Dear Wonderful Readers,

It’s the moment many of you have been patiently waiting for:

The Intimacy Journal is officially live on Kickstarter! 🚀

And we are already 25% funded! Thank you so much to everyone who has already supported us. If you’d like to join us, you can back the project to get your own Intimacy Journal, gift a journal to a friend, join our workshops, or book a one-on-one writing session with me. Check out our project video and all the options here:

The seeds of this book were planted almost a year and a half ago, when I first heard Peppur Chambers read her poem, “Can I?”, at an open mic with The London Writers’ Salon (Writers' Hour Magazine). I invited Peppur to read her work in my first sex writing workshop. It was beautiful and daring for those of us who shared what we wrote. I felt like we had stumbled across something magical.

I realized that writing openly about my sex life here for you all on Misseducated has taught me a lot. I learned more about my desires, my pleasures, my kinks, and my fantasies. I learned that writing is a powerful tool to connect us with the erotic. As I shared more in “How to be Shamelessly Sexy” and “How to Keep A Sex Journal,” I realized that I had a unique opportunity to create something that you all might just love. A journal that each of you could fill with your innermost, spiciest thoughts!

I will admit something: I underestimated the joy that creating this project would give me, and that I could complete it so quickly. Writing my novel required a specific kind of marathon in terms of the creative process, spanning 14 years for me in total. Yet since I started working full-time on this project at the beginning of July, from start to finish, it has taken me almost four months (which included my one month of road-tripping and mountain escapades in the Western US, by the way). Putting this journal together for you has been a surprisingly sweet and pure joy. It brought me to new heights of creative euphoria, and I finished the first draft within 30 days. My soundtrack for this entire experience was the instrumental “aubades” album by Jean-Michel Blais. He’s an absolute legend, and I’ve listened to this on repeat hundreds of times:

While I’ve been quiet on here over the last few weeks, I bulldozed through a lot of extremely stressful yet tedious logistics, such as negotiating with printers and navigating the bureaucratic Mexican tax stuff, so that I could deliver your copies to you with ample time for the holiday gift-giving season. With an awesome creative team from Sustancia MX, and amazing contemporary voices, including Peppur’s, somehow we did it! I’ll update you more on that later, as the book also features lovely poems by Abigail A Mlinar Burns, of Happy Endings and Ozy Aloziem.

Come back for more! 😉 🫦

Launching a book in four months is a pretty crazy thing to do. But when you get a strong sense of conviction about a project, like I did with this journal, there’s simply no time to waste. You only have a little window of the universe’s offering of timing, luck, and good fortune. So you just have to go for it. That’s how I felt with this project. I just knew I wanted to be the person to create this. And here we are.

Words of Praise for The Intimacy Journal ✨ 🌿

I’m honored to share that two of my idols, Cindy Gallop and Anna Lee, have given short book reviews of The Intimacy Journal:

“We could all do with asking ourselves more questions - especially the questions that we would never think to ask ourselves. Tash Doherty’s Intimacy Journal is a wonderful way to explore and get intimate with yourself, to improve and increase intimacy with others, while enjoying some amazing poetry along the way. The perfect gift for someone you love to love them more - yourself.” - Cindy Gallop, Founder & CEO of MakeLoveNotPorn; Author of Dear Cindy.

“As someone who’s always advocated for understanding pleasure through self-reflection, I love how The Intimacy Journal fuses introspective journaling with erotic curiosity. Tash’s prompts push you to think—and feel—more deeply.” – Anna Lee, Co-founder & CEO, lioness.io, (S)explore by Lioness.

More about The Intimacy Journal 📕💋

The Intimacy Journal is an erotic poetry anthology and guided journal with 20 days of writing prompts to help you awaken your shamelessly sexy self. It’s a tool to explore your love life and your turn-ons, and define sexual intimacy, fantasy, desire, and pleasure on your own terms. This is not something you can find on Amazon with a best seller’s rank! This is an independent creative project, inspired by and brought to you from Mexico City.

This is quite a full-circle moment for me. I never could have imagined, while living in New York and working my desk job, that one day I would be creating a tool that helps people use my favorite thing, writing, to explore physical intimacy with themselves and others.

I cannot thank you enough for being here! It’s honestly so much fun to be able to share this with you. Writing this blog for you has taken a certain amount of grit and vulnerability over these last few years. I am so grateful you are here and along for the ride.

Sending love,

Tash

💌 ✍️

p.s. Here’s a photo of me with Rahsa Dezmen, the author of the poem “Open”, which you can find in the last chapter of The Intimacy Journal, for the theme of “Evolution”. She did a reading of her work at the book launch I hosted on my rooftop in Mexico City on Sunday night!

Get full access to Misseducated by Tash Doherty at misseducated.substack.com/subscribe