I want to talk about how strange it is to write a sex scene when your parents are eventually going to read your book
This is a weirdly specific anxiety that nobody warned me about and that I've now heard mentioned, quietly, by enough writer friends that I think it deserves a proper conversation.
I'm writing in a genre where sex scenes are basically expected, and my mother reads everything I publish. My father will eventually skim it. My aunt was at the launch of my first book and bought four copies. I do not want any of these people to read me writing the word "thrust." I especially do not want them to read me writing it well.
But here's the thing. If I write the sex scenes badly because I'm imagining my mother reading them, I'm failing the book. The reader who picked it up because of the genre I'm writing in deserves a real scene, written with the same care as every other scene. The reader hasn't met my mother and shouldn't have to suffer for my discomfort about her existence.
I've mostly solved this by, when I sit down to write those chapters, very deliberately not thinking about anyone I know reading them. I write them for an imaginary reader who picked the book up off a bookshop table because the cover looked good and has zero relationship to me. It works most of the time. The morning after, while editing, I still sometimes have to physically push the awareness of my mother's eventual readership out of my head.
I don't have a real takeaway here. I just think it's funny and a little sad that this is part of the job and nobody really talks about it. If you also write in a genre with sex and you also have family who reads you, I see you. We're all silently grimacing through the same chapter