Do I have your attention now? Good.
Sex is a difficult subject for a novelist to handle. Hell, it’s a difficult subject for most people to handle. The thing is, like with real life sex, you can never please everyone (although I’ve tried).
My sexy cousin Lana asked me if there was a lot of sex in my book. I told her, “Not really.” She looked sad. What sex there is was toned down quite a bit by my agent and my editor. Was there a lot before they got there? In my humble opinion, not really. But now there’s even less.
Does this please everyone? I mean, other than people who want sex – I mean, in their literature? Apparently not.
People like Jackie Collins and Candace Bushnell probably had to deal with this when they first started out, but now people know that if they’re in the market for some hot sex, those books are the way to go. On the other hand, when people decide within their own minds that a book will not offend their sensitive sensibilities and this turns out to be a bad decision, they can get rather irate.
Apparently, a self-published Baptist missionary thought my book was “trash.” While there is a lot of dispute over what is and is not morally and sexually appropriate in a book, there is no such dispute over what “trash” means when it comes to literature. “Trash” does not mean you can’t write or you have a lot of holes in your plot. It means that someone thinks you’ve got a dirty little mind.
Oh well. Maybe now Cousin Lana will be quicker to read the book.