When I was 16, sitting in my family room watching Corey Hart sing about sunglasses at night (yes, I loved that song), I never thought: someday I'll be on MTV - maybe wearing a torn dress and dancing with prostitutes just like Pat Benetar when she belts out, "Love is a battlefield..." But, here we are so many years later, and I am!! Well, I'm not exactly breaking out into an impromputu dance with hookers, or even romping on the beach in black and white like another of my fav 's, Don Henley's Boys of Summer. But my book is on MTV, even if I'm not. For the month of May, MTV is running ads for PLAN B. Very curious to see the ad...my friend Marley saw it last week and emailed me, so I ended up watching two hours of Tiara Girls in an attempt to catch it...not the best use of my time. Although I did learn more about teen beauty pagents than I ever thought I'd need to know. And I came away with a serious case of tiara envy.

I'm on the slippery slope towards James Frey-dom and the likes of a plagerizing Kaavya Viswanathan ? Are you kidding me? This touched my funny bone too much to pass up.

My lovely agent posted a very innocent little blurb about me to her blog and created a firestorm that has me being called everything from a money-hungry sell-out to a slut who shuns her married status (ok, so I exagerate... sort of). In any case, Kristin's post was supposed to be about the names an author chooses to write under (Jenny for my teen book, in this case), and why. She also happened to mention that in my author photo for PLAN B I didn't wear my wedding band (the idea there being that the book was written for a younger audience who may not think that some married chick pushing 40 could ever understand what it's like to be a teenager).

Well, my, my, that was the wrong thing to say. The subsequent moral indignation and chest thumping about my "pretending" not to be married had people way more rightous than myself up in arms. I'm accused of being "embarassed" to admit I'm married (well, when he wears lampshades and dances in public, sometimes I'll agree with that assessment); somebody actually condemned "the marketing machine which coerces these choices."

Well, not wearing my wedding rings was my choice, so I take full responsibility (although I would love to see the marketing machine that supposedly is behind my book because right now I think it's just some nice girl in Simon & Schuster's publicity department). I'm also an intelligent enough person to be able to determine what my photo looks like.

Goodness people, lighten up! Use all those big words and brain cells on something a wee bit more important than an author's photo. I haven't received one single email from a reader of PLAN B that questioned my marital status or seemed even vaguely concerned that I was "hiding" my spouse in a closet somewhere. The emails are more along the lines of, enjoyed your book, when's the next one coming out?

Now, maybe if I hadn't dedicated PLAN B to my daughter, or if my bio said something like, "Jenny is an uber-hip and cool nineteen year old with a belly button ring and tatoo of Orlando Bloom on her ass," then these poor, impressionable girls would have reason to be misled. But a quick perusal of this blog and the stories referencing my husband and kids, and anyone with half a brain gets the picture. And, you've got to give girls more credit - they don't really buy books because of the author photos (unless it's a guy and he's really, really hot, probably). They buy them for the story. And, now, thanks to Kristin's blog, I have one hell of a story to tell my husband - who has that very ringless photo on his desk and thinks I'm way hotter than Orlando Bloom.

For the record: it's Sunday at 5:17 and my left hand has been ring-free since Friday. Scandalous, I know...or maybe I don't need gold rings to actually remember I'm married.