Sex must be mixed with tears, laughter, words, promises, jealousy, envy, travel, new faces, stories, dreams, fantasies, music, dancing and wine.       Anáis Nin

In my draft novel The Spa Resort there are several scenes involving romance, from enticing glances, to fully immersed lovemaking. Sometimes the characters fail clumsily. In other scenes they are seductive successes. As I wrote them I wondered what people would think. Would they be offended? Would they want the ‘juicy stuff’? Would innuendo be good enough? What kind of language should I use to describe these scenes? What if members of my family, friends, or neighbors read them? Would I feel embarrassed, be called sexist? Would I have to give my Boy Scout badges back?

So I thought I’d put a summary together of how other authors go about writing sex scenes. The spectrum is as varied as romance itself. On one end, there are gratuitous sex scenes put in just to titillate the reader. Just like in many of today’s movies where there has to be some nudity, a car chase, an explosion, and a fight. A scene where two people find themselves unexpectedly near a bed and feel compelled to rip each other’s clothes off then touch, lick, squeeze, and generally mimic a game of twister on that bed. Then there is the opposite side, obligatory (by genre) sex scenes where two people have met and over 20 chapters fallen in love despite themselves. Where their relationship naturally culminates in a passionate love scene, finally, often behind doors closed to the reader. (more…)

Sometimes a person can find themselves in a dilemma. The magnitude of the dilemma could be very small or of Herculean proportions. But regardless of its size they remain bamboozled as to how to go about addressing it, how to find the right answers, how to resolve it.
People will lose sleep, tell others that they’ve tried everything, or that they are at their wit’s end and just don’t know what to do. All the advice they are given never seems right – seems like square solutions to problems made of round holes.
Then one day the sun comes out. The idea of going for a walk and to abandon all their problems for an hour or so seems very attractive. So they go. And for the first time in weeks, they see that the trees have lost all their leaves. That the neighbour’s cat is out hunting mice, and that the nearby mountain is still so majestic.
Then taking a turn down a ramshackle back lane, they find an old concrete wall with these words spray painted on it, ‘Sell the house and forget her’.