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Author Has Sex for 100 Straight Days, Book Editors Get to Read About It

Douglas Brown, sex machine.Screen capture from Denver Post online video

We hear agent Daniel Lazar of Writers House is out to editors right now with a book proposal sporting the genius title Just Do It. Why is it genius? Because the nonfiction proposal, by Denver Post writer and blogger Douglas Brown, follows the middle-aged author and his wife as they pledge to have sex at least once a day for 100 consecutive days. During that period, the white-bread couple — complete with two kids and minivan — do what they can to spice up their time together:

te>We did it on top of a mountain. During the porn industry’s annual flesh circus in Las Vegas. In a yoga ashram, and in a remote yurt. In an ostentatious hotel, a cheap motel, and a Very Victorian bed-and-breakfast in Wyoming in the dead of winter. In our basement…

For the first time in our relationship, we surveyed porno. Annie tested sex toys. I tried variations of one accessory several times, a simple device with a brutal name, a word so unsettling to me that I found it difficult to pronounce in anything more resounding than a whisper: cockring.

TMI!!! It might get uncomfortable in the Denver Post newsroom when word gets out. But what a great stunt-based book concept, like A.J. Jacobs, but with sex! You have to assume that every single male editor who received the submission is already trying to figure out a way to get his wife to read the proposal without seeming like an asshole. (For the record, Brown claims that his wife came up with the idea.) If Brown is too quick to reach for squishy self-help language where a better writer might find more laughs, it’s hard to argue that in modern America a tendency toward self-help will really hurt his book sales.

The book’s simultaneously out for film consideration. Is this a movie? We could see Judd Apatow snapping this up, casting Paul Rudd and Catherine Keener, and making a fantastic R-rated comedy for grown-ups. But one Hollywood insider we spoke to scoffed, calling the hypothetical audience for such a film “people who like having sex in a yurt with a cockring on.” But even he grudgingly noted the immediate appeal of the concept: “I told my wife we should try for 200 days.”

Author Has Sex for 100 Straight Days, Book Editors Get to Read About It