I think the lit fic folks get so overwrought about trying to be original that their sex tends to be silly. Sex in non-romantic genre fiction, like thrillers, is often perfunctory and sometimes squidgy. And even really good romance writers sometimes back down from the physicality of the act and describe it as some sort of disembodied, effervescent, altered state of consciousness, so I end up thinking “is she in bed or in a university lab somewhere tripping on ecstasy in an isolation tank?”

I don’t blame anyone for taking the escape hatches described above. Or just plain panicking. Writing sex is technically difficult. A sex scene is an intricate, emotionally charged action scene. I know that when I write, I spend more time on the sex scenes than any other kind of scene. If you’re writing hot you have to show enough to thrill–but not so much that it reads like a numbing transcription of a porn film. And worse of all, no one is going to agree on what’s too much and what’s not enough.

Kinda makes you go hmmm…