I blogged last week about how hard it is to write sex scenes without being unintentionally ridiculous (and the target of intentional ridiculousness is maybe even harder to hit).
I would never mock bad fan fiction, springing as it does from the pure hearts but poor fiction-writing skills of writers like me.
But published novels, that's another thing.
I just came across this scene in a Published Book that made me crow with delight at the… the "freshness", shall we say, of its metaphors.
This is the passage; the speaker is a young man having sex with a young woman [A]:
Oh, myyyy. Nothing like that post-lift–off cheetah breath.
I would never mock bad fan fiction, springing as it does from the pure hearts but poor fiction-writing skills of writers like me.
But published novels, that's another thing.
I just came across this scene in a Published Book that made me crow with delight at the… the "freshness", shall we say, of its metaphors.
This is the passage; the speaker is a young man having sex with a young woman [A]:
"For most people, sex was an end in itself. For me, it was a vehicle. The perfect vehicle. A slow-burning rocket headed toward the white well of infinity, with flames hot enough to torch my memories and acceleration strong enough to life me off a barren blasted earth and point me toward the possibility of paradise. The longer the journey, the longer the flames burned, the better it was. If I could have made it last forever, if I could go and never come back, if I could be incinerated, that would be best.
At some point, [A] fell away from me like a spent booster rocket. …We were tangled up together in my bed, panting into each other's faces like a pair of cheetahs at the end of a kill sprint…"
Oh, myyyy. Nothing like that post-lift–off cheetah breath.