Oh, it's not actually up in GWW.

Do you want to post it or email it?

Porn me!

I'll delete it tomorrow morning.

Yikes. EDIT: BTW, poor ol' Cillian is a vamp. That why all the weird eye stuff.

Well, there's some good stuff and bad stuff. Often right next to each other.

Bad - "It was like touching fire made solid, covered with slick satin." Actually I like how you're trying to get to a very specific image, but this is not good. The images are incoherent and you can't mash them togther without cognitive dissonance. You need to work harder to find a metaphor that's going to get this across for you. A satin bag of fire doesn't work.

Good - "The heat licked out at me, and I gasped. It felt like the heat rippling off a glassmaker’s kiln, like if I blew on it, I could take it and form it into something real and touchable." Much better. Very good, in fact.

Also you have wayyyy too many heat/hot references. I get it. It's hot. You need to bury that and evoke it without ceaselessly mentioning temperature. I don't know - more sweat, more flushing, more something.

"“Cat,” he whispered, “claw me again,” - No. No, no no.

"His teeth left my skin, and his tongue trailed quickly over the skin his teeth had scored."

That reads a bit clumsily. Like a stereo manual description of sex. It makes me stop and sort out the order of his teeth leaving the skin and the tongue arriving and that's not the effect you intend there. I would work on the rhythm of that sentence more than anything. Maybe...

"I felt his mouth pull back and his tongue trailed over the bite."

"My hands moved of their own accord"

I'd strike "of their own accord"

"...up his chest and I sunk my nails again into him, this time into the back of his neck, and his mouth was on mine, and I was open to him, tongue willing to war with his, and oh, his hand in my hair and the fire of his body pressed along mine."

That's fine in a bodice-rippery way. Which is the way this is going.

"Trevor’s voice cut into my panic, and the world crashed solidly back into place. I was standing there, bruised over what felt like every inch of my body, lips throbbing, the taste of someone else’s blood in my mouth and what I was very much afraid was a real vampire still pressed up against me." That's fine.

"All I saw were his eyes, and they were ablaze, luminescent green flames, and I fell into them for a thousand long years, and each year was filled with the sound of his voice, whispering to me, telling me that I was his."

This is much. This is both too general in its Big Romance and a bit cliche. If I were to just edit this section I'd ditch the "thousand years" stuff and the heat references.

"All I saw were his eyes, luminescent green, and his voice whispering to me that I was his."

That's smaller but more credible, more compelling. (I think - it's your book, though).

There's good stuff there, Erin, but it could use a tightening.

A satin bag of fire doesn't work.

BWAH!

Yeah, I was unhappy with the heat-hot/fire things, too. That was I was so desperate for feedback -- I wanted to see what was, er, hot, and what was too eyerollingly over the top.

It's HARD to write an effective erotic scene. I felt steam rising off my head, and not in a good way. And the things you mentioned as effective were things I retooled.

I'm trying to work both physical attraction and some kind of psychic connection into the same scene, and that's were I'm coming up with the disconnect. Ugh.

Thanks for the feedback. I was making myself crazy looking at it and thinking WTF does it NEED?!

It's HARD to write an effective erotic scene.

No lie. I tend to go the other way and it can get a bit too lean and not juicy enough. That's where I try to let the rhythm do some of the work, because that's where I'm comfortable in my writing.

I'm trying to work both physical attraction and some kind of psychic connection into the same scene, and that's were I'm coming up with the disconnect. Ugh.

Try to find a metaphor that's going to contain both those elements. The physical and the psychic/emotional and then work that. Stick to that conceit and work it through. Maybe go back to the kiln imagery. The shaping, the taking form, furnace blast, the glow, the roar of it, the danger. If you evoke all that, then they're going to feel heat without you having to stick a thermometer up Cillian's ass. Something like that. Think of John Donne or that scene in The Big Sleep where Bogie and Bacall are talking about horse racing except the whole time they're talking about sex.

Just an option.

I'm a-gonna write it all using flea-as-sex metaphors! Wait...

Now I'm trying to think of good metphors or conconceits for sex, or at least kissing.

There's hi, hello kisses, fuck-off kisses, I-hate-you-let's-fuck kisses, long slow kisses that taste like spring kisses, frantic drunk sex-in-an-bathroom kisses, apology kisses, you-are-amazing kisses...

Careful kisses, careless kisses, caring kisses. Wrestling matches in the mouth. Tougnastics. Wine-tasting kisses. Apples-in-fall kisses. Tequila at midnight kisses.

Hrm. Now I want a drink.

I'm a-gonna write it all using flea-as-sex metaphors! Wait...

Fleas suck blood. Vampires suck blood. ijs

Now I want a drink.

Or a kiss. "He stepped toward her, as intent as a glass-blower facing his kiln, and his lips were JUST AS HOT!" Or, you know, maybe not.

"They call him Hot Lips Houlihan!"

Wait, that's been done, too.

Sex as flesh-eating bacteria? No, wait, flesh-eating zombie sex!

Oh, god.