Kurt R.A. Giambastiani

Week Three of NaNoWriMo has been productive. Sort of.

At the end of last week, I was facing a scene I’ve been dreading for a long time. A sex scene.

I hate writing sex scenes.

To be frank, my primary challenge with them is based in fear. Sex scenes are where a lot of authors either make it or break it with their readers, and male authors have a pretty solid track record of making total asses of themselves in how they present the action and inner thoughts of their characters, especially the female participants. So, there’s a lot at stake in these scenes, and since my readership skews heavily toward women, particularly so in my books.

I also don’t write a lot of them. I don’t write erotica and what little of it I’ve read is way too interested in techniques and specifics for my tastes, both as a reader and as a writer. I’m more interested in the emotions of the interaction than in who is putting what where. The thing is, for a sex scene to be in my book it has to be pertinent to the plot. It has to advance the action, create a conflict, help develop a character, or have some other relevance to the story before I’ll include it.

None of this is to say that my books are all prim and prudish, devoid of physical love between characters. Folks in my books have sex; it’s just that, in most cases, I don’t think it belongs “on-screen,” as it were, so I’ll “fade to black” or simply refer to it in past tense, without bringing it front and center with cameras rolling.

So, I haven’t written a lot of them, and there’s a lot of pressure to get it right when I do write one.

And that’s what I’ve been working toward for the past couple of weeks. Months, really.

But, this week, I wrote it. It’s pretty much all I wrote this week, but I did write it.

I have no idea if it’s any good or not. At this point, I’ll just assume it isn’t and worry about making it presentable (and not laughable) in rewrite. At least the damned writing-it-down part is behind me, and I can get on with the rest of the story.

Onward.

k