This week, I’ve been busy. Rushing around with the paid work and various other things has left me little time to read and I’ve turned to novellas to get my romance fix. Some were OK but none really set my world alight simply because of one common issue; they all contained lots of sex that had absolutely no meaning to the story.
Long time readers of this blog will know that I like sexy books (hell, I run a sex scene competition every year :D) but these books weren’t sexy…. in fact, I found myself skipping through some scenes to get to what limited plot there was. The focus in these books was only on the sex, not plot or character development, and they were completely unsexy because of it. On celluloid, sex like this can work. I don’t have to know much about the characters or the plot because my eyes can take in details that fill in some of these blanks. In books though, the words are supposed to be painting my pictures and filling in these blanks. If all I have is IKEA sex (tab A into tab B) to work with, I’m more likely to be bored and confused than anything else.
There was quite a bit of agreement with my views on Twitter on Monday and so I’m sure I’m not just becoming a boring old fart 🙂 I’m coming across more poor stories that just contain a hell of a lot of sex and I often end up marking them as DNF.
What do you think readers? Have you noticed this trend? Also, have you read any books that you would recommend to us all?Â
Yeah, sure. I find any number of popular books and series seem to be created with the same tired set of cookie cutters. Recently I’ve noticed that some writers give their characters mental monologs in the lead up to sex that clash horribly with the way their personalities have been developed. It feels like prose murder-by-thesaurus and completely kills the moment. Making a sex scene sexy requires character development, realistic timing and consistency. Romance writing by recipe fails dismally and ticks me off for having wasted my time and book budget. Fortunately for readers like me, there are reviewers like you to keep me on the path to reliably good reads.