Bad Sex Awards

Writing Journal: The Adjusters #23 seems to have been well received. The pace is probably a bit slow for most, and a lot of it has to do with the monthly updates, and the fact that I like to pause here and there and let characters get it on—well, that, and the fact that I plot slow. I'll try to improve on that in future arcs. Meanwhile, yesterday morning, I've looked at my draft of #24, and realized much to my dismay that some of what happens in that episode has made it into #23. (I wrote what is now #24 first, then added what is now #23 to make some of what happens later make sense.) So #24 is going to need massive revisions to clean up the resulting mess.

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I'm on the road this weekend, so no heavy post tonight. I'll just leave you with a couple of articles about the always hilarious bad sex awards:

Prudishness lies at the heart of poor sex writing. You can sense the urge to shy away from sex, to displace it with simile or hide it all together. It’s striking how frequently the view becomes cloudy or obscured. In previous years Carlos Fuentes got “lost in a leafiness like that of a forest of fleshy ferns”; Amos Oz was “like some piece of sonar equipment ... anticipating and consciously avoiding every sandbank, steering clear of each underwater reef”; John Banville has “a passionate dalliance ... on the edge of a precipice beyond which can be glimpsed a dark-green distance in a reeking mist and something shining out of them”. [...]

You can also read extracts from some of the contenders.