Karen read the lastest installment of the story I'm writing the other night, and said, "Do your stories always have this much sex in them?"

The answer that leapt to mind was no, of course not. The current story ("Mephis Morph," which is a working title that I'm very much not happy with, but nothing good has sprung up at me yet) is about how the protagonist meets and falls in love with the woman he will eventually marry. The society in which he was raised, however, doesn't place much emphasis on romantic love, so his initial attraction is primarily physical.

("He's obsessed," Karen said. "But they say men think about sex on average every seven seconds, so I thought maybe you were just trying to simulate that." I hadn't consciously been doing that, actually, but when I went back and read, yeah, there's a lot of sexual references. I need to get a male reader or two who can tell me if I've gone overboard or what.)

So anyway, I was all set to tell Karen that no, it was just the nature of the story that lent itself to a lot of sex, and that I didn't usually do that.

Except...

I kind of do.

Before this story, I was working on Willow Bough, which is about a sex-slave. I initially intended it to be a character-study erotica, for my own amusement, but the wrong character kept taking the spotlight. So I turned it into an exploration of the new character and (on the side) the culture in which he lives.

Before/during Willow Bough, I'd expanded Dawn's origin story, which begins with a surfeit of sex and violence. Though the sex kind of disappears (kind of) about halfway through.

Before those, I was working on Silver and Green, which isn't quite as steeped in sex, but as it contains a romantic triangle, there are multiple references. (At least that's all completely consensual. Sheesh, the most recent three would lead someone to think I had an unhealthy obsession. Shut up.)

Before Silver and Green was Circle in the Sand, to which Silver is a sort of prequel. It's got... at least four major romances- No, wait. Five. Lots of romance. A fair number of sexual implications result, though mostly we did a "fade to black" on the actual acts.

Reaching back further... In This Life Or The Next, which is planned but not yet written, is highly sexually charged. S'ayad'i's origin story is really, really horrible, in many different ways, but I think it's what eventually gave rise to Dawn's. The collaborative story I wrote with a friend in high school is truly cringe-worthy, but that has sex all over the place, too. (Though I was too bashful at the time to actually attempt to write it, or to have the grace to do a "fade to black," so it come out sounding kind of dry and insectoid. It's really, really, really awful stuff. It was also, I might note, apparently the seed that eventually grew into my conception of Alani circles, which is interesting.)

The only writing project I can think of, off the top of my head, that didn't involve any sex was the White Wolf-based thing that Matt and I were working on together before we started dating. (So... about 10 years ago, now.) And even that had an element of... tension, between the characters.

Oh, and some of my awful poetry.

So, um... I guess the answer is yes, Karen. I do always have a lot of sex in my stories, explicit or implied. I'd say I'm sorry, but... I'm really not.

--Liz