Novel Update

I have passed the 10,000 word mark for November a full day ahead of the pace.  And as I said in the last post, I had 4000 words done before November started, so the manuscript is actually over 14,000 words now.  Here's an excerpt from the first draft of Chapter One (it very much revolves around art modeling, but it is fiction):

               The first time I ever laid eyes on Lydia Nelson, she was as naked as Lady Godiva on her famous ride through Coventry.  Of course, I could also say that the first time Lydia ever laid eyes on me, I was as naked as Michelangelo’s David.  So in that, we were even.

                I had been modeling for the figure drawing classes at the university for almost a year when she stepped into my life.  Late in the semester most of the classes used two models in some sort of long pose.  I had already done one such class earlier that week, with a young waif of a girl named Kelsey.  I had known Kelsey before we shared a platform; she and I had met several times in the little changing room that was shared by all the models.  The University of North Texas had what was probably the largest art program in the state.  There were at least two classes using models at any one time during the day from Monday through Thursday.  So the models’ changing room was very busy whenever one set of classes, say the eight o’clock to ten-fifty period, ended and then next classes, like the eleven o’clock to one-fifty period, began.

                I show up early to every class, and that Thursday two o’clock class was no exception.  Two other models were in the changing room when I got there, getting dressed from the previous session.  One of them was Walter, who was a fixture in the art department.  He had been a model at UNT for at least twenty years, and was the only person on the model list older than I was.  The other model was a beautiful blonde student named Rochelle.  She was topless with a bra in her hand when I gave a courtesy knock and entered, her large breasts, with the colorless almost white nipples, seeming to defy gravity.

“Hey guys,” I said as I slipped into the room, being careful to make sure that the door didn’t swing too far open, not that Walter or Rochelle would have minded an audience that much after having just spent three hours in their birthday suits in front of a classroom full of people.

“How goes it?” I said in polite greeting.

I found a spot on the counter next to Rochelle’s stuff to set my bag, zipped it open, and rummaged around for my robe.

“Ready to go home and soak in a hot bath,” Rochelle said as she slipped into her bra and tried to fasten it in the back.

She continued to struggle as I pulled my shoes and socks off.  Finally, I stepped behind her.  “Here,” I said and fastened the bra for her.

“Thanks.  One long three hour pose,” she said, shaking her head.  “My left arm doesn’t want to bend like it used to.”

“How many breaks?” I asked.

“Just Three.”

“You are an iron woman,” Walter said.  He slung his backpack on and started for the door.  “Catch y’all later.”

Rochelle and I both said bye as Walter slipped out.  I looked at the schedule on the wall as I slipped out of my pants and saw “David Michaels & Lydia Nelson” under the 2 to 5 Room 324 column.

                “Do you know this Lydia I’m supposed to be modeling with?” I asked Rochelle.

                “Nope.  I saw her name on the schedule last week, but I’ve never met her.”

                “You should hang around,” I suggested.  “If she doesn’t show, you might get some extra hours.”  The thought of sharing a platform for three hours with a nude Rochelle was a very pleasant one.

                “I would if I wasn’t already tired as hell.  Besides, she must have showed up last week, or she wouldn’t have been on the schedule this time.”

                That was true.  The UNT model coordinator was very unforgiving of models who didn’t show up when they were scheduled.   Rochelle pulled her t-shirt on as I slipped mine off.

                “Good luck with ‘Lydia,’” Rochelle said.

                I was naked by then, shaking my robe out and trying to find my sleeve, which had been turned inside out after my last session.  Rochelle backed out the door, looking at me and winking as she went.

                “See ya,” I said, and then I was alone.

                I put my robe on and tied it closed.  My house slippers were still in my bag.  I pulled them out, dropped them on the floor, and put my bare feet into them.  I thought about staying in the changing room and waiting for Lydia, just so I could introduce myself before we had to spend three hours naked together.  I looked at the clock on the wall and saw that I had four minutes until the schedule start of class.  I started folding my clothes and setting them on the top of my modeling bag.

A Novel November

This blog will probably be silent for the next month as I pour all of my writing energy into a novel.  I've always considered myself a writer even though I have gone long periods without writing any stories.  But even during those periods, I was writing something.  Writing a Facebook status is writing something.  And I've written two blogs over the past few years, a pro-life one and this one on art modeling.

I started the novel a little over a week ago, and I'm about 4,000 words into it.  I've taken the last couple of days off from writing to finish the book I've been reading (Stephen King's 11/22/63 which I highly recommend) and to prepare myself for the big National Novel Writing Month.  Technically, I should be starting from scratch on November 1st, but doing the 50,000 words in 30 days challenge was something that just hit me in the last couple of days.  So, if I do get 50,000 words by November 30th, my novel will be sitting at around 54,000 words.  And to be marketable, it needs to be around 70 to 80 thousand words.  And I very much want it to be marketable.  Being an author doesn't have to make me rich, but if it would just replace the income from my full time IT job and allow me more time to model, then I would be a very happy camper.

And by the way, the novel will center around two art models who first meet when they model for an art class together.  Their relationship develops when they participate in an unconventional and controversial anti-abortion protest.  So the novel will be a blending of my two blogs and will deal with such uncontroversial subjects as religion, sex, and politics.  It's something that I hope takes on a life of its own.  I'd much rather create my characters and let them determine where this thing goes rather than scripting the entire thing.  I'm hoping that writing that many words in that short of a time frame sparks that very thing.

Vacation Day

I took a vacation day from my full-time job this past Tuesday.  I don't get many since I'm still new.  I have five regular vacation days and one floating holiday for 2013, and Tuesday was my next-to-last available day.  And how did I spend that day?  I managed to get booked for a couple of classes at the University of North Texas.  Does it seem odd to take vacation days from one job so that I can go work at another?  If it were any other job, I would say yes, but modeling is, to me, not just any other job.  I love any opportunity to model that I can get.  I'm already looking at a date in November to take and go model again, using that last vacation day.

The classes I did were Drawing II classes, and we did the perspective exercise that I blogged about last spring.  This time though (and for the first time in my near 29 year modeling career), I managed to get video of myself modeling.

The casting agency that was doing the casting for Naked and Afraid contacted me about a new show they are doing.  I applied for it (without a clear understanding of what I would be doing if I were selected), and my application was advanced to the interview stage.  I did a phone interview which I had to video.  I then had to upload that video to the production company.  As part of that process, they wanted me to submit about thirty photographs of myself in my every day life.  They also wanted me to shoot and upload a "B-Roll," video of myself, doing what I do.  So I took video of myself sitting at my desk at work, going into the church, and holding a baby in the nursery.  I also found a video clip of myself playing vintage base ball that I uploaded with the others.  And on Tuesday, I took and uploaded video of myself modeling for a drawing class.

Getting the video wasn't easy.  I did several one minute gesture poses for the class that I tried to shoot.  But in the resulting video, I was only visible from the shoulders up.  I changed the position of my borrowed iPhone (the production company specified iPhone because it would take 1080P high definition video) and went into a 20 minute pose.  The result was a fifteen minute video of myself being really still (when the entire B-Roll footage was supposed to have been about five minutes).  Of course, I couldn't break the pose to turn the video off, and I wasn't going to ask the teacher or one of the students to disrupt their class time to do it for me.  So the video ran until the iPhone ran out of space.

I did upload the entire fifteen minutes to the production company and told them they could edit it down however they wanted.  The beginning of the video should be usable since the instructor is in the shot giving instruction to her students as I got into the pose.  What I found really interesting was watching the video with the FF button pressed.  I could see my respiration and that my facial expression changed a bit as the pose went on.  But other than that, I stayed really still.  It was a simple standing pose, and there wasn't any swaying or fidgeting.

Modeling and Survival Practice

I've got multiple modeling gigs scheduled this week, which is a very good thing.  I was at the University of North Texas yesterday modeling for a couple of Drawing II classes.  For most students in those classes, yesterday was their very first experience in drawing a nude model.  There's nothing like being their first...

I'm less optimistic about my chances for getting on season two of Naked and Afraid.  I got an email from the producer I talked on the phone with, and she said that, at this point, they were not interviewing anyone else without "hard core" survival skills.  A little while later, I got a Facebook message from the production company (in answer to a message I had sent them last week) saying that I was under consideration.  I've got my family all set for a series of camping trips over the next year, where I will practice such things as staring a fire using multiple methods, trapping small game, fishing, eating roots and berries, etc. in the hopes that there is a season 3 of Naked and Afraid that I could try for.

I know a lot about survival, about finding water and purifying it if necessary, about finding food, building shelter, drying meat for preservation, and tanning a hide with the brain of the animal.  What I don't have is much actual experience doing such things.  I'm always working or modeling or fulfilling some family obligation.  My full time job provides very little paid time off, and I just can't afford to take a leave and go live off the land for any extended period of time.  That's what I hope to get out of this show, a leave paid for by the production company to practice my survival skills for three weeks.  I had hoped that the nudity, which doesn't bother me in the least, would keep their pool of applicants low enough to give me a chance of being chosen.

I have given some thought to how such an experience would change me.  How would I view modern society after living away from it for those three weeks?  How would I see myself after having to struggle for everything (water, food, and shelter) that we take for granted in this society?  How would others see me after seeing me in the wild on their television?  Would I still have that Baby Whisperer touch in the church nursery where I volunteer every week, or would some of that gentleness have left me from the Naked and Afraid experience?  Would I be able to come back to work and sit at my computer after living, really living, in the wild for three weeks?  Gosh, I would love the opportunity to find out all of those things.

Things that Make Me Say Wow

The Texas Academy of Figurative Art recently redesigned its website.  With that redesign came an updated student gallery.  All the pieces in that gallery are amazing, but I'm naturally partial to the three of them that feature me as the model.  One of those is the drawing from my long 42 hour pose earlier this year.  The artist is a young lady named Katy who also did the drawing at the top of my blog.  Her drawing of me in that long pose is one of the most amazing drawings of myself I have ever seen...

The Agony of Da Feet

I posted last time about my application to the Discovery Channel primitive survival show Naked and Afraid.  I'm still hoping/waiting for a callback on that, but I decided that I needed to prepare myself just in case I, by some miracle, do get chosen.  So I started taking my evening walks barefooted to toughen the soles of my feet.  My first such barefooted walk was Saturday night.  I modeled for the Sunday open figure drawing lab at the Dallas Creative Arts Center the following day, and my feet killed me the entire three hours.  The gestures were difficult enough, but the first 30 minute pose was a standing one.  Normally, I love standing poses, but this one was a struggle with my sore feet.

My mistake, I think, was staying on the concrete sidewalk.  I went on another walk Monday night and varied my surfaces from concrete to green grass to bare dirt to brown, dead grass.  I also walked across the playground at the park which is composed of wood shavings.  That wood felt worse than anything.

I wrote a blog post last year called Getting My Head Examined about modeling for a portrait session.  Maybe I do need my head examined in another way for wanting to be on this Naked and Afraid show.  I first watched it in a hotel room in Austin.  I was going to testify before the Texas Senate Health and Human Services Committee the following day regarding the "fetal pain" bill, so I had a lot on my mind.  As soon as I saw the show, I immediately wanted to be on it.  That desire was so strong that I had to quit watching before the episode ended.  I figured my chances for getting on were very slim, so I put it out of my mind.  I didn't think about it again until I came across a casting call for season two when browsing Craig's List (looking for opportunities to model for art classes).

Now, I keep checking my phone and my email, hoping for that call to go to Los Angeles for the next step in the casting process.  Nothing so far.

My desire to be on this show can be attributed, I think, to many things.  Number one is my love of the nude human form, especially nudity that has nothing whatsoever to do with sex.  I also crave adventure.  That's why I am not content in just my day job and why I keep modeling.  I love to travel, and yet, I've never been outside of the United States.  I want a break from the daily grind of work and traffic.  And finally, I love the pureness of this idea.  I've said before in this blog that I feel pure when I model nude.  I play vintage base ball because of the pureness of the game under those 1860's rules: no gloves, no over-running first base on a ground ball without the risk of being tagged out, etc.  The challenge presented by Naked and Afraid is the challenge faced by our very distant ancestors; how to survive in a hostile world without any modern conveniences.  The survivalists on the show are purely human, as created by God, without any of the added things that make our lives more comfortable (or complacent).

I will be taking a crash course in survival techniques until one of two things happen: 1) I get confirmation that I am no longer being considered for the show, or 2) I leave for my three-week survival destination (a tropical island perhaps, or the Outback, or the Amazon, or the Congo, or some other exotic and challenging locale). One way or another, let the adventure begin.

Naked and Afraid

I came across a casting call for the Discovery Channel show Naked and Afraid last night, and I submitted an email to them. I've only watched the show once, but it was interesting. Two strangers of the opposite sex are put into the wild without anything (including clothing). They then have to survive for three weeks.

The casting call was looking for survivalists, and I have virtually no experience in that area. But I figured, why not submit anyway. I'm sure that they have more challenges in casting that show than most others. After I sent the email last night, I got on their Facebook page this morning and found an online form to fill out. About an hour or two later, I got an email from someone at the production company asking for a phone number and a good time to call. I answered, and she called about 20 minutes into the time window I gave her.

I gave her my life history, including my college degrees, my stint working for the New York Public Library, my current IT career, and my part time nude art modeling job and how it came to be the main topic of conversation with Regis when I was on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. She also asked about my church and how being a Southern Baptist conflicted (or not) with my being a nude model. She also asked about my political affiliation, and I told her about my run as the Libertarian Party candidate for State Representative in 2012. When she asked about my outdoor survival experience, I was honest and told her that I didn't have much. I did give her the pitch that the first half of the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away would have been boring if the main character had been a survival expert before he crashed near that island, that it was his struggle and discovery that made that movie compelling. When she asked me which environment I preferred among jungle, tropical island, desert, or swamp, I chose tropical island. I told her I chose that because rainfall is fairly regular in the tropics and that making some kind of container for rain collection would provide me and my companion a clean water supply for the three weeks. Swamps had a lot of water, I said, but a lot of it is stagnant. And finding water would be a struggle in a desert. She seemed pleased with that response, and she told me that most people chose the tropical island but don't really give a survival reason why...

I think it was a good conversation. She said she thought I was a good fit for the show (mainly because I was more than comfortable with the nudity involved) but that she had concerns about my survival skills. She said they would talk about it and get back to me next week. If I were selected as a final candidate, I would be flown out to Los Angeles for more interviews. I put my chances at getting into that final candidate status at about 10 percent because of that lack of survival experience, etc. But it would certainly be an adventure...