Word on a Whim

Writing a good Sex Scene

This is something that I struggle with – writing about it without including gratuitous details or off-putting graphic references to body parts.  Here are couple of snippets from books I have read that really don’t do it for me:

“maintaining his erection against her thigh, he lubricated her with his hand”

Sorry but Yuck!

“she felt the length of his shaft”

They were down a mine, right?

If I am reading a love scene, I feel cheated if the couple go off to bed and shut the door on me, but yet it can be cringe-making to be allowed behind the door.

As a teenager I loved the work of DH Lawrence and must have read just about everything he ever wrote – and how sensitively he wrote it!  Yes, he could be graphic, but then the ‘C’ word in his day sounded okay.  DH Lawrence also describes human emotions as they are, sometimes forsaking delicacy.  His characters feel anxiety in their bowels rather than as a butterfly fluttering in the chest.

Many years ago I read Roald Dahl’s ‘My Uncle Oswald’ (and I might quote this wrong as my copy got passed on along with all the Lawrence books) but I still recall a scene where he is looking through a window and he narrates something like this;

“I am not a voyeur.  The act of copulation is like that of picking your nose.  It is okay to be doing it yourself but to witness someone else doing it is a singularly unpleasant spectacle.”

That cracked me up when I read it and has stuck in my mind since about 1990, and probably explains why I struggle with sex scenes and why I will never be entirely at ease with writing them.  But I hope to keep practising …

Jules

Now available as a Paperback

Sorry to change back the subject, but ‘The Rise of Serge and the Fall of Leo’ is now available as a Paperback (368 pages), in addition to Amazon Kindle format!

Dean’s book cover looks superb and Imprint Digital’s printing and binding is excellent.  I really hope that what’s written on the pages is of similar quality – and I hope that you will read it and let me know what you think, either by commenting on this blog or by filling in the contact form on the top of this page or by writing a review on Amazon.

To link to the Amazon Kindle version (on Amazon.co.uk) click on the book cover image.  It can also be purchased in USD from Amazon.com.

To order a copy of the paperback using PayPal -UK only please (owing to postage cost) click the ‘PayPal click here to buy’ button, beneath the cover image.

I hope you enjoy reading the story as much as I enjoyed writing it.

Thank you,

Jules

What shall I do next?

I have finally submitted the PDF file to the printers, and the paperbacks are in the process of being printed.  Whilst I’m looking forward to receiving them I am dreading discovering a typo the minute I look inside.  Not that I ever want to read my BF book again – after all that proof-reading.

There are some books I wrote years ago that I could dig up and re-write; all of them completely different from the one I have just finished, and different from each other – or maybe I should try something new?

An issue I have with writing in my spare time is that it doesn’t leave much time for reading other people’s work, but when I decided to read something instead of jumping into a new project, I found I was still in proof-reading mode and was checking out the punctuation instead of enjoying the story.

I will be glad to get my teeth into something new!

Still proof reading ‘The Rise of Serge and the Fall of Leo’

I thought I had been through it with a fine tooth comb but, randomly dipping into it, I spotted a typo that sent me back to the beginning to read the whole damn thing yet again … slowly … looking at the individual words rather than combining them into something I recognised, and yes, I am picking up one or two errors that I missed the previous time, and finding it hard to believe that I missed them.  Other people’s mistakes in prose jump straight out at me!

Yesterday I found one of my characters stoking a dog instead of stroking it.  Oops!  I can’t blame the spell-checker for that one – but I do get cross with it for arguing with me all the time about apostrophe use, to the extent that I begin to doubt myself.  In the book I have frequently used it’s as an abbreviation for it is and the spell-checker keeps trying to persuade me to remove the apostrophe.  That is just one example of the spell-checker being annoying, which prompts me to be a bit too click-happy on the Ignore button, so I end up skipping some of its valid corrections.  See, I do know how to use the apostrophe!   I also know this story so well by now that I have no idea whether it’s any good or not.  I believed it was good when I had just finished writing it, but I am too close to it now to judge it – it has turned into a grammar and spelling challenge.

I only hope that when it is eventually published, people will read it and tell me honestly what they think.

Loving my characters

‘The Rise of Serge and the Fall of Leo’ took me a long time to write, and I gradually grew to love Serge and Leo as if they were family. I would plan future chapters of the story whilst awake at night, or washing up, or stuck in traffic, and I missed them when the book was finished and they were no longer part of my daily life. The project had been shelved for months when real life events took over; resulting in some continuity issues which had to be resolved. And then, when it was all over, I wrote the synopsis!

The final proof reading is still ongoing but I’m finding I want to change things, which is annoying, as it introduces more scope for errors and I don’t want to have to go through it all again.  Particularly in the early chapters, I keep thinking Serge wouldn’t react like that, or that’s not a word that Leo would use.  I guess it’s because their personalities have developed and characteristics reinforced over the course of time, and I now know exactly what they would say or do in any situation.  Only they’re not with me any more …

Proof reading my own work

It is not ideal.  I am very quick to spot other people’s typos, but I look at a paragraph of my own words and only see what I intended to write.  It does help that I finished the book a while ago, so there is a sense of re-visiting it.  The closer I am to it, the less likely I am to spot the mistakes.

I am not only checking for mistakes but also for consistencies.  Sometimes I have written ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’ with a full-stop after it and sometimes without, and there are places where the word processor has inverted the speech marks the wrong way; normally in dialogue, where the speaker’s words are interrupted, represented by a dash – or else when their words trail off … and this is more noticeable with Times New Roman than with Arial, owing to TNR being more curvy.  (Hmm.  Okay, don’t worry, I’m done with fonts!)

There are also times when I am eluded by the common name that everyone else uses for something.  I had one of my characters turning off the main road and into a ‘business complex’, which didn’t sound right.  I asked my partner, “What do you call those places with a huge car park surrounded by shops like Argos, Next, Boots and PC World and there is always a McDonald’s?”

‘Retail Park,’ he instantly replied.

Of course!  ‘Business complex’, I ask you!