With 50% of precincts reporting in, my CPs are thus far unanimous in rejecting a scene I was rather proud of.
t cue chorus of self-doubt
Normally the combination of pride over something you've written and CPs/betas disliking it means you need to kill that particular darling...but I'm still stubbornly clinging to this one. This is my Regency romance group, and I'm now writing Regency-era non-romance. The issue in question is whether two of my characters should have sex at this point in the story. So far one CP is saying, basically, that it's not romantic enough for her--she seems to have trouble with sympathetic characters deciding to have comfort sex when both the text and what I've told her of the plot to follow make it clear they'll part soon and end up with other people. The second says it's just a throwaway sex scene like male adventure writers keep throwing in to please their female readers regardless of its relevance to the plot, and I shouldn't follow their bad example. Thing is, I guess I'm one of those pleased female readers, because I like the way the one author on her list I've actually read handles sex scenes. They don't seem throwaway to me.
Sigh. Really can't decide what to think of this. I mean, they're my characters, and their having sex seemed completely inevitable to me. I'd love to be able to chalk this up to my CPs using a romance standard for a non-romance story, but that might be a cop-out.