On writing love scenes at 7 a.m.
So last night Stella and Dane finally got to meet, carefully dove tailing this introduction to the way it was described in Baby Dust.
Of course, Dane already HAS a girlfriend, but that doesn’t stop Stella. It’s not like he’s married, and besides, they’d been together all of what, two weeks? She had zits older than that.
But the meeting doesn’t quite go as she planned, and Dane takes off with Darlene on his motorcycle. And in Chapter Four, the book switches point of view. So we start to get to know Dane himself.
Last night I found I’d written myself in a corner. I was so afraid of Dane’s POV that I ended the scene at a page, which technically made it a sequel, not a bonafide scene. So I shut down for the night and lay in bed thinking about how to write myself out of the hole. I needed a problem for him, something with some meat in it. That’s when I wondered–what would Darlene do? She saw the sparks with her long-time rival. She’d go for broke.
And so Darlene leads Dane out to her uncle’s hunting cabin in the Ozarks, planning to make her move.
I had the scene.
Unfortunately, I woke up early, and with the sun just entering the horizon, and me in my decidedly unsexy flannel jammies, hair in some indecipherable knot, I made my first attempt at a sex scene from a man’s point of view.
Did I succeed? And more importantly, did Darlene? I’ll assess the scene tonight and decide if it’s worthy of inclusion in the next excerpt, going out in Thursday’s weekly newsletter to subscribers. Not on the list yet? New subscribers will get links to the content they missed in previous emails.
