Monday, August 01, 2005

Can you have too much sex?

Chapter 14 has just been put to bed...and I should follow suit. But one question floats around my mind like a miasma, infecting all my sleepy thoughts with revision-y thoughts.

Does it contain too much of what some quaintly call the sex?

I know, I know, it's a romance novel. You can't have to much sex, right? That appears to be the uneducated assumption. After all, when I told my boyfriend I was nervous about writing my first sex scene a month or so ago (after what he knew were at least six months of working on this novel) he said, "But isn't the whole thing just sex scenes? Isn't that what a romance novel is?"

Uh, no. Not quite. I just read one over the weekend (How to Marry A Marquis, for all you Julia Quinn fans) in which there wasn't any sex at all until the very last chapter. That's chapter 36 or so.

My characters were very happily fighting and flirting and doing nice things for each other and misunderstanding each others' motives throughout the first 70,000 odd words of the novel. And then they had sex and it was all well and good and created all kinds of complications and led to scenes with secondary characters and that was good too.

And now they won't stop doing it.

Which is a problem, because while I'm sure they're greatly enjoying it, I'm not so sure anyone who reads the chapter will. There's nothing so easy to write as a boring sex scene.

I guess I can always hope they get tired of each other.