Happy New Year! I'm working today on my April Fools For Love story, one of the first purely contemporary romances I've done in a while. And because of that, I'd like to ask a question--
How do you get the hero and heroine's clothes off??
See, my vampires are able to turn to mist, and their clothes just drop through. Then they snap back, yummily naked. My witches can (spoiler) zap their clothes and their partner's clothes of AND on. Even my shifters can claw the things off.
But this...? I'm writing a contemporary, mundane, grounded-in-reality romance. I can't use any of those shortcuts, which hasn't bothered me before today. BUT TODAY... today, I wrote the sex scene, the one where the hero and heroine have intercourse.
So I sit down and start at the start of the scene, where he leads her by the hand into the room and locks the door and I'm writing and writing and writing, good grief am I writing, and FINALLY I get to the point where he can put his mouth on her nipple.
Yay! Okay, now for me (and the heroine) the sex has started.
At this point because it's lunch time I take a break. There's a bit of scientist in me, and since I started the scene at the beginning and stopped as I applied his tongue to her breast, I was able to get a word count for the day so far (and thus how many words it took them to get that far). Drum roll, please...
Four hundred words.
Four. Hundred. FOUR hundred. It took me almost TWO WHOLE PAGES to get them to where they could get down to the good stuff.
What about you? If you're a writer, do you enjoy writing the bits coming off, or do you have a shortcut? If you're a reader, do you like it when it takes them a couple pages to get naked or do you want them to get right down to it?
I feel your pain! And you definitely don't want to skip any of the payoff after they do all that work to get naked. ;)
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