How to Leave Your Readers Sweaty, Breathless, and Gasping “Oh, Baby!” by LJ Greene

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Still, certain things hold true regardless of your particular preferences, and it’s important to keep them in mind. After all, a badly crafted scene involving a bank robbery may be boring to a reader, but a badly crafted love scene can be just plain hilarious. And that’s not usually the goal.

The good news is that as human beings, we’re biologically programmed to be interested in sex. Sex of any kind, really. Cows, horses, grasshoppers – if a creature is doing it, we’re inclined to at least give it a glance. So you can expect the cat ears of your readers will naturally swing forward at the first gasp of desire. As such, love scenes are powerful tools in your arsenal of storytelling. Use them responsibly! When you have a tiger by the tail, there’s a lot that can go wrong. Here are a few things to keep it from turning on you:

1. Context. Context. Context.
The measure of a great love scene is that it could only be written for those two specific characters in that particular moment in time. I can’t stress this enough. Sex is not an exchange of sweat; it’s an exchange of emotion. (And there’s a wide range of emotion available to you; don’t limit yourself to just love or lust.) What happens in a sex scene is far less important than why it happens or how your characters feel about it. Too much description with too little emotional context and you have wandered into “hokey pokey” territory. Readers deserve far more than just being told where the right arm presently is.

2. Words matter.
 Power words like “lick” go a long way towards painting a vivid mental picture, and the human brain is more than willing to fill in the rest. Too much detail can be unnecessary and distracting. If you find yourself describing slurping or slapping, you’ve likely gone too far.

 Resist verbal contortionism. I cringe when I read scenes where an author has gone to extreme measures to avoid using certain words. It’s true that how a writer describes the female body, in particular, is a very personal and stylized thing. But most romance readers are not so delicate that you need to say “tender pink crests.” Just say nipple. No one will mind.

 Leave out the euphemisms. If you find yourself writing “coochie,” perhaps you yourself are not comfortable with the level of description in your scene. Your readers will know it. Further, if “flesh knife” appears in your novel, might I suggest any number of better alternatives?

 “Moist” and “creamy” are best left to describe the excellent cake your lovers will enjoy together afterwards. Enough said.

3. Say something!
One of the things I look for in a great love scene is dialog. Keep in mind that these are two human beings. Interacting. And that interaction should move the story along, not just serve as a sexy digression. Dialog is a highly efficient and interesting way to convey emotional context. As you sit down to craft a love scene, try thinking about it as a dialog scene with physical details to support.

4. Employ at least three senses.
In the throes of writing a sex scene (no pun intended!), it’s easy for us writers to forget that our sense of touch is only one arrow in the quiver. What we see and hear, what we smell, and what we taste play equally important roles. By layering in several senses, you can paint a three-dimensional picture that is far more vivid, compelling, and artfully sexy.

Oh, baby!

What could be more terrifying than falling in love with the person who is your good place? Maybe realizing just a smidge too late that there can be dire consequences to becoming your best friend’s lover.

The lives of Keir Stevens and Selene Georgiou serendipitously collide midspan on San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge, one jarring step ahead of fate. He’s a temporary transplant from Seattle; she’s facing the biggest career opportunity of her life. They have no notion of the common thread that connects them.

As they come to discover they share a similar adversity, their relationship evolves from a fun and frivolous infatuation with nowhere to go into a true friendship with sincerity, humor, and respect at its heart.

It’s awfully hard not to fall in love with that—even if you’re pretty darn certain you shouldn’t.

But when love and friendship suffer their own devastating collision—their interests brutally conflicting—the consequences of blurring the lines between the two suddenly become real. In the end, which one will be the stronger? And more importantly, can either survive?

AFTEREFFECTS is a standalone dual POV adult contemporary romance about the things we choose in life out of all the things that are beyond our choosing—a tale of love and friendship, of time and how we spend it, and of the inner wars that ultimately show us what really matters.

Enjoy an Excerpt

Selene lifted her left hand and touched my face with her palm. It was definitely a new kind of closeness for us, at least sober—one to which I gave no resistance. Her skin felt warm and smooth as she stroked my cheek gently. And I couldn’t take my eyes off her face. My God, she was stunning. This close, I absorbed the perfection of her features, of her delicate earlobes. A tiny piece of dark hair curled around the back of one.

The air between us seemed to crackle quietly, and I sat frozen in my seat in case any movement might cause her to draw away.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you clean-shaven,” she said softly.

I could feel her breath, too, warm against my face. My fingers itched to reach up and touch her mouth, to feel whether it was as soft as I remembered. My heartbeat picked up not only faster but harder, like it was punching me from the inside.

Had a goal been scored just then I wouldn’t have noticed. Nothing could have pulled me from that trance. I didn’t hear anything going on around us. Not the crowd, not the announcer, not the buzzer.

Only her.

Only her voice and her eyes and her breath. The memory of her mouth.

“Do you have a preference?” I asked roughly. I had no idea what possessed me to ask her that.

No, that’s a lie. That other side of me wanted to be everything she wanted and would have shaved every single day if that’s what she asked of me.

“No.” Her beautiful lips curved slightly upward. “How could I choose between James Bond and Indiana Jones?”

Her palm came to rest on my jawline, and I took a deep breath. When had my wanting her turned into this painful kind of ache?

Under the sanctity of her expression, I had a sudden and startling thought that maybe we could write a different ending for the two of us. One I hadn’t yet considered. Maybe there was a different story we could tell in which the things we had to offer would be enough.

There was obviously more to our relationship than just friendship, and perhaps we could figure out how to have something more than what we’d allowed ourselves. After all, there was care and respect at the heart of everything we did together. That had to mean something.

About the Author: LJ Greene is a self-professed obsessive multi-tasker who writes really boring stuff by day and lets her inner romantic fly by night. This California native is married to the most amazing man and has two beautiful children, not old enough to read her books. (They probably wouldn’t want to anyway on account of the “Ew, gross” factor.) She’s an avid reader of all genres with an embarrassingly large ebook collection, and a weird penchant for reading the acknowledgements at the end of a novel. She’s also a music lover with no apparent musical talent, a travel enthusiast, and a cheese connoisseur.

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