Hot! Hot! Hot! All that Sex and Why it Works (or doesn’t)
When I was growing up a million years ago, the only places
you could find explicit sex in written material was at pornographic bookstores.
Mostly they were located in the seedier sections of town and were frequented by
men. The nineteen-sixties changed all that.
Now it’s sometimes hard to find books that don’t have sex.
And lots of it. I started thinking about why some books feel hotter than hell
and others are so blah I find myself skipping over the love scenes. (Critical
caveat: These are only my ideas. I’d love to know what the rest of you think.)
Each of us is unique, but for me a book starts and ends with
characters. They need to feel real and their motivations need to feel
believable. If I can’t get into the characters, it’s hard for me to care what
sort of love mess they’ve gotten themselves into.
Let me back up a few paces here. If I can’t get past the
cover, I’ll never even get to the characters. Cover art is really important. I
always check to make certain my contracts say I get input into cover art. And
I’ve been blessed with really talented cover artists who share my vision of
what's in my books.
Moving along here. So we have a dynamite cover that draws
you into clicking on it, reading the blurb and, hopefully, liking what you’ve
seen well enough to buy. While I’m ranting about covers, I like the ones with
less flesh better. I think you can do way more with inference. And after being
inundated with sleek, airbrushed bodies and six-pack abs, they’ve sort of lost
their punch.
Vivid, three-dimensional characters are a combination of
“real” with “larger than life” that works. That means the men are alphas and
the women strong and sexy. Ditto for GLBT stories. The characters have to draw
you in regardless of their sexual orientation. Strong characters can pull off
gay, straight and ménage without breaking a sweat. They make you care what
happens to them. I volunteer as a judge for the EPIC contest each year. Last
year, one of the books I read had a secondary character with an androgynous
name. I was well into the book before I discovered they were female. The author
was skilled enough, it didn’t matter a twit.
With good characters, you can do just about anything. Sex in
books that leaves you panting for more always involves credible characters
yearning for one another. There’s a very old saying that the best sex happens
in the mind. So we think about what someone’s body might be like, how they’d
kiss us, or how their hands would feel on our bodies. Self-stim scenes are
perfect to spin fantasies and ratchet up the sexual heat.
It’s the yearning and the moving towards and away from one
another several times that builds the tension an author needs. I want
characters strung tight as bow strings so when they
finally do get together, it’s so steamy you need to crack a window.
Effective sex in writing is way more than who touched whom
where.
What about for all of you? What makes sex in a book so
compelling you can’t put it down? If you had to pick a favorite character, who
would it be and why?
A Time for Everything
Ann Gimpel
Blurb:
Siobhan Macquire’s fortune has attracted a string of men who
are out to drain her for everything they can get. Her last boyfriend was no
exception. Furious at being used—again—she goes for a walk in the Highlands.
With the weather worsening, she wanders alone for hours.
She’s soaking wet and starting to get scared when someone calls out to her. A
striking-looking man emerges from the mist. Except there’s something wrong. His
kilt is way too long and he talks with an archaic accent. Siobhan soon finds
herself not only lost in the countryside but also in time.
Sam pulled the draw cords of her hood tighter, squinting
against driving rain. She shivered, willing her legs to move faster. Even in the
northern latitudes, it got dark eventually during what passed for summer, and
the light was definitely fading. One foot sloughed into a hole. Cursing
roundly, she yanked it out, noting the mud added what felt like ten pounds to
her tired leg. Going on a ramble—as the locals called it—by herself had seemed
like a good idea earlier in the afternoon. Now she wasn’t so sure. It had been
hours since she’d seen another soul. The air felt heavy—and threatening,
somehow.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she scolded herself. “My
imagination’s off the clock, working overtime.”
A flash off toward the river was followed almost immediately
by a rumbling crash. It started raining harder. The sky lit again, casting the
wet greenery and surrounding mountains in a macabre glow. Thunder sounded so
loud it made her ears ring. The next lightning flare sparked off a rock not
twenty feet away. Sam’s heart sped up. She stared at the mountains ringed about
her. Why wasn’t the storm up there? Lightning was supposed to be drawn to high
points, not meadows saturated with water.
As if determined to prove her wrong, another flash struck
the ground off to her left. She threw her hands over her ears but the thunder
reverberated in her brain as if someone had struck an anvil right next to her.
Shaking her head to try to make her ears stop hurting, she started walking
again. Lightning struck inches from her feet. Sam lurched to a stop, blinking
to clear the afterimage. Even as wet as it was, the air felt electrified, thick
with sharp edges. She could almost see marauding electrons reaching for her,
hungry little mouths wide open.
Fear raced along her nerve endings, making her feel as if
she’d downed half a dozen double espressos in a row. The breath whooshed out of
her and her head spun crazily.
The storm’s trying to kill me.
Oh, please, she answered herself. Sam hated her tendency to
engage in two-way inner dialogue, but she’d done it all her life.
An excruciating twenty minutes and half a dozen lightning
strikes later, she thought it might be safe to move. It was raining like a son
of a bitch, but after striking what looked like a circle around where she
stood, the electrical part of the storm had left as quickly as it had come.
Guess the storm gods didn’t want me, after all.
Why should they? No one else does.
Sam sank into a funk. Shit, could I possibly be any wetter?
Weather in the British Isles had been
particularly wretched this summer. “Yeah, sort of like the rest of my life,”
she muttered as she tried to assess if she’d be better off staying on the track
or cutting cross-country toward where she thought a roadway was. Resolutely,
she struck out for the road and promptly stepped into calf-deep water. It ran
over the top of her boot and soaked her thick, woolen sock before she could
jerk her foot back to solid ground.
So much for that idea. Obviously, there’d been so much rain
the ground on both sides of the track had turned into a bog. She’d never seen
one before this trip to Scotland.
They were hideous. Miles of saturated ground with water deep enough to reach
her knees in some places. Sam glanced at her watch and groaned. She’d been
walking for close to five hours. No wonder it was getting dark. The village she
was aiming for shouldn’t actually be all that far away. In fact, she should
have been there long since. About to tuck her watch back under her sleeve, she
took one last look at it and realized the second hand had stopped. She tapped
the crystal with her finger but nothing happened.
Crap! Wonder when it quit? Must be the damp.
Yes, another less pleasant voice piped up, it also means I
have no idea how long I’ve been walking. Peering through mist-shrouded
countryside, she looked for some signs of Beauly Village
but all she saw were sheep.
Sam told herself to keep walking. It wasn’t as if there was
anywhere she could even sit to consider her options. Everything dripped water.
Her jacket and pants, which had always provided adequate protection from the
elements back in the States, were woefully inadequate here. She was afraid to
pull out her cell phone. Electronics and water definitely weren’t compatible. Yeah,
just look what happened to my watch. Dark thoughts crowded her mind. Why had
she thought it would be romantic to spend a year in Scotland?
You know why, an inner voice—the nasty one—sneered. It was
your infatuation with Clint. Sam gave her resident maven a point for accuracy.
Clint, with his spiffy Scottish intonations, dreamy blue eyes, and red-blonde
curls, had sweet-talked her into bankrolling a trip to his home. Between his
ever-so-broad shoulders, washboard abs, and nice, tight ass, he’d barely let
her out of bed for a month. By the time she’d figured out the reason he had so
much time on his hands was because he didn’t have a job, it was too late. She
was head over heels in love. And hoping desperately that this time it would
lead her to the altar. After all, it wasn’t as if he had to work. All he needed
to do was treat her like a queen. She had plenty of money for both of them.
Eager to grant her prince whatever he wanted, she’d readily agreed
when he’d talked longingly of going back to Scotland for a while. Except he’d
had a personality transplant practically the second they’d landed in Glasgow. In the
month-and-a-half since they’d arrived, she’d scarcely seen him. He was always
off with his mates, as he called them, drinking or climbing. There were weeks
when he hadn’t returned to their rental flat in Inverness
at all. Worse, she suspected some of those mates were gay. When she’d asked him
if he swung both ways his eyes had turned to blue ice chips. He’d twisted away
and slammed out of the house. That was the last time she’d seen him.
Water ran off the bill of her hood. Some of it dripped into
one eye. “Oh to hell with it,” she snarled. “I’m catching the first plane out
of here—without him.” She sighed, feeling sad and angry by turns. Clint was far
from the first man who’d taken advantage of her. As soon as they found out she
was an heiress to a whiskey fortune, they promised her the moon and then
fleeced her for everything they could get. She’d gotten pretty cagy in the
years between sixteen and her current twenty-five. She’d even rented a modest
apartment in Seattle
and pretended she lived there when she met someone new.
Eventually, though, when she thought a guy might be
different, she took him to the Capitol Hill mansion she’d more-or-less
inherited after her parents relocated to one of their many other homes. No
matter how promising a relationship looked, the truth of that rambling mansion
was always the beginning of the end.
Short Bio:
Ann Gimpel is a clinical psychologist, with a Jungian
bent. Avocations include mountaineering, skiing, wilderness
photography and, of course, writing. A lifelong aficionado of the
unusual, she began writing speculative fiction a few years ago. Since then her
short fiction has appeared in a number of webzines and anthologies. Two
novels, Psyche’s Prophecy, and its sequel, Psyche’s Search, have
been published by Gypsy Shadow Publishing, a small press. A husband, grown
children, grandchildren and three wolf hybrids round out her family.
@AnnGimpel (for Twitter)
Long Bio:
Ann Gimpel is a mountaineer at heart. Recently retired from
a long career as a psychologist, she remembers many hours at her desk
where her body may have been stuck inside four walls, but her soul was planning
yet one more trip to the backcountry. Around the turn of the last century (that
would be 2000, not 1900!), she managed to finagle moving to the
Eastern Sierra, a mecca for those in love with the mountains. It was during
long backcountry treks that Ann’s writing evolved. Unlike some who see the
backcountry as an excuse to drag friends and relatives along, Ann prefers her
solitude. Stories always ran around in her head on those journeys, sometimes as
a hedge against abject terror when challenging conditions made her fear for her
life, sometimes for company. Eventually, she returned from a trip and sat down
at the computer. Three months later, a five hundred page novel emerged. Oh, it
wasn’t very good, but it was a beginning. And, she learned a lot between
writing that novel and its sequel.
Around that time, a friend of hers suggested she try her
hand at short stories. It didn’t take long before that first story found its
way into print and they’ve been accepted pretty regularly since then. A
trilogy, the Transformation Series, featuring Psyche’s Prophecy, Psyche’s
Search and Psyche’s Promise is complete. The initial two books
have been published, with the final volume scheduled for release in 2012.
One of Ann’s passions has always been ecology, so her tales often have a green
twist and the Transformation Series is no exception.
In addition to writing, Ann enjoys wilderness photography.
Part of her website is devoted to photos of her beloved Sierra. And she lugs
pounds of camera equipment in her backpack to distant locales every year. A
standing joke is that over ten percent of her pack weight is camera gear which
means someone else has to carry the food! That someone else is her husband.
They’ve shared a life together for a very long time. Children, grandchildren
and three wolf hybrids round out their family.
1 comments:
Thanks so much for hosting me, Danielle. One of the best things about book touring is all the great blogs I discover along the way. Got some great additions to my TBR pile from yours.
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