love scenes and stuff

Whenever I come to the romantic or sexy (or violent) scenes, I always start wondering if the level is right. Today's is pretty tame and it could be a scene in a young adult book. Sometimes I wonder if they aren't too tame for an adult book. Certainly they would make it more racy on television or a movie, these days, but reading doesn't really equate to a visual portrayal and I trust the readers to fill in more blanks in a sex scene than modern movie makers seem to think their audiences are capable of achieving.

More often in this book I have found myself taking stuff out as being too over the top. If I wouldn't say the word aloud, I don't think I should put it in writing either, for starters. It's possible to say a lot without using those words. I've played with some interesting sex scenes using classic metaphors in tidal waves and sweeping storms and the rise and fall of empires, but really, it's usually enough to get the couple started and encounter them later. Adult readers can fill in the blanks happily so long as the scene is friendly.

The violent sex scenes definitely don't need any details and I find myself wondering if I should change them to nonsexual violence rather than even imply the sexual nature of the violence. I do in anything young adult. i don't write young adult dramas about people coping with horror; I like fun adventures. The propensity for sexual violence on the tv shows (never shown, sometimes implied even when it doesn't happen, especially in advertisements for the episode) is plenty and too much as it is. Still, I've included some in Cerel Gold. Candice's past is all about every kind of violence I could think of and it's only a matter of how much to imply, how much to describe, and the tone to take in the description.

In the case of violence and generating either sympathy or horror or other reactions, I think there is a kind of magic required, and what we think will work may have the opposite effect. I think a certain degree of coldness and unsympathy in the writer, being mean to our characters as I've heard it described, will actually get more sympathy from a reader, whereas some of the best horrors are very amusing or sympathetic in tone. I haven't found the magic, but I keep trying.

For now, I've finished a couple of quilt tops and now have much quilting to do but neither that nor blogging will get done for about a week and a half, so no posts meanwhile. Let your imagination play in other worlds but come back in a couple of weeks!