The Dead and the Sexy

I posted on facebook yesterday about how I was writing a new book, and I was probably going to put a sex-ish scene in it.  And since I knew that scene, or possibly scenes, would be in the book, I wanted to skip writing the other parts of the book and get to the sex-ish part (I keep writing sex-ish because I don't know if they will actually do the deed.  We'll see how much they like each other).  Maybe my readers have noticed that I haven't had most of my book characters go very far sexually, and even when they participate in a sexual act, I haven't written a scene that shows the actual act taking place.  The reason I've used throughout my four novels for doing (or not doing) that is because I am a middle school librarian.  I'd love to be able to have my books in my library and for my students to read them.  And how weird would it be if they were reading these sexual scenes written by their librarian?  I just couldn't do it.  So I didn't.  But now here I am on my year off, and I finally feel liberated enough to write a sexy book.  Not the whole thing, mind you, but appropriately placed sex-ish moments.  Sex-ish is starting to sound hilarious to me, by the way.  What happens when I get back in my library?  If I get back in my library?  Who knows?  But the time has come to find out.

I'd also like to mention a comment on that facebook post by my writer friend, Andrew Smith, that said, "I think that makes you a man."  Now, Andrew has this whole tough guy, writer dude thing going, and he likes to talk about boys and writing and manly things.  Which is obviously important and warrants discussion and thought, especially in the hands of a talented writer like Andrew.  But I would like to point out to Andrew, and all people who think that sex is a predominantly male-brained phenomenon, how many books are written by women for women (young and/or otherwise) that make it perfectly clear that females think about sex just as much as males.  Me?  My first self-published works were soft-porn stories I wrote for my friends in high school.  Not that I would have classified them as that at the time, but we were all thinking about it, so I wrote elaborate, graphic fantasies where my friends managed to nab such fine (at the time) men as Michael Hutchence (RIP) and Bono.  The difference is, just like with much of what men do (and I'm not going to turn this into a political rant, but I have many thoughts on men and, oh, the state of the world), women don't have to make everything they do about showing it off to other people.  Maybe it's because we don't have appendages hanging off the front of our bodies.  Wait a sec-- we do, don't we?  They're called breasts.  And somehow men seem to think those are for them, too.

My point was not to dog men out for thinking they are the only gender allowed to have sexual thoughts (well, maybe it was a little), but to explain that women enjoy reading and writing a good sex scene, too.  In fact, maybe I'll just skip ahead and write the scene in advance.  Or maybe I can start a side career, penning sexual fantasies for women involving their favorite dead and/or washed up rock stars.  Any takers?