My good friend Cecilia Tan says that the two main complaints she sees in reviews of her books are:
- Too much sex
- Not enough sex
I’m on a mission to write books such that nobody ever complains about item 2.
Some of you are probably wondering, “Why? Censorship is a constantly-moving target. Readers seem to like sex in their books, but book distributors, payment processors and Patreon allow it grudgingly, if at all, and it’s about to get worse. Next year you may be in jail in Oklahoma.”
I blame Aunt Ruth. Under the name of Rebecca York, my aunt has written over 150 romance novels. Ruth once told me that writing is lonely work, difficult and boring work, and that the only way to make progress it is to write what gets you going. As she’s read a couple of my books, I occasionally wonder if she wishes she’d given me different advice.
I also blame the internet–more precisely, I blame USENET, one of the precursor networks from before the internet was really a thing. Back in the 80’s I joined these completely uncensored exchanges before they were ruined by spammers and commercialization and read the hot stories that college students and employees of defense contractors were writing (That’s where I met Cecilia Tan). I quickly concluded that my ideas were no weirder than anyone else’s, and that I could spell better than at least half of those people. I once read a post on USENET by someone who had been stuck at work babysitting a sick computer and called his girlfriend to tell her he’d be home late. He sat down to read the stories on alt.sex.bondage and found one of mine. Then he called his girlfriend and told her, “I’m coming home right now.” Now that’s feedback I can use.
While we’re at it, I blame all of those ancient history classes that taught me to think critically about things that were rarely talked about in polite company. Sex and sexual attraction are neither natural nor universal. You’re programmed by what you see around you to find one person attractive and another person not worth a second glance. After a few such classes by thoughtful professors, I started to find the books I was reading a bit frustrating. Why write a book set in a different time and place, on a different planet, and have people with the same relationships that they have during a very narrow slice of time and space out of human history?
I set out to play around and see what I could write differently. Let me know how I’m doing.