No, I don’t mean I’m a ho for NaNoWriMo. But I’m finally off and running on my NaNo novel, after falling behind by about three days last week, due to other responsibilities. I spent the weekend writing and managed to crank out almost 5,000 words. That’s not a lot by some people’s standards, but it brings me up to just over one day behind. Hopefully, I’ll make up the rest soon.
My wedding is this coming weekend, and of course, we have Thanksgiving weekend coming up two weekends after that. So this isn’t the ideal month for me to be writing a novel. But so far it’s going fairly smoothly, as far as the actual writing goes.
Once again, I discovered that the most difficult scene to write was the sex scene. I agonized over it for hours, as Erich can attest. I would write a line or two, then walk away, stuck, until I could think of what to write next. The funny thing is, I consider setting up sexually charged situations and creating sexual tension to be one of my strong points. I love putting two guys together in ways that challenge their conceptions and opens them up to the possibility of becoming lovers.
But I’ve always skipped over the sex scenes themselves, find them rather dull. As I’m often heard to say, “When it comes to the part where we’re inserting Tab A into Slot B, I start to tune out and skip ahead to the next bit of actual character interraction.” However, the publishing market where I’m beginning to get my foot in the door, at last, prefers steamy sex scenes. And ultimately, I don’t object to writing steamy sex scenes. I simply need to figure out how to make them about character development, in order to keep them interesting to me.
So I ended up with a sex scene that touches upon past conflicts between the two characters, and the fact that they can’t resist each other, despite the fact that they don’t think they have a future together. And I don’t think it came out half bad. One challenge, though, with having a sex scene at the beginning of the novel, is where to now? They’ve already hopped in bed together and we already know they love each other. So what’s next? I’m going to have to explore the issues in their past that have kept them apart.
The main thing, right now, is to keep moving. Normally, I would have to write 1,667 words a day to keep up, but since I’ve fallen behind, I’m shooting for at least 2,000 words tonight.
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