The Reunion / The Hanged Man

I'm working out of sequence as I have been frequently because of how I keep getting stuck. A friend had a bad day yesterday, and she read the first draft of Courting Apparitions and laments the fact that Basilie and Étienne don't have sex except for one in the entire book.

That is a bad, bad sentence. But let's move on.

Since my friend had a bad day, and I'm very close to that big sex scene, I thought I'd go ahead and write that scene to cheer her up.

In the tarot, there's a card called the Hanged Man. It's not the well-hung man, so get your mind out of the gutter. The hanged man is the guy who always looks at a situation differently from everyone else. If you watched Project Runway last night, he would be Casanova (who thought WAY out of the box) or even Ivy H. (her approach to the project was the opposite of everyone else).

A good sex scene has to have an element of the Hanged Man. If it's merely presenting what happened, it's not enough. If it's merely erotic and graphic, it's not enough.

I've talked in the past about every sex scene doing its job to move the plot, and enhance the character and show us about the relationship we're seeing. But it should also have that special quirkiness that makes it real.

In real life, this happens.

Like the time I asked my husband in the middle of things if he remembered whether or not I turned the oven off.

Or the time things went incredible and my husband thought something was wrong based on an unusual noise I made.

I already have a very powerful surprise for the revision to book three that shows how quickly "the other woman" picked up on a secret fantasy of the male character that his wife never noticed in 25 years together.

And don't even ask about the Tufula Tufts.