Guest Post from Steve McHugh

So excited! My first guest post of 2013 is from none other than the incredible indie author Steve McHugh. Steve is amazing, and as one of only two men in my writing group, he gets more than his share of romance in his reading (and writerly conversations). Guess a little bit of that rubbed off on him, because he's here today to celebrate his newest release, Born of Hatred, and talk about one of my favorite topics--writing sex scenes. Yummy!

Take it away, Steve!

The Art of Sex Scenes

Although a massive generalisation, it’s very quickly become apparent to me that women write better sex scenes then men. I can think of, at a push, three male writers who write excellent sex scenes in their books. I can think of at least a dozen women, right off the top of my head who do the same.

Now, of course there are women who can’t write sex scenes either, but even so, the odds are firmly in the female court.

So, it was with a little trepidation that it became apparent that my first book, Crimes Against Magic, was going to have sex in it. This was a problem for one reason. My sex scenes were dreadful. They read a little bit like an educational sex talk given by a teacher for whom the word ‘sex’ should never leave their mouth. They were dry, dull and quite frankly about as sexy as wet cardboard.

So, I tried spicing them up a bit and found a new problem. They now sounded like a porn film. All I needed to do was add a handlebar moustache and have the main character come to check on the woman’s boiler, fridge, cooker, pluming and I’d have had a career in writing truly terrible sex scenes. It’s something to think about if this whole ‘published author’ thing doesn’t work out.

So I needed to re-work it again. And this time I found some good advice. Apparently, I’m pretty good at writing action scenes. So, why not try writing a sex scene in the same way? Everyone writes action scenes in their own way, but I tend to map out where everyone is and what they’re doing, or going to be doing.

Applying it to a sex scene was actually straight-forward. Instead of several people all in the same place I only had to deal with two (although, your mileage may vary). So, I wrote it as if it were an action scene, or a fight. Once I had the backbone for it, I found it much easier to go through it and make it ‘sexier’, but having that base was necessary for me.

Since that first time, I’ve found it much easier to switch into ‘sex scene mode’ for writing and can usually manage it without the need for the clinical part first. I’m never going to write the greatest sex scenes of all time, but I hope I’m no longer in the same bracket as some of the truly terrible ones.

Steve McHugh is the author of the popular Urban Fantasy series, Hellequin Chronicles. The first book of which, CrimesAgainst Magic, was published in April 2012 and followed by the sequel, Born ofHatred in December 2012.

To learn more about Steve and his work, you can find him:

http://stevejmchugh.wordpress.com/

https://twitter.com/StevejMchugh
https://www.facebook.com/Hiddenrealmspublishing

And find a copy of his most recent book, Born of Hatred, at Amazon.co.uk and Amazon.com 

There was a time when Nathan Garrett was feared. When the mention of his name was enough to stop his enemies in their tracks. That time has long since passed. When Nathan's friend asks for help investigating a pattern of horrific crimes, he reluctantly agrees. But his investigation leads to a serial killer who is something more, or less, than human, a creature of pure malevolence and hatred.

There are some things that even a 1600-year-old sorcerer hesitates to challenge. But when evil targets those Nathan cares about, his enemies will discover exactly who Nathan used to be. And why they will learn to fear him once more.

Tuesday Teases: Julie Campbell

Today I want to welcome another author friend of mine. Julie Campbell writes urban fantasy different from most of what we see hitting bookshelves. Her love of animals comes through in her novels...as it does here. Please welcome, Julie Campbell!

First off I wanted to thank Seleste for having me stop by.  Thanks!!! I’ve only guest blogged once before, so I’m very excited.  I wanted to share a little about what had shaped my writing life, so here it goes:

In my humble (ok it’s not humble) opinion, those are the major things that have shaped my life.  If I didn’t like to read, I wouldn’t write, if I didn’t ride I wouldn’t have the ideas I have today, and if I didn’t write I wouldn’t be who I am today.

I hated to read when I was very young.  I can’t really remember why, but I suspect it was hard for me.  Then one fateful summer my best friend stayed with us instead of going to daycare while her mother worked.  Naturally that was the summer that we decided we hated each other.  In retrospect that was  very important, because that’s the summer she learned to love to read.  She didn’t really have anything else to do because I was being an ass.  Of course once school started we were best friends again.  She shared her newly discovered love of reading with me.  This was the third grade and I started reading voraciously.  I have never stopped.

I’ve been in love with horses since I can remember.  Most of my childhood favorites involved horses: The Black Stallion, The Saddle Club, any fantasy where the characters rode horses, even things like Steinbeck’s The Red Pony.  I don’t remember a lot of that book, but I do remember it really didn’t seem like a kids’ book, but it had a horse so I read it anyway.

I also loved to ride.  Ever since I was tall/old enough to go on pony rides my parents would do their best to get me on horses.  Once I was big enough to take lessons, they scraped together the cash to get me instruction.  The place I rode did lessons by quarters, and I could only afford to ride once a year, but I took lessons as much as I could until I got to high school.  There, I was too busy with track and science Olympiad and my interest in horses waned a little.  I had this vague feeling that if I could ride every week all year I could really get somewhere with my riding, but I knew it wasn’t possible and a slight sense of frustration, combined with school kept me from begging for lessons when my parents wanted me to stop.

Through this whole time I wrote.  Nothing serious, and very intermittently, but I always liked to tell stories.  My friends and I had a play we were writing, something silly and with star wars characters, but that was a lot of fun.  I also loved it at sleepovers when we would tell serial stories, each person picking up where the others ended.  Of course mine usually involved killer Portuguese Men of War.  I have no frigging idea why.

Things started to come together in the sixth grade when one of my reading teachers, Ms. Fox, said those fateful words: “Julie, someday you are going to be a writer.”  I thought she was full of it at the time, and it took six more years, but suddenly the bug bit me, and it hasn’t let go since then.

I moved to Colorado and suddenly there were horses everywhere.  I was dying.  All these horses and I couldn’t ride.  I was a college student, lessons were out of the question.  I know I could have worked more than one job to make it happen but with the amount of homework I had, that wasn’t a good option.   I went silently nuts until one day I said something to the right person and the next set of fateful words were spoken: “Hey, I have a friend…”  And so I met Fran.  I rode with Fran, learning a ton from her, refreshing my rusty skills and gaining new ones.  The horse I have now, who very well could be called my muse if anything could be, lived, unused and untrained at Fran’s barn and one day I started working with her.  I fell in love.  She was perfect.  Still is.  Perfect for me anyway.  With help, I trained her and she has carried me miles and miles down mountain trails, over jumps, around arenas, across open plains and just about everywhere else.    She has also carried my imagination to other worlds on horseback and sparked the idea for the first novel I ever actually finished.  I have written three novels based on that idea now, the two original ones and then the rewrite I recently completed which is the beginning of the series that will eventually be published.

Without Sabaska, my horse, I don’t think I would be where I am now.  She is my sanity when the day job is kicking my ass, or my personal life goes to hell.  She’s the anchor in my life and she refreshes my mind when I’m burnt.  A half hour of riding is more therapeutic than anything else I’ve ever done.  A day spent in the mountains with my horse will keep me going for months after, and my imagination goes wild with ideas when I’m spending time with Sabaska, or any horse really.  Like writing, horses are in my blood.

I write what I like to read, which is fantasy, but though most fantasy has people riding around on horseback, very few actually have horses as main characters.  Mercedes Lackey is one notable exception and I love reading her books.  I believe I have read almost every fantasy involving horses that is out there, certainly everyone I could find.  And there aren’t enough.  I read once that if there is a novel you want to read that hasn’t been written, then write it.  So now I write urban fantasy with horses, and of course I write urban fantasy with vampires too.  Even though the subject is different, those ideas also come to me while I’m riding.  I also have a short story series about Doc the vampire hunting Border Collie and his development is a whole different blog post.  You can read some excerpts and Doc’s stories on my website: www.writerjacampbell.com .  Feel free to stop by and leave a comment if you like what you see.

Also, if you feel like seeing what I had to say today, I'm over at Julie's blog talking about Supernatural.