How Much is Too Much Sex?

Okay, so as most of you (All 6 followers) know, I’ve been editing Wilson Mooney. I’ve been working on grammar, flow, foreshadowing, character development, and such. In doing these edits, I reread the whole book all at once, and I have to say, Wilson is a very, very, lucky girl. Come on- she has a hot guy all over her making sure she was pleased through 4 different chapters. Now you ask yourself, who wouldn’t want that right? Well, let me be the one to answer that for you- ME! I don’t want it. Four major encounters in 90,000 words doesn’t seem like much and maybe it wouldn’t be if it wasn’t so descriptive.

Yeah I said it.

Now to honor my beta readers, I know you love the details, but maybe you don’t have to have every turn, stop sign, and speed bump mapped out for you. Maybe, leaving just a little to the imagination will give you the opportunity to put Wilson and Max into the scenarios that you might have had when you were 17 years old. Maybe living vicariously through them, doesn’t have to include a Google map with satellite images and driving directions.

I didn’t pull the “they fall into the water, fade to black,” scene or the, “they wake up to pillows torn and feathers all over the bed,” and I didn’t swing the descriptive pendulum completely to the other side with embarrassingly pornographic words that you’d find when you opened a dirty magazine. My words filled the gap between falling back on the bed and they cuddled afterward, in a tasteful descriptive way.

But even tastefully done descriptions can give the readers too much, so I planted my bum in the chair and revised, revised, revised. Now don’t get upset that you, my beta readers, will lose the mapped out descriptions to the tantalizing details of Wilson and Max together. Because I will make sure you don’t. But what I will give you are key words that will allow your mind to form your own pictures in your head. After all, the ultimate goal in writing those scenes was that they would be seductive enough for the reader to dog-ear the pages and reread them again. I can only hope I have achieved that and I didn’t let you down.