Hello, and happy Friday! Today I spent about an hour looking for a video that precisely illustrates my objective, without success. I know it's out there. I know it as surely as I know that once upon a time Dudley Moore and Woody Allen were making that very video clip (not together.)

I'm talking today about a thing that happens in every young(ish, if we're comparing me to say...a certain presidential candidate) writer's life, at least those writers who write erotic romance and that is... Burn out. It's not what you think. I could write for eight hours a day every day for the rest of my life and not get tired of the process... But I simply have to say that working on my seventh novel I'm running out of...well...novel ideas in the sex department.  Yeah, yeah.  People crush each other up against walls, they sweep papers and breakfast dishes off the kitchen table, they bend each other over cars.  There's bathrooms on airplanes and elevators.  (Okay from personal experience when you hit the stop button?  An ALARM SOUNDS.) 

Sure, occasionally I even throw in a nice scene in a bedroom.  But there's always one scene in a book, that one, that now we've really gone and fallen in love, this is where it's going to be really great, we're going to come out of this a couple and you'll be able to see it on our faces scene, and I've just run out of juice.  As it were.  Because that scene has to be spectacular.  You know it.  Your readership awaits it... it has to be spectacular.

Spectacularly good...or...spectacularly bad.  Nothing less than the apex of the love-scene food chain will do at a time like that, and I know...I know... I have to pick one and write one.  Writers regularly play role reversal games in both het and homo erotic romance.  Top goes to bottom, she who was once passive knocks him down and says,  "Jump".  He who was Alpha says, "How High."  They also go for the gold as far as pushing the boundaries... she who never blew, blows, he who never rims, rims.  The idea being, I guess, that love makes that which squicked us seem...if not okay, then tolerable with the object of our affection.  I don't think I've written that.  But I've read it. 

So I'm at the end, right?  And something has to be good.  Better in fact, than anything that's gone before it.  Deeper, more powerful, more meaningful.  Our heroes have to emerge closer, more comitted, more intimate.  They have to understand and love each other more.  It has to be powerful enough that we believe that some kind of a bond has been forged, even if it's a Happily For Now ending. 

And I just can't do it.  I don't have any place to go.  My head says yes, yes, but my fingers are just saying no. 

Today, I'm choosing the spectacularly bad. 

Ever get an elbow in the eye?  Ever tear that condom package open and spit the condom across the room instead of that torn away part of the foil package you thought you had in your mouth?  Ever get stuck in a sweater?  Forget to undo your cuffs?  Have a contact lens roll up into the back of your eye so that you have to spend time trying to get it to roll down?  Ever had to look at a pair of black socks when that just seemed so... funny?  Ever tried not to laugh to save someone's ego?  Ever gotten to the bottom of things only to find that bottom, (belonging to a man in his forties) was clad in leopard print bikini underwear?  (Okay that one?  Was autobiographical.  But I was nineteen at the time, and to be honest, it was probably funnier at the time.) 

On my honeymoon my husband tripped over a suitcase and fell, only to catch his nose on the edge of the card table in our hotel room.  I think, probably, in retrospect that he broke it.  (His nose, not the table.)  He had black circles under his eyes and his nose was all bruised in a lot of our honeymoon photos.  We raced, me in my fluffy white peignoir and hell if I can remember what he was wearing, down to the ice machine in the middle of the night to make a compress.

Spectacular.  EPIC FAIL.  

But it makes for a funny story.  We chuckle over how vividly different our stories of that night are.  He likes to tell people I beat him.  I like to tell people... well.  Never mind.

So I'm wondering, and the Friday Casual Sex Day Question of the Day is.... Who out there writes a spectacular sex scene?  Do you feel like you have to save the best for last?  Do you feel like it has to be all better than ever, everyone gets their cookies, and no one goes empty handed?  Or could you see writing that scene where someone tries a flavored lube that his partner is vilely allergic to, and they end up cuddling in the hospital waiting room?  Can you see yourself writing about the spider dropping from the ceiling, or the bed breaking, or taking a dick in the eye because you moved faster than someone thought you were going to.  Can you see writing people at their worst?  And does that make you think, like it makes me think, that it's a very fine way to show people at their best?

What are YOU thinking about this Casual Sex Friday?