On writing. On writing smut.

It’s been a week since I finished the mad dash to the NaNoWriMo finish line.  I did it!  Fifty thousand words in a month.  That’s a lot, or not a lot, depending on your perspective.  This blog entry is approximately 1,200 words.  It takes me about an hour to write 1,000 words, give or take a half hour.  If the inspiration is flowing (i.e. I am writing a sex scene or a snarky internal monologue), closer to a half hour.  If not (i.e. I am writing awkward dialogue that I know will need to be rewritten, but I’m writing it anyway because it’s really better if my main character talks to other people too, not just to herself all the time), then closer to 90 minutes.  The goal per day for NaNo is a little under 2,000 words, so it was a 2-3 hour/day commitment for me. 

There were days during which I wrote nothing.  Thanksgiving weekend is always a black hole of family, cooking, and day drinking.  I also discovered a fun penicillin allergy in early November, for which I was essentially chugging Benadryl from the bottle to control the overwhelming itchiness and hives.  Not so much with the writing or even the moving my mouth to makey the words.  In contrast, on my most productive day, I wrote 7,000 words, which was roughly a full 8-hour day of nonstop writing.  That day included three sex scenes.

Oh, if you’re new here, or just catching up, I’m writing a smutty novel.  Contemporary fantasy/paranormal erotica. 

I have always wanted to write smut.  Always.  At sixteen, top of my class in high school, I’m sure I was a disappointment to many teachers when I told them that my career aspiration was to write smut for a living.  Only one of them told me to my face that it was a waste of my brain.  He recommended that I become a geneticist.  At the time, that held zero appeal.  Now, older, wiser… yeah, still no. 

So smut.  I’m writing smut, and I love it.  It writes itself, honestly.  Not the pesky plot part (Plot? What plot?), but the characters seem to emerge as if by magic.  The novel started out as a romance between a succubus and a satyr.  But then this other character came in, and who knew?  The romance between the two of them is much more compelling.  I didn’t plan that.  These two fictional characters that emerged from my own brain have a chemistry that I didn’t plan on.  So the novel switched genre from romance to erotica.  I’m not going to make her choose.  For now, at least, she can have them both.  Where by have, I mean… Yeah, you all know what I mean.  Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more.

Here’s the tricky part.  People keep asking to read this thing.  They have joked with me that I should send excerpts out with my Christmas cards instead of my annual holiday letter.  That seems like a good thing, in theory.  People are interested.  That’s good.  I mean, who doesn’t like smut?  Smut rocks.  I would happily stick a pseudonym on this thing and let anyone read it.  It’s not about insecurity.  It’s about intimacy.  I didn’t realize that writing sex scenes was so… personal.  That sounds dumb, right?  I mean, what is more personal than sex?  But I really just didn’t realize how personal until my best friend asked if she was going to get to read it and I freaked out inside.  No.  Just no.  She knows me really well, but no, it’s too personal. 

There are only so many ways to write “and then they boinked and it was awesome.  Big O’s all around.”  If you are writing explicit sex scenes, it’s going to get… more elaborate.  And the elaborations say a lot about me and my sexuality.  The main character isn’t me.  But the sex scenes?  Yeah.  They’re my hot buttons.  Of course they are.  Who else’s could they be?  My experiences of sex that didn’t involve me are… shall we say… rather limited. 

I think about some of my favorite writers who do sex scenes in their novels.  Jacqueline Carey.  Laurell K. Hamilton.  They have hot buttons, and I have a pretty good idea what those hot buttons might be.  These women are strangers, but I feel as if I know some very intimate things about them.  But it’s OK, because they’re strangers.  I’m not hanging out having coffee with Laurell K., thinking about how she fantasizes about having sex with two dudes at once.  How it “just flat does it for her.”  (If you read her books, that line should be familiar.)  She likes guys with long hair who wear lace-up leather garments.  She likes biting.  She probably scratches the crap out of her partner(‘s/s’) back(s).  I am really fine knowing that about a stranger.  I am also really fine with a stranger knowing the equivalent fantasies for me.  But friends?  FAMILY?  I don’t know how to knock down that wall of intimacy. 

For now, the “novel,” such as it is, consists of 50,000 words spewed out rapid fire.  Those words are not suitable for anyone else to read yet anyway.  So I have some time to figure this out.  But I feel it… I feel inside that I will finish this novel and that it won’t suck.  I don’t know whether other people will agree that it doesn’t suck.  I don’t know if anything will ever come of this.  But I think that at some point, people I know are going to read this thing.  They’re going to know I like that, and that, oh yeah, and that other thing. 

Having someone else read my writing is always an incredibly intimate and agonizing process for me under any circumstances.  Always.  Even just putting these blog posts out there is intimate and not without social challenge.  It’s hard to imagine getting over that hurdle, letting someone read what I’ve written about the most intimate aspect of my life.  The main character isn’t me.  Her issues are not my issues.  I have known a lot of people in my life, and they all inform the kind of characters that I can imagine and create.  But sex, more than anything else I can imagine, is personal.  I don’t know what it’s like to have sex as someone else.  In those moments, yeah, she is me.  Except for how I’m not a succubus.  There’s that, at least. 

So for those of you who have been requesting smutty excerpts, thank you thank you thank you.  You are encouraging me to finish this book, to edit it, to keep working when self-doubt creeps in.  You are helping me to realize a dream I have had since I was a teenager.  But also, please be patient.  It’s not self-deprecation or my inner critic that is holding me back from sharing.  It’s this question of intimacy.  I need to figure this out if I am going to be a purveyor of smut, but I haven’t figured it out yet.  And if I never share it, but one day you find a smutty book on a shelf somewhere with a pseudonym based on my first and middle names, please buy it.