I had this fantastic English teacher in high school: Bobbie Kay. The woman was an unstoppable force of energy and good humor. She was that teacher that everyone loved—if you could survive her sadistic weekly grammar and vocabulary tests. She was exacting, demanding and because of that, she was one of the very best teachers I, and several classes of Morro Bay High School students, ever had. She was hilarious and effervescent as she flounced around the classroom in school-spirited sweatshirts and incredible nail art on her long, long perfect fingernails, covering blackboards in her perfect Palmer Method handwriting, while regaling the class with gripping and educative anecdotes of her heydays of high school and college in Colorado. One such story had to do with how she made her spending money in college by writing erotica under a pen-name. And because I loved Mrs. Kay like a second mother, because she understood me like no other teacher I'd had up to that point, because she was the first one who first told me I was an excellent writer, because I wanted to be exactly like her, nail art and all, I decided that I, too, would one day write erotica on the side, and thus pave my road to financial security, whilst I toiled at meaningful novels and dark short stories. 

I left for college with this goal still imprinted on my mind. And by my junior year, having  gotten a couple of ambivalent boyfriends, sloppy breakups and bad sexual decisions under my belt, I figured I knew enough about sex to write convincing erotica. I mean, really, once you have some firsthand experience with the mechanics, all you need after that is a vivid imagination. Right? I even had my nome de plume picked out. ("Roxanne Lovejoy," since you asked.) 

Not so fast. I learned quickly that I couldn't bring myself to write the requisite scenes. I can hardly write now about how I could hardly write them without blushing. I'd start a sentence that would say something like, "And then she felt…." and I'd just stop. I could sit there and think of the countless ways to say what we all know is coming next—and truly there are a zillion ways to fill in that blank. But I would just blush by the glow of my computer screen, frozen, fingers hovering over the keys. I'd tap out tentatively "…his…" or "….the…." then I'd backspace furiously. Then decide I'd try again later. 

But later never really happened. And thus began and ended my career in erotic literature. I turned to bartending to make my ends meet, and we all know how that turned out. 

So now, lo, these 20+ years (and countless boyfriends and lovers later), anyone who has spent more than five minutes with me is aware that I am no prude.  You have an uncomfortably hilarious story about your ex-boyfriend's penis? Oh, god, please tell me. Need some recommendations about how to find pornography that's not reprehensibly misogynistic and gross? I can help you with that. I am a lover of bawdy jokes and exchanging explicit stories of sexual conquests. I would generally describe myself as sex-positive, open-minded, and have what some would call an unhealthy comfort with the whole notion of TMI. To the point where my own filter about what I say among mixed company can be, well, questionable. Depending on how much whiskey has been recently imbibed. 

And as a writer of stories, from time to time, I find myself at a point in a narrative where a love scene is called for. By love scene, I mean sex scene. And every time it happens, I stare at the screen of my laptop and blush, still unable to write the words, to fill in the blank. You guys, everything I write will be totally devoid of sex because I cannot for the life of me even render the most tasteful  sex scene, let alone an interesting one. Like at all. I can't make myself write it. 

So, instead I come up with these elaborate plot-wrenching workarounds that make it so the sex simply can't happen. And, honestly, if you have two characters who have a sexual tension between them, releasing that pressure by allowing them to actually fuck takes a ton of energy out of your story. This a true fact in storytelling craft. But eventually something, as the old song goes, has got to give, and when that happens, you've got to nut up and write the sex. Unless you're me, in which case you just make sweeping decisions about your characters and your plot that make it narratively infeasible for them to hookup. 

I guess this is a hangup I should work on getting over. But in the meantime I'll just be grateful that this is one of those rare instances where life does not necessarily imitate art. 

Image: Due Amanti, Guilio Romano, 1499–1546