Should A Girl Spice It Up?

Shannon's Law is out there. The critics are chewing it over. They seem happy. Some love the sex. Others think there is too much of it. In a way so do I....but I'm not Shannon - a hot blooded girl who has not indulged for a long time. Talking about such a person openly calls for a certain amount of, well, openness. There is no doubt that a lot of interaction between people expresses itself in their sexuality. Why would a writer hold back from a reader what that character did sexually while detailing every other aspect of the story? The answer possibly is to avoid making it seem like a "sex" book that would not succeed without the clinches. I mean, Jane Austen didn't need that stuff. There weren't over two and a half million competitors on Kindle in her day (74,000 new titles last month). OK - maybe sex no longer sells? Maybe a true literopathic practitioner wouldn't take this route. (Yes, Literopathy exists).

About a year ago I learned a sad life lesson by way of this blog. I had been editing an audio book in my day job with Gallo-Romano Media. The story was a period romp filled with bawdy double entendres. As an illustrative joke I put out a post entitled "Are my tits out of proportion to my hole?" In fact it was a feature about my frustration at failing to attract birds to my nesting box. I went on to make some remarks about this old fashioned form of blunt humour.

The first thing that happened was that "friends" disowned me. In some literary circles I was reviled as a filth stained trollop. I felt like the ugly duckling and hid away. Some folk were so disgusted they have not spoken to me since. I thought that was the big lesson to learn. As usual, I was wrong.

Blogs have lost a lot of their penetration in my view. All the same in the clamour for attention and an ever bigger paddle on the Amazon, total views are significant. In my years of blogging I have battered folk with every form of discourse, some of it with photos. I have blurbed and spammed my readers into fixed smile comas. The fact is that the fascinating feature on the great-tits in my bird box has received four times the views of any other topic. All sorts of networks have picked it up. Every day ornithologists from all around the world flock to my site. A few of these viewers may be interested in low matters of the female flesh. Surely not!

There's a lesson here somewhere. In Shannon's Law there is hard crime, cars, motorcycles, cricket, romance, social comedy and SEX. If only I'd nailed up a bird-box somewhere.


Stop Press: While the novel does its caterpillar imitation up the sales slope, the companion cookbook, 'Cop's Kitchen' has streaked to number one in it's category on Amazon. The idea was that if you bought the novel and reviewed it you got a cookbook. OK guys - My next novel will come free with my aphrodisiac cookbook. It will include a bird watcher's recipe for frontal area of poultry.

Emma Thinx. You gotta tuck it in before you can let it hang out.