There I was. Minding my own business. Reading the Friday 20 over at PBW’s place where she casually mentions she snuck off from writing to participate in a discussion over at Jordan Summer’s place. Naturally, I click the link to see what enticed PBW away from writing (I thought it was only things like her flesh-and-blood in dire danger that could do that), and I discover the discussion is about sex dropped into books just for the sake of sex. Like finding a penny on the street. No reason for it to be there, but there it is. And worse, if someone (who doesn’t want to partake in this sexual encounter) doesn’t have sex, the world will end.

Um. That’s a stretch for me. And I’ve heard readers don’t give authors too many “free passes” into the unbelievable realm. I’ll accept sex in a lot of inappropriate places for a lot of reasons — or maybe no reason at all, but to save the world? Yeah. Right. Then I began to reflect.

I have a novel incubating before revision which includes sex seemingly for the sake of sex (more as a weapon than sex). And, if I’m truthful about it, in a perverse way, the character is doing it because he believes he can contribute to populating the world with like-minded beings. I think the character’s off his rocker, but bringing the world to his way of thinking is his motivation for what he does in the story. The character is following the teachings of a real life guy serving a life sentence for espousing those beliefs and taking actions to make them a reality. But if I can’t capture that in a way the reader can understand in my rewrite, I won’t seek publication for this particular work.

People will argue with me, but there’s only so many ways to depict Tab A interacting with Slot A, B, C, and/or D. Why are we humans so utterly fascinated by it? Yeah. Yeah. Procreation. Sex in all it’s glory is so ridiculous, we’d never do it if it were a logical, cerebral act — it had to be hard-wired into the core of our being, or humans would never survive.