I’ve been eagerly anticipating this moment for the last hour. This is fast becoming my favourite thing to do and one of the best bits about being a writer. I hadn’t given it much thought to begin with because everything happened so quickly – but a few days after More Than Sex was released, the reviews started to come in and that was it. I was hooked. If I’m truly honest, another reason for the lack of progress with Book Two (untitled) is possibly due to the amount of time that I have spent searching for reviews online. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. It’s just Continued Professional Development – I’m keen to read what people say about the book, good or bad, and then use that to further my writing skills. I appreciate and take on board each and every comment. It’s like I tell the kids at school – a person is never too old to learn and it’s important to keep your mind open to the opinions of others.
I’ve had to limit my looking though, after Nick asked me yesterday how my writing was going and I complained that I didn’t have enough time to get anything done and that he was going to have to cook supper because I’d been so busy working on my book. Well, I told him that I was working. The reality was that I spent several hours searching for reviews online and twenty-eight minutes writing my opening paragraph. And twenty-one of those minutes consisted of me staring vacantly at the screen, wondering what Valerie would make of a first chapter that started with the words:
Bella Rose’s skin started to prickle with unbridled passion and also as a result of the temperature in Tulsa, Oklahoma being ninety-six degrees Fahrenheit (which in real money is thirty-five point five degrees Celsius). The high propensity of buildings meant that the trapped heat made it feel much hotter, which Bella Rose knew was part of the phenomenon known as Urban Heat Island and made living in this new city a very different experience to the ranch back in Wyoming. Not that the meteorological conditions were a problem. Bella Rose liked her climate the way she liked her men. And also her coffee. Hot and steamy and tattooed. Hot and steamy was good. Hot and steamy was what Bella Rose liked best. Long, sultry nights filled with sizzling, torrid passion as she and Daxx made wanton, steamy love into the early hours.
It took a lot of reading and re-reading for me to come to conclusion that Valerie would think it in no way realistic or even particularly sexy despite the fact that it includes the words sizzling and wanton. So I deleted everything except the first six words and I haven’t been able to come up with anything else since, which is why I’m trialing this new way of working. My new plan is to write for one hour and then check for any new reviews instead of refreshing my screen on a two-minute basis, which will hopefully mean that I’ll get some actual writing done and stop getting too distracted.
It hasn’t worked so far today but then again, maybe I’m just the kind of writer who needs feedback from her audience in order to thrive. That sounds reasonable. I cannot write in a vacuum. I need to bounce off the opinions of others and hone my craft, acknowledging that without the reader, there is no writer.
My new career might be fraught with risk and challenge but I can’t lie – it’s also incredibly exciting. Every time I think about the fact that I have written an actual, genuine book that actual, genuine people are reading I feel a thrill of utter euphoria and reading their comments makes me feel like I’m someone a bit special. Opening the first tab, I can see immediately that there are four new reviews since I last looked. My heart starts to beat a little faster and I lean closer to the screen, ready to soak in lots of lovely, critical appraisal.
The words from the first review leap off the screen and punch me in the face.
What the actual fuck? I don’t know who Heather0933 is, but I sure as shit know that she does not have a clue what she is talking about. If she’s such a bloody expert on what entails good erotic fiction then where is her book, hey?
I struggled with this book and the beginning nearly had me giving up.
Well, I wish you had given up, if you were just going to be unkind about it.
I scan down to the next review.
The humour felt forced and unnatural and there’s very little plot.
It wasn’t supposed to be funny when I wrote it. Although she possibly has a point about the lack of plot – but does it really matter? Do readers really pick up erotica for the plot?
However, what she says next about some of my information being wrong is just plain ignorant. I fact-checked everything that went in. There’s no way I would include something that I hadn’t ensured was accurate. I spent hours researching, making sure that I had up-to-date knowledge about the setting in Wyoming and Nick and I re-enacted all the explicit scenes to guarantee that they were physically do-able. Any suggestion otherwise is just libelous. I could probably sue.
I’m quite fortunate that Nick didn’t try to sue me himself, if I’m honest. My surprise purchase of a sex manual entitled Kama Sutra: Three hundred and sixty-five positions resulted in an evening that neither of us is ever likely to forget. I still have the occasional night where I will wake drenched in sweat and clutching the duvet in horror as I re-enact the moment that Dylan and Scarlet walked in on us attempting to recreate the Coiled Cobra position. The fact that we were fully clothed did little to dispel the awkwardness.
I ended up donating the totally useless manual to the school charity sale, hidden under a pile of Enid Blyton books. That’s another thing that wakes me up now and again – the knowledge that I almost definitely inscribed my name inside the front cover, as is my habit on purchasing a new book. Nobody has confronted me about it though, so I’m either safe or it was bought by someone who hasn’t learnt to read yet.
Blinking hard, I scroll down to look at the next review. Kevin from Hull has given me three stars and the comment reads:
Very nice. Just what I’ve been looking for. My mother-in-law is delighted.
I wonder if Kevin from Hull has possibly confused my erotic novel with his new kettle purchase.
I fervently hope so.
Thankfully, I get lucky with the fourth reviewer who says that she’s never read anything so funny in her life and that she hadn’t known that sex could be so entertaining.
Neither did I, until I unwittingly struck comedy-sex gold. Now all I’ve got to do is tap that again.
Heaving a big sigh, I give Dogger’s fur a quick ruffle and then return to the table. This book isn’t going to write itself and Valerie is waiting. I can’t let her down. I need to find a way to write in a sexy manner while injecting a jocular note into every sensual act that Bella Rose and the brooding, yet slightly stupid, Daxx perform.
I stare at the screen and try to remember what I did last time. After I’d read all the Fifty Shades of Grey books and been inspired to do a better job, I read a few other erotic works and tried to find a pattern. But what really worked was writing about what made me feel excited. And that was making sure that Bella Rose was a kick-ass, take-no-nonsense woman who knew what she wanted. It was all about writing a character that secretly, I would quite like to be.
So all I’ve got to do now is figure out what Bella Rose wants next and send her on a new journey. Her journey of sexual awakening or enlightenment or whatever, which presumably means that she’s going to be having quite a lot of it. Sex, that is.