My Heroines Can't Have Casual Sex (Structurally Speaking)

I've read sex scenes that were technically flawless and I couldn't tell you a thing about them.

Every limb accounted for. Dismounts that earned a 10 from the judges. And I turned the page thinking, okay, and now back to the book.

That's the failure. Not that it was badly written. That it was removable.

Here's my rule, and I apply it to my own drafts with a red pen and no mercy: if you can lift the spicy scene out of the manuscript and nothing downstream wobbles, it wasn't a scene. It was a commercial break with bow chica wow wow music.

Every other scene has to justify itself. 

A fight scene has to cost somebody something — blood, an ally, the illusion that they had this handled. An interrogation has to move information. A dinner scene has to detonate at least one polite lie.

A sex scene doesn't get a pass.

The question was never is it hot. The question is what does it cost, and who's different at the end of it?

The armor has to come off, and that's the actual nudity

I've said before that snark is armor, and armor implies a wound.

Which makes sex one of the very few situations in a book where the armor is structurally required to come off. My heroine can't deflect. She can't reach for the one-liner. Well — she can, and mine absolutely do, right up until they can't.

That's why these scenes are the best character work available to me. Not because of what her body is doing. Because it's the most exposed she's been all book and none of that has to do with clothing.

The heat and the vulnerability aren't taking turns. They're the same instrument.

So here's the test.

If the next morning could go exactly the same way whether or not that scene happened, I cut it. Not because it's too much — because it isn't enough.

My Nava Katz books are my spiciest, and that's saying something.

Now her epic journey is getting the collector's edition treatment.

The Unlikeable Demon Hunter is live on Kickstarter as three limited edition deluxe hardcover omnibuses with premium foil stamping, gorgeous edgework and full-colour art. 

The Kickstarter ends August 28.

Check it out now!