Imagine
you’re a novelist and your latest offering is six months old and you’ve
(repeatedly) knocked on every door on your list, you’ve exhausted the goodwill
of your promo squad and you’re boring your Facebook friends to tears. What’s
next?
You
sit around gnawing on your fingers, feeling the pressure of keeping your book
‘out there’ and then it comes to you; it’s time to whip up a YouTube reading.
Saved
by yet another outlet in social media, you start paging through your third
novel, A Glittering Chaos, trying to
choose a reading and you’re somewhat startled by what you find.
Where
did all this sex come from? No wonder your mother emailed to ask when you were
going write a book she could actually read… You were affronted by her comment
at the time but now you can see it from her perspective… masturbation, cock,
foot rubs with incestuous intent, a black dildo named Kurt, Sapphic stairwell
passion and an entirely new way of enjoying an innocuous shower at the end of a
long day… yep, there’s a whole lot of sex going on in this book and you
realized that it’s not going to be easy to find a family-friendly reading,
unless of course you unapologetically just read whichever page you happen to
crack open.
But
seriously, you ask yourself, where did all this sex come from? As much as you
don’t want to admit it, when you trace it back, it’s there because the Chatelaine
Book Club ‘complained’ that there wasn’t any sex in your second novel, West of Wawa, and they were hugely disappointed
when things with the heroine and her über-sexy bad boy closed the door on the
readers and the scene faded to black.
You
felt mildly insulted by their criticism. Did they think you couldn’t write sex scenes? Of course you
could. It was simply that sex had no
place in West of Wawa, sexy bad boy
or not. But later, down the line, there you were, in Las Vegas, getting a shiny
new idea for a shiny new story and you’d show them you could write about sex;
baby, you’d knock them out the water, they’d regret having said you can’t write
about sex…. Wait, okay so they didn’t say you couldn’t write sex scenes, they said you hadn’t… there’s a
difference but your little writerly ego couldn’t bear the blow of such literary
judgment.
Granted,
you didn’t plan for that much sex to
be in the book; just a scene here and there but then, as will happen with sex,
one thing led to another, and - next thing you know - the fires were burning wildly and your
mum didn’t feel comfortable reading the book and your close friends said they
never thought they’d hear you say the word ‘cock’ and you tell them it’s not
you, it’s your protagonist – but that’s a whole other topic for another blog post –
how friends and family simply cannot separate you from your protagonist, no
matter how astoundingly different you are.
But
back to your conundrum… it’s time for to
record your YouTube reading and you can’t seem to find a page that isn’t in
some way controversially sensual…
So,
what do you do? Well, readers if you’d like to find out what this author did, I
invite you to take a look at http://bit.ly/1ahnDIU and I hope you’ll
enjoy!
(Oh
and PS, the 'erotic literary thriller' comment was a tweet by one of my
readers, Terri Favro, author of The Proxy Bride)
Originally from South Africa, Lisa de Nikolits has been a
Canadian citizen since 2003. She has a Bachelor of Arts in English Literature
and Philosophy and has lived in the U.S.A., Australia and Britain.
Her first novel, The
Hungry Mirror, won the 2011 IPPY Awards Gold Medal for Women's Issues
Fiction and was long-listed for a ReLit Award. Her second novel, West of Wawa won the 2012 IPPY Silver
Medal Winner for Popular Fiction and was one of Chatelaine's four Editor's
Picks.
Her third novel, A
Glittering Chaos, was launched in Spring 2013 and is about murder, madness,
illicit love and poetry.
and check out her website www.lisadenikolitswriter.com
Check out Lisa's books on AMAZON and follow her on Twitter @lisadenikolits
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