Monday 12th April 2021

I heard Brandon Sanderson call some exploratory writing you do before starting a novel, pre-writing.  I like that term and even if it’s not exactly the same as what Sanderson does, I’m adopting it for my opening exploratory chapters I write as part of the outline.

And here’s the thing.  I’m ALL over the place.  I’ve pretty much been working on 3 chapters, one which got inserted in the middle after I’d written what is now chapter 3.  That means chapter 3 needs to be changed.  But I also introduced things I crammed into chapter 1, and came to the conclusion that an event that happened in chapter 1 needed to be subtly changed to allow for the character progression that we see in new chapter 2.  This is forever going to be known as the blowjob scene.  Or better yet (as it’s chapter 1 and chapter 1 can’t really have any spoilers), the brojob.

And this is ridiculously hard (no pun intended).  You see, I don’t want to be graphic in my description.  I’m not trying to get people off here.  So I don’t want to shove literary phalluses in people’s faces.

Instead, I’ve made the brojob implied.  I don’t actually say it.  There’s just heads going down and mouth being wiped with back of hands.  Part of this is because the focus is not on the act itself but on the characters.

Originally, I had both characters into it.  They both wanted it.  But that rang a little too shallow.  It seemed a little too sexy time for me, despite how much I’ve pulled that scene back to the bare minimum.  But for the main character going forwards, this didn’t make sense.  I want it to be consensual, because I just think rape gets overused in fantasy.  So I’ve made it more confused.  The character likes it, they didn’t want the other person to stop, but they’re not sure they would have ever asked for it.

It makes it nice and grey but still consensual.  The characters in this book are shaping up and because of the nature of the story they need to be a little grey.  That includes their sexuality to a certain extent.  Part of the reason is because this character is one of the main characters and their antagonist / fellow protagonist is a little grey in terms of sexuality as well.  I think they’re bisexual, but it might not even be that.  Apart from the brojob, I’m not expecting any sex in this book, but because of the nature of the antagonist they’re very flirty with everyone and I need to contrast this with the protagonist.

It sets up an interesting dynamic between the two, which is what I want.  I’m starting to get excited about the depth of some of these characters, and I’m hoping to include that in a chapter 4 I need to include in my pre-writing.

Do I worry about the inclusion of the brojob?  Of course.  We like to pretend that literature is all diverse and accepting, but this is going to be a huge red flag to some and publishers might look at it and think it’ll turn a portion of the audience off.  Still, better to do that in chapter 1.

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