Sex in Storylines

I’ve been writing for so long, I can’t remember when I actually got serious about it. I know when I started. I’d been a teacher for six years. I had my first daughter in 1976, A Bicentennial Baby. She got a certificate in the mail from Ronald Reagan. It’s in her baby book. Two years later, I had my second daughter, and all I felt I did was change diapers and feed babies. Robyn had 37 allergies, and I had to be careful what I gave her. I was beginning to feel Brain Numb.

HH signed me up for a class at our local community college for Writing for Fun and Profit. Joan Truitt was the teacher, and she was wonderful. I turned in one of my assignments, and she wrote back that I should try to sell it at Byline Magazine. That sort of shocked me, but I sent it off, and two weeks later, Byline bought it for a whole $25. I remember looking at HH and saying, “Writing’s easy!” LOL. Beginner’s luck. Writing is HARD, and it’s really hard to sell what you write. But I had a lot of luck with small, unknown publishers who often paid in copies. And I finally worked my way up to selling to Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock mystery magazines. I was on a roll, so decided to try my hand at writing a novel.

OMG. My first effort was a complete failure. I’d started out writing stories that were 3,000 to 5,000 words long. I outlined. I tried to develop settings and characters and came in at 20,000 words. Pitiful. Luckily, there was a small newspaper publisher who supplied stories for people getting on airplanes, Penny Paper Publishing, and they wanted GOURMET KILLINGS. A sale! They bought my next book (?) too, STINGS OF DEATH. HH and I even went to Baltimore for a big signing of that year’s stories that were published. But I really wanted to write a full-length book.

I came close to selling so many times, I don’t even want to think about it. Tor held a YA horror I wrote because they were going to open a new line for that, but after a year, I asked them about it, and they’d lost the manuscript and forgot to get back to me. The joys of publishing. An editor took an urban paranormal I wrote to a sales meeting to convince them to buy, but the salespeople told her they’d just promoted a book with Tarot cards, and they didn’t need another one. Publishing.

I finally got a good agent, but she couldn’t sell my paranormals either. The market was glutted, so she convinced me to try a romance. Easier to sell. And Kensington accepted COOKING UP TROUBLE.

For paranormals, I finally had to write sex scenes. And believe me when I tell you, they’re not strong point. A reader suggested that I have the two people go into the bedroom, close the door, and then look out the window to see fireworks. It would be more exciting. Not much of a compliment. But what I remember very well is that a member of my writers’ group, Ann Wintrode, was in her 80’s, and she got aggravated with me if I didn’t give her a finished manuscript to edit. I thought it was a lot of work and told her so, but she told me she didn’t have anything better to do, so to give her the damn draft. So I did. But I didn’t want to give her FALLEN ANGELS because of the sex scenes. I tried to wiggle out of it, and I told her why. She looked at me with her vivid, sharp blue eyes and said, “Sex is part of life. None of us would be here if our parents didn’t have any. Get over yourself and quit letting your mother read over your shoulder. You’ll be a better writer.”

And she was right. I DID worry about what Mom would say if she read that book. And once I quit fussing about that, I was a better writer. I’ll always remember Ann. She was just plain wonderful.