Good morning, readers and book lovers! As we have no contributing diarist today (sniff), we’ll have an open forum. Today’s topic will concern sexy fiction. Some readers enjoy novels in which there are graphic descriptions of that and some do not, so the question is: if you do enjoy it, how much is just right? Or not enough? Or “Landsakes, get me outta here fast”?
But first, breakfast! Our drink this morning is Harrod’s Royal Garden Tea, which my darling niece brought back from London last week. It’s a Darjeeling infused with roses, that most erotic of flowers. (No sugar, but a slice of lemon, please.) This will go beautifully with…what else? Spice cake! And for our morning vitamin C intake, we have passionfruit.
So, full of spice and passion, lips still tasting of rose petals, let us sashay into the salon and begin our discussion.
Rather oddly, for someone who used to write slash fanfic (for those of you unfamiliar with slashfen, “slash” is gay erotica), I have now become bored with descriptions of what happens in the bedroom. When I was young I devoured any book that came my way, but even in those days most novels didn’t go in for the full Monty. When I read such popular trash as Forever Amber, Peyton Place, or Captain from Castile and encountered a suggestive scene, I simply thought, “Oh, rilly,” and went right on with the story. The one erotic novel that did make an impression was Pierre Louy’s Aphrodite. It pretty much curled my hair.
For me, the story and the characters in it are what hold my interest, not the shenanigans they get up to in private. Not everyone shares this view, I’ll be the first to admit. I used to work with a young woman who hated the, ah, physical act but did enjoy reading about it. Every morning on the way to work she sat in the back of the car reading one steamy romance after the other. She used to abandon them in the workplace kitchen when she finished with them, which is how I found out about her little hobby.
Ever alert for no-brainer entertainment, a couple of years ago I seized on the novels of Jane Feather.
As she met my rather stringent criteria in every respect but one, I kept reading her novels. However, Ms. Feather is a great one for describing every moan, tussle, rumpled sheet, drop of sweat, quivering wossname, and so on; it drove me nuts. I skipped all those scenes even though in some books they went on for quite five pages. I did sometimes wonder whether she copied and pasted from book to book. After all, there are only so many ways to describe what happens, so if the well of creativity runs dry a writer doesn’t have much choice.
In my current writing project, a novel about a gay Pagan man who is persuaded to run for elective office in a conservative state, I find it far more entertaining to suggest what is about to happen than to describe it in detail. The reader’s imagination will do the work for me, thereby saving me a ton of effort.
To summarize, I now prefer a little seasoning in my fiction rather than lots of spice. But what about YOU? I can visualize you now, eyes dilated, lips parted, a moist sheen on your comely countenance, chest rising and falling with emotion, your breath ragged with the desire to Tell All. Please do, we’re all ears!