Page 5 of Foreplay on Words

Occupation: Mystery novelist

Connecticut

“Why am I so terrible at this?” I growled as I pushed my laptop off my legs and onto the cushion next to me.

Swinging them off the side of the couch, I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees, scrubbing my hands across my face.

I was stuck. Writer’s block had never been an issue for me before. The words had always appeared. Half the time, I didn’t consciously formulate the plot in my head; it simply flowed onto the paper. My editor, Adrian, called me his ringer. Whenever he had trouble with another author, he relied on me to knock one out of the park.

“Speak of the devil,” I muttered as my phone buzzed on the coffee table.

He was hounding me for pages. I had the whole book drafted—I knew it needed work, but he’d basically told me that my sex scenes were shit. And for once in his life, Adrian was right.

“Yes?” I swiped the screen to connect the call as my eyelids drifted closed.

“Any word on when you’ll have new pages in my inbox?”

“I’m working on it,” I sighed, glaring at the laptop beside me.

“So, you’re still hung up on the first edits I sent you?”

“No,” I lied.

Yes. How could I not be? The last time we’d spoken, he’d basically insinuated I needed to get laid to finish my book.

“Man, you gotta snap out of this. I get that you’re not a fan of people, but you’re a good-lookin’ guy,” Adrian coaxed.

Oh shit, not this again.

“If you need a wingman, I can drive out this weekend,” he laughed. “We can stop at that little pub down the road from your house, talk to some ladies...or guys, whatever gets the creative juices flowing.”

The thought of going in there made my palms sweat. There was a reason I lived in a small town in rural Connecticut. No crowds, no subways or trains, no people if I didn’t want to see them. I needed to derail this train of thought. I preferred my privacy and could only take so much of Adrian’s bravado in person.

“I’m in the research phase. I’ve got it handled.”

Literally. With my hand.

I may have had a slew of incognito tabs open on my tablet with Redtube videos I’d marked for reference. I kept telling myself it was research, but it didn’t seem to be doing anything other than making my wrist hurt.

“So, Sloane floated an idea by me—it’s not bad, but you might not be a fan,” he said evenly. She was the head of publishing, so I was in deep shit if she was involved.

Missing your initial deadline was such a headache. The editors were on your ass, and their bosses were on their asses. It was a giant clusterfuck.

My outline and chapters were way ahead of schedule, but they wanted a polished excerpt to put in the next run of my last book. I was the dumbass who decided to use a prostitute as the main character. Of course, I couldn’t avoid using the trappings of literary sex. It sold—it sold big—and I had avoided anything sexually graphic in my last eight books.

Fade to black in a mystery novel wasn’t uncommon, and often readers were there for the plot and not the word porn. But there hadn’t been anything fade to black in my previous books, thus my total inexperience in writing a sex scene.

“Our portfolio also includes some pretty solid romance writers. We thought with help you could push through this.”

“You think I need a writing consultant?”

Fuck, it was worse than I thought.

“You’d benefit from someone to bounce ideas off of, work with on structure and flow,” he explained.

“I’m not letting a ghostwriter take over my book,” I told him. I’d worked too hard to let someone come in and rewrite everything.

“She won’t. She’ll be there to point you in the right direction.”

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