Snowday Reading: Or, What I Learned This Week

On Friday we had a winter storm. Not a huge one, nothing even close to a blizard. This storm was just enough to keep me tucked away, warm and cozy, in my house with a good book.

And the book I chose was good too. It had an interesting and engaging narrator in a situation that gained my sympathy in chapter one. His love interest was sexy and enigmatic and an artist too. Yum, I have a weakness for artists, especially painters. The mystery plot was well thought out and came to a satisfying conclusion that I wasn’t able to predict, a thing I very much appreciate. And the secondary characters were fun and quirky and added a lot of color to the story.

Only one thing kept me from grading this an A plus read.

I didn’t get to see the narrator and his lover actually say the L word. It was obvious that they loved each other, at least to me, from very early on in the story. But, damn it, I wanna see that! If I follow a couple for 200 pages of yearning and lusting I want to see them together and in love, not just be told that they have decided to be together and that they have finally admitted their love for one another. Show it to me!

The other thing this author didn’t give me was the final, HEA sex scene. Okay, so the conclusion for this couple was sort of an HFN rather than HEA. But I wanted to see that last, all important scene where they don’t just fuck but make love.

Don’t misunderstand me. There were some very satisfying sex scenes in the story. They were beautifully descriptive and intrinsic to the development of the characters so I make no complaints there. But I wanted that last one and I didn’t get it which had me closing the book with a feeling of being cheated of something I, at least in my own mind, had a right to.

A while back one of my crit partners was telling me about the importance of showing that final, now-we’re-together-and-happy sex scene. (I was struggling with whether or not to include one more sex scene in my wip.) And on an intellectual level what she said made a lot of sense. But not until I looked at the question with my reader hat firmly in place did I really understand on a gut level how important that scene is to a satisfying ending.

So what about you? How important is that final sex scene to you as a reader? If an author fails to give it to you, would it keep you from reading any more of that writer’s work?

Written by Kimberly Gardner

As early as the seventh grade, Kimberly remembers slashing her favorite rockstars and reading romance. So it’s not surprising that her two passions, romance and putting pretty boys with other pretty boys, should come together in her writing. Moliere said, “Writing is like prostitution. First you do it for love, then for a few close friends, then for money.” Kimberly is delighted to finally be doing it for money.
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