Smart Bitches, Trashy Books

What Not to Write: Spooge.

Anonymous forwarded the following to me, and of course, I have to inflict it on the rest of you. Enjoy.

Kerrelyn Sparks’s Eat Prey Love is, in my opinion, a What Not to Write, but the “werepanther spooge” part sticks out.

Some background: Our hero is a shapeshifting werepanther, and when he is killed, he comes back to life and kinda goes up a level in strength, abilities, etc. all Marty-Stu-like.  And when he comes back to life, he needs sex.  The first time he dies, he hasn’t quite hit that point with our heroine yet, so he has to go off into a corner of the cave they’re stuck in and, well, take care of himself.  On the way out of the cave, the author somehow feels compelled to draw our attention to the puddles of werepanther spooge left on the cave floor by our masturbating hero.

“Watch your step here.” He maneuvered her to the left.

She shone her flashlight down to see what he was avoiding. It was a whitish puddle. “What is that? Rainwater with chalk or lime deposits?” She beamed her light at the ceiling to look… read more »

What Not to Write: Snack Food Edition

Oh, it’s a beautiful thing when food imagery is used in sex scenes. It’s all 9 1/2 Weeks spliced together with Iron Chef - wouldn’t that be the very best in a sensual interlude? Unless we’re talking snack foods, as Kathleen discovered:

Thank you for pointing out the Books on the Knob website. I have had a lot of fun downloading the free ebooks. One of these was The Bite Before Christmas by Heidi Betts. In the story “All I Vant For Christmas”, I read something that belongs in the “The What Not to Write” category.

Sex linked with food is heavy in this story (vampire hero thinks the heroine smells like peaches and cinnamon, sex talk with steak and ice cream sundaes mentioned, etc.), but this one ... well….

  Not that he was worried about her level of readiness. Her nipples were pointy little diamonds in the centers of her full, luscious   breasts, her breaths were coming in tiny shallow pants, and he could feel the dampness between her legs just from where they pressed   together like Twinkies inside their cellophane wrapper.

I found myself trying to… read more »

What Not To Write: Callouses

Alert Reader N. answered the call for any examples of What Not To Write with an email message that made my jaw drop. As part of a regular feature here at the Hot Pink Palace of Bitchery (where the drinks are free and the man titty shelters us from the harsh rays of the sun), we’re taking a look at descriptions, both sexual and non-sexual that yanked us out of the storyline.

Some of these examples, such as the comparison of a woman’s hey-nanner-nanner to a horse’s mouth, evoked some irritated responses that the passage in question (the words, not the ACTUAL passage) didn’t bother them. And of course, any sex scene taken out of context is ridiculous, as AgTigress pointed out. It’s true.

But every now and again, readers encounter some examples of description that cause a double-take.

Which is why N’s example was so marvelous.

I humbly submit for your consideration Susan Johnson’s short story “A School for Scandal” in the anthology Perfect Kisses, in which the hero wonders if he is being overly vigorous:

“He wasn’t worried for himself - his penis was calloused… read more »