Why you should avoid “sex scenes”

So you’re reading along, engrossed in the action when all of the sudden, bang! The lights go out and you hear strange music in your mind (bow,chicka,bowow!)…errm, sorry that was my Libido (Hi folks!). Yes you just stumbled over the dreaded “sex scene”!

As a rule I avoid them (the old pan up to the headboard, eh?-shut up you), for three reasons:

1. they are distracting,
2. nearly impossible to get right and;
3. almost always unnecessary.

Unless the story is centered on romance I find many a sex scene to be disstracting (isn’t that the point?).  Very little character development happens in the actual scene and the action while plenty (and then some) doesn’t move the story forward (and back, and forward again, oh baby hit me one more time!).

And getting it right, forget it!

(You just have to work on your technique pal.)

Depending on the language used the story read like it was ripped from the Penthouse Letters (the cheerleader jumped up and down at the edge of the field, her tits…), OK enough…(spoil sport) or something out of your eight grade health class.  Worse when you combine words like “heaving”, “throbbing” or “deflowering” with “penis”, “vagina” and “breasts”. Clinical and tasteless at the same time.  Besides most sex scenes just read different from the rest of the story, as if the writer is trying to make up for the lackluster performance of his/hers prose.

Finally, if the idea is to say that the character(s) are having sex (people are still having sex) then just say so.  I don’t need five pages of thrusting and heaving and deflowering (sounds like somebody isn’t getting enough thrusting and heaving) to know that their doing it. If I want that, I’ll pick up the latest issue of Hustler magazine or download a video from the Net (that explains a lot, actually).

So my advice to you, avoid the sex scenes if you can.

(You can read my rebuttal here)

Heck, the Animaniacs pulled it off without showing a single nipple, so can you:

Writer’s Blogs and a Contest!

Hello again fellow scribes!

First off I have two more blogs to recommend today:

1. Medieval Soul/Postmodern World (actual title): By Nancy Hightower. Breezy atmosphere and cool crowd. Go check it out.
2. The Writing Runner: A cool blog by a writer and a runner (like the title did not clue you in on that one).

Talking of blogs Marian over at Flight of Fantasy has a very cool post on the nature of “ancient evil” in fantasy.

But now for the real meat and potatoes of this post. QueryTracker.net is holding a hook competition. The person(s) who write the best one sentence hook will win one of the following:

Grand prize – full submission of your manuscript
1st place – 50 page submission
2nd place – 30 page submission
3rd place – 10 page submission

The contest starts this Monday (April 13th). But before I send anything I like to run a few hooks for Neither Here nor There…. by you and see which one works:

1. Little did Anthony know that the letter he held in his hand would propel him across the Atlantic and change his life forever.
2. A single letter ripped open Antony’s emotional scars and propelled him across the ocean to face the ghosts of his father’s past.
3. An ocean separated Antony from his father but a single letter changed all that.
4. Two siblings, who lived an ocean apart, are brought together by their father’s death and the two faces of a man they thought they knew.
5. Antony thought he knew the father that abandoned him at age ten but a single letter will change everything he thought he knew about his father and himself.

That is all I got for know.  And just because I can, here is a video from Lily Allen. Enjoy!

BSG was not the best show on television.

And if it was, then American television sucks!

“What are you talking about?”

“Battlestar Galactica was the best show on….”

No it was not.

I say this as a disgruntled fan. I abandoned the show when the humans decended to Hell, or should I say New Caprica. Until that moment I defended the show every illogical twist and turn. But after the nuke went off I said, ENOUGH! I did watch a few episodes afterward, but I really didn’t care for the show that much anymore.

What really pissed me off about BSG was the fact that as a show it had all the ingridients to be a classic: great camarography (it took a awhile to used to the jerky zoom action of the camera, but it worked brilliantly), solid characters (more on that later), great actors and adult situations.

So what went wrong?

Simple, the whole show, from begining to end devolved into the following “dun,dun,dun!” What looked like smart writing simply existed to deliver another shock. Folks I’m not a five year old, please don’t treat me like one, ok.

Internal logic, gone.

Internal consistency, never there to begin with.

Character growth, say what now?

The Cylons had no fucking plan!

BSG was NOT grand space opera, it was space soap opera! I’m all for character growth but the characters did not grow, they simply twisted to the whims of writers so they could set up the next “shocker” moment. There was no relevant story arcs, no logical progression of character actions, masked by the moral ambiguity of survival. I can see the writers room now with a white board on one end with the words SHOCK written on it and nothing else.

Take away the special effects and some great acting (in spite of the awful writing) and you end up with four seasons of nonsense.

In space….

Might as well go back to watching WWE and As the World Turns.