{"id":22472,"date":"2014-02-19T22:12:57","date_gmt":"2014-02-20T03:12:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/?p=22472"},"modified":"2014-02-19T22:12:57","modified_gmt":"2014-02-20T03:12:57","slug":"jane-oreilly-five-things-i-learned-writing-indecent-exposure","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/2014\/02\/19\/jane-oreilly-five-things-i-learned-writing-indecent-exposure\/","title":{"rendered":"Jane O’Reilly: Five Things I Learned Writing Indecent Exposure"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Quiet, sensible Ellie Smithson is a highly respectable photographer by day \u2013 but there are only so many wedding photo-shoots you can take without your mind wandering to what happens when the blissfully happy bride is swept off her feet and straight to the honeymoon suite\u2019s sumptuous four-poster bed\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n

So after dark, Ellie takes pictures of a more\u2026intimate nature \u2013 a dirty little secret she\u2019s kept from her accountant Tom. Until now. It seems Tom is the subject of her next racy shoot!<\/em><\/p>\n

It isn\u2019t just the blurring of work and personal boundaries that\u2019s the problem; secretly Ellie has always had fantasies of a most unprofessional nature about the almost illegally gorgeous Tom. With such temptation on display, how will she ever stay\u00a0behind\u00a0the camera?<\/em><\/p>\n

<\/em>1. I love writing in 1st<\/sup> person present.<\/h2>\n

I\u2019d always written in 3rd<\/sup> person past before, which is pretty much the standard route for romance novels. But 1st<\/sup> person present is so immediate, so visceral. You are right there with the character, living the story as they live it. I loved it so much that I then wrote 90K of my next manuscript in it. (I regretted that later. It was completely the wrong choice for that book). I have seen some readers say that they\u2019ll reject a book based purely on the fact that it\u2019s written in 1st<\/sup> person present, but I wouldn\u2019t use that as an excuse not to write a book that way if you want to. Just accept that those people aren\u2019t your readers and get on with it.<\/p>\n

2. There is a tremendous sense of freedom in writing erotica.<\/h2>\n

I was able to say all the things I\u2019d never been able to say in my contemporary romances. Use all the bad words and explore all the desires of the heroine, Ellie, that wouldn\u2019t have been acceptable in a contemporary. Erotica is very honest and raw, and I don\u2019t think you will find a more accurate portrayal of female desire. Anyone who wants to understand female sexuality should read some.<\/p>\n

3. You can have too many connections between the hero and heroine.<\/h2>\n

It helps a story to have some, because it gives some backstory, some conflict. But when they went to school together and her studio is in the shop his parents used to own that he burned down and he\u2019s her accountant and he\u2019s had sex with her best friend, it\u2019s too much. Fortunately, the editor who bought Indecent Exposure pointed this out. And made me fix it.<\/p>\n

4. You won\u2019t die from embarrassment if one of your sex scenes is read out loud in front of a group of strangers.<\/h2>\n

I took a scene from Indecent Exposure to a writing sex workshop run by novelist Julie Cohen. There were about 8 of us there, as I recall, and only one other person had brought some of their work with them. I felt reasonably content with my ability to write sex scenes \u2013 I\u2019d sold some of my contemporary romances by then, and they have sex scenes galore, although not featuring anal sex and pornography. Ahem. Someone else read my scene out to the rest of the group – I was too busy dealing with the shame \u2013 and there was a moment, a really precious moment, where everyone went very quiet and no-one breathed. I knew then that the scene worked. And if that scene worked, maybe the whole thing would.<\/p>\n

5. When people find out that you\u2019ve written erotica, they\u2019re going to ask you if you find writing it exciting. And you\u2019re going to have to think of an answer.<\/h2>\n

When I was first smacked between the eyes with \u2018did writing it turn you on?\u2019 I was completely floored. How very rude, I thought to myself. How very personal. I\u2019ve been asked since, though the question has been put more gently. Do you enjoy it? Is it exciting? It\u2019s not difficult to know the answer, though it is difficult to say. It was funny really, after writing stories about women struggling to deal with the way society views women and sex, to find myself struggling to answer that question. To tell the truth, or to deny it? To say yes, writing a scene in which the gorgeous hero pleasured himself was fabulously arousing, or to pretend it was nothing more than words on a page? Like the heroine of Indecent Exposure, Ellie, I tried denial. It didn\u2019t work.<\/p>\n

* * *<\/p>\n

Jane O\u2019Reilly<\/strong> started writing as an antidote to kids\u2019 TV when her youngest child was a baby. Her first novel was set in her old school and involved a ghost and lots of death. It\u2019s unpublished, which is probably for the best. Then she wrote a romance, and that, as they say, was that. She lives near London with her husband and two children.<\/p>\n

Jane O’Reilly: Website<\/span><\/a> | Twitter<\/span><\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Indecent Exposure: Amazon US<\/span><\/a> \/ Amazon UK<\/a><\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Quiet, sensible Ellie Smithson is a highly respectable photographer by day \u2013 but there are only so many wedding photo-shoots you can take without your mind wandering to what happens when the blissfully happy bride is swept off her feet and straight to the honeymoon suite\u2019s sumptuous four-poster bed\u2026 So after dark, Ellie takes pictures […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-22472","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"hentry","6":"category-theramble","8":"no-featured-image"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pv7MR-5Qs","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22472"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22475,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22472\/revisions\/22475"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/terribleminds.com\/ramble\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}