Why is Sex so Damned, uh, Funny?

The voyage interrupted....

All the social media-ing was taking so much of what little free time I had, that my manuscript was starving to death.  It was in urgent need of sustenance but I kept putting off the feeding.  My voyage had to take a brief time-out but I,  stubbornly and consistently, came up with excuses for not leaving ‘the mother ship’.  There was a very good reason for that; well, at least I saw it as such.  You see, I had come to a point in my story where I had to write the dreaded ‘carnal scene’.  

Don’t misunderstand me, it’s not that I find sex itself repugnant.  Lord, no, not me, I’m all for it, I am!  It’s just that writing about it is difficult because I find it impossible to type and laugh hysterically at the same time!  I keep hitting the wrong keys.  The cursor on my screen seems to be stuck in reverse from all the deleting I have to do.  Writing on most every other subject is a walk in the park compared to describing, in the most vivid of detail, the physical, shall we say, ‘attributes’ of various body parts, not to mention the machinations of two people engaging in ‘sexual conduct’.  No matter what words I use, the end effect is always either coldly clinical or ridiculously cliché.  It took me about three hours just to write the following:

“She, as if mesmerized, grasped his pulsating shaft with her left hand and kissed the swollen tip which had turned an almost impossibly intense shade of raw flesh. With the concentration of a child holding an ice cream cone, licking here and there where the frozen substance threatened to drip, she drove his senses wild!”

Oh please!  



Mind you, the paragraph above was a huge improvement over earlier versions of the same text.   Moving the words around and around, hoping they would somehow, I don’t know, fall into place?, I messed everything up so much, that I ended up with:  “She, as if mesmerized, grasped his engorged shaft with her left hand and licked the tip, her swollen tongue turning an almost impossibly intense shade of …...”  Oh damn!  Unless the next line read, “She let go of his penis and called 911”,  my heroine would find herself in quite the pickle.

I toyed with the notion of reading “Fifty Shades of Grey” to get some ideas but, with all due respect, I have my standards!….which probably goes a long way to explain why E.L. James is making a million dollars a week while I….well, we won’t go there.

Determined to succeed, I bought three books on the subject to find out how it’s done (the writing, not the sex!).  “Do Not Disturb: Hotel Sex Stories” by Rachel Kramer Bussel, “101 Best Sex Scenes Ever Written” by Barnaby Conrad, and “How to Write Sexy Descriptions and Sex Scenes” by Val Kovalin.   I cannot say if these books will be helpful since, well, I haven’t read them yet.  I’m sorry, O.K.?  It’s just that I’m just too busy, that’s all!  Things need doing, after all, I can’t just drop everything, can I?  I’m reading my e-mails, watching TV, playing solitaire…..you know, dealing with all the important stuff!   

I’ll get there, perhaps later rather than sooner but that’s good for you lot, if you think about it!  With all this advance notice, you’ll have ample time to save all the spondulicks my book will cost to buy and it’ll be a pretty penny, I can tell you! Once it lands at the top of the New York Times bestseller list (betcha dollars to donuts!), I’ll be able to charge a tumescent arm and an engorged leg for this sucker!

A.J. Aston