsis, n.

I took it out on the wall.

I LOVE YOU. I LOVE YOU. YOU FUCKER, I LOVE YOU.

exacerbate, v.

I believe your exact words were: “You’re getting too emotional.”

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photo (not of the author, for the record) by MShades

Mike Sacks is one fifth of the hilarious Association for the Betterment of Sex, the cabal behind the book Our Bodies, Our Junk, which we wrote about last year. So we weren’t surprised in the least to discover how much funny there is in Sacks’ own book, Your Wildest Dreams, Within Reason. It’s a collection of 54 short humor pieces, many of them written in collaboration with the other members of the ABS, amongst others. The essays include everything from “Rules for My Cuddle Party” (“#1: Please do not give birth in the hot tub.”) to a bridegroom on Twitter (“Attempting to fist-bump rabbi”) and icebreakers to avoid (“This party reminds me of 9/11″). To give you a taste, we’re excerpting one of the essays here in full…

Reasons You’re Still Single

You . . .

Own a 60-inch flat-screen Plasma television, but sleep on a broken futon

Have a ferret on your shoulder, and you’re at the mall

Own tie-dyed gym clothes

Once took a night course on improving your oral sex technique

Only feel truly alive in the Renaissance Faire jousting area

Have your “lucky” anal beads hanging from your rear-view mirror

List “Dungeonmaster” on your business card

Hug amusement park mascots

Own a “It’s Not Going to Suck Itself” T-shirt and the “Not” Has Faded Away

Will do anything for “shits and giggles”

Display with pride your framed degree from bartending school

Have a “Peeing Calvin” decal on your electric car

Perform yoga in parks

Have a dangerously high Thetan count

Bring your camera to Happy Hour

Sleep with only a shirt, Porky Pig style

Refuse to drink any beer that has not been “beach-wood aged”

Have had something on your face since the late ’90s

Use the word “scrumptious”

Can only make love while blasting “Orinoco Flow” by Enya

Favorite pickup line: “Hi, I once beat to death an elderly deaf man.”

Have ever taken a date to a restaurant with license plates and antique rakes on the walls

Consider yo-yo tricks a wonderful way to break the ice

Define wearing an umbrella hat as your “calling card”

Carry an NPR “Fresh Air” tote bag

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photo by Daniel Sandoval

We met Wendy Strgar, founder of the company Good Clean Love, at a conference in Vegas (as one does) a few years back and were instant fans. Good Clean Love makes organic love products — for example, lubes that actually smell good, and aren’t packed with nasty artificial sugars (which can lead to yeast infections). She’s all about sustainability, from the environment to your relationship. So we were excited to check out her new book, Love That Works. One of our favorite sections of the book focuses on how mindfulness can improve your sex life. And while some mindfulness advocates drive us crazy with these vague notions of what it means to truly focus, Wendy’s approach is practical and straightforward.

The basic idea is this: mindfulness can help you cut out all the noise that tells you your sex life is not “normal” enough or “experimental” enough. It can help you forget about unsexy distractions like work stress or family dysfunction or body image issues. Mindfulness helps you turn off your overworked mind so you can focus on the physical sensations in your body. “Sensuality is really nothing more than connecting to your senses deeply,” Wendy writes. “It is in the smallest of sensations that this practice comes alive. For instance, actually feel the different textures of skin on your partner’s body, or feel the weight of his or her hands on your lower abdomen, run your fingers through his hair, trace her face with your lips. … Being consumed by your sense of smell with someone you love carries the intrinsic power of presence.”

Of course, mindfulness takes practice, as anyone who sat through two and a half excruciating hours of Julia Roberts in Eat, Pray, Love can tell you. So we asked Wendy to share with us five tips from her book on ways to incorporate mindfulness into your day-to-day love life:

1.  Make it a game. One of everyone’s favorite childhood games, Hot and Cold, is a great way to playfully lead your mate to exactly the places that you most enjoy being touched. Any time you turn your communication into a game, you build up suspense and anticipation because the game opens your exchange to the unexpected. For example, if your partner is kissing your neck and you say, “you’re getting warmer,” you might be pleasantly surprised by the many unexplored erogenous zones they discover on their way down to your preferred spot. Playfulness and laughter are the hors d’oeuvres of passion.

2. Use fantasy to your advantage. I can always pique my husband’s curiosity when I start any conversation with “I had this fantasy about us, and you were doing  ______with me.” Opening up your lover’s imagination both lets him/her know that you are thinking about him in sexy ways and gives him/her permission to try out new things that they might have otherwise been too timid to approach. Sharing fantasies is a playful and effective way to move your love life into new territory.

3. Let someone else do the talking. Both men’s and women’s magazines offer monthly advice for improving your love life. Sometimes giving someone a good idea can be as simple as leaving the magazine open to the right page on your bed. If that doesn’t work, a simple conversation starter like, “ I just read this interesting, crazy, cool (pick your adjective) article in this magazine. What do you think about….?” Books and television shows can also be used like this, so just find good sources to get your conversation started.

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