Just following up on last week’s post about the four-year-old incomplete sex scene.
I worked on ONLY this book since that post instead of my two-wip pronged approach I’ve been trying to build. My theory was if I set Helayna aside again, it might be another four years. I can’t do that to you, me, or her. I need her story figured out. So every time I sat down to write, it was Queen Takes Darkness.
Even when I could only get 200 words. Even when it felt like stripping my own skin off as I crawled over shattered ice crystals. I kept going. Even if it felt like I wasn’t making any progress at all. I re-read the scenes, over and over, trying to get momentum built. I referred back several times to the Sept 2021 notes, cursing myself for not writing more down. I knew Svar had backstory that was super important. But what was it? Whatever vague idea I had was gone into the ether. I hadn’t left myself a single clue outside of a few hints in the books themselves.
I inputted (my #2 strength). Going over the dark alfar lore again. Refreshing the vibes I was going for. The Darkness playlist has been playing nonstop in my house. In the car. (Okay, I did play Taylor’s Life of a Showgirl too but it was primarily Helayna’s playlist!)
Part of what made this particular set of scenes so hard is that I was introducing two new characters and moving straight into sex. I needed their backstories. Their hangups and personalities. They had to be people, real, interesting, and most importantly, distinct from all the other Blood I’ve created.
Then when I got through them… I still had Svar’s backstory to figure out. I kept wanting to flinch away and do something easier. Lighter. But I had to see. So I knew where to go.
And then even after we made it through that Darkness, I still had one more Blood to go. Because when a vampire queen is working her way through her Blood, no one gets left out.
I think I broke my personal longest sex scene record. If I start with the first disrobing and go all the way through to the end of the last scene, it’s over 16k (edited – forgot to include the last scene!). Not all of that is actual sex but it’s all part of the journey. Learning these new characters. Finding new powers. Building relationships. That’s why, when people say they skip the sex scenes, it just does not compute for me.
If you skip one of these scenes, you’ll never know Svar’s backstory. Why he is the way he is. Who Dörr is as a person at his core. I may complain about how many sex scenes I end up writing in these books, but it’s always transformative and powerful. Which is why they’re hard to write–but hopefully that’s what makes them memorable.
This week, I’m planning to move back into my two projects a day schedule so I can get Blizzard Bound moving again. I don’t want it to go too cold. (Haha) Though now that I’m over the hump in Helayna’s story, it may all be downhill from here and she may win out. We’ll see.
Gee, that’d be terrible if I could finish BOTH of them before December….