No pun intended

Far be it from me to make fun of another writer. The Sisters think this whole writing thing is way, WAY too hard to cast aspersions.

Often the hardest parts to write are the sex scenes. There is the difficult emotional quotient to sort out, but that’s not even the worst of it. It’s crazy-hard to keep track of how many hands and legs are in play and whether or not something is even physically possible. It’s painstaking and — in my opinion — totally un-sexy to write.

How shocked should we be that there are awards for the worst sex scene? The Literary Review started giving out the award for bad sex in fiction 23 years ago. The goal is “to draw attention to poorly written, perfunctory or redundant passages of sexual description in modern fiction, and to discourage them”.

Morrissey, the singer/song writer of The Smiths has written his debut novel. List of the Lost has had some murky reviews, but they say any publicity is good publicity. Sadly, or wonderfully I guess, depending on how you want to spin this, Morrissey won the Literary Review award.

This is the passage that cinched it for him. Hold on to your pants.

At this, Eliza and Ezra rolled together into one giggling snowball of full-figured copulation, screaming and shouting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.

Not only is it devoid of any emotion, it’s unabashedly confusing. What the hell happens there? I’m not completely convinced that sex actually happens. Is it a paranormal? If not, why all the screaming, shouting and howling?

I’d like to note that the romance community has taken years, nay decades of abuse over purple prose, but “… bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement” is possibly the worst I’ve ever heard.

You know what I think the man needs? A good dose of a romance novel so he knows how sex is written. All those “literary types” out there need to know that just because it’s not a romance doesn’t mean the sex has to suck.