Romance Writer’s Weekly: Speedbumps

Hello and good morning! Welcome in! It’s a lovely, albeit drizzly, day here in Central Florida, and I have a new book out!

I’ll talk about the new book in a minute. For now, let’s talk speedbumps. All writers have speedbumps, those scenes that slow their writing pace to a crawl. It’s always the same — you’re writing, the characters are really talking to you, you have the energy, you’re making words…. and WHAM!!!

Speedbump.

I have two speedbumps in particular, and they both happen for the same reason. What are they? What’s the reason?

For me, it’s sex scenes and fight scenes. Both of them slow me down to a crawl. Funny, right? A writer who has built her career on steamy sex can’t just (pardon me) bang one out? (I’m sorry!)

It’s true! I’ve been known to leave <INSERT SEX HERE> in a manuscript so I can search it up later and put the scene in, just so that I don’t break my momentum. So far, I haven’t handed a manuscript to my editor with a missing scene, but you never know. One of these years, it’ll happen.

So what do sex scenes and fight scenes have in common?

Blocking.

I can’t write a “count the number of legs in the bed and divide by two” sex scene (to quote one of my favorite Terry Prachett lines). A scene that essentially boils down to “Wham, bam, thank you ma’am” (or “thank you, man,” depending on which book we’re talking about) does nothing for me. Sex scenes have to flow properly and organically, and make sense when you go from one to the next. Otherwise they just don’t work for me. Which means spending a lot of time thinking them out, planning movements, researching positions and BDSM rope dress. I can tell you that my search history would make my mother wash my mouse out with soap!

Fight scenes slow me down the same way. Writing a fight scene can be very much like writing a sex scene, because the movements have to flow, and they have to make sense.

Writing The White Raven: Morrigan’s Heir took forever because it’s a sword-and-sandal erotic romance. But it’s off with the editor now, so hopefully I wrote both sorts of scenes properly and it sells!

Now, there are fight scenes in the Heir to the Firstborn series, but there’s no explicit sex (it’s all behind closed doors), so I only had one speedbump to worry about. It didn’t slow me down too much, because Bones of Earth (Heir to the Firstborn 3) is out today.

You can find it on Amazon, Smashwords, Google Play, or any other ebook retailer.  There’s even a paperback, although it’s not showing up on Amazon for some reason. (Working on that!) And if you want to follow along with the final book once you’ve caught up, you can jump into Wings of Air by joining me on Patreon.

That’s about all for my neck of the woods. Time to go back to writing, and hope I don’t hit any speedbumps. Your next stop on the RRW web cycle is over with A.S Fenichel. If you’re in the mood to take a chance, she’s running a contest! For me? I’m curious to see if her speedbumps are anything like mine!