way through assorted tubs of Ben & Jerry’s and a twice-baked New York cheesecake made by Joan who, after years of abstinence on the kitchen front, had started working in a cookshop, taken up the apron and turned out to be the most amazing cook.
Gabbie is a solicitor, well spoken, tall and skinny, with the most fabulous long, straight, brown hair. Whatever she’s doing, she always looks as if she has just been ironed. Helen is a gardener: strawberry blonde, ruddy complexion, capable, funny, always wears trousers or shorts and smiles a lot. There’s Joan, tiny, pretty, dark-haired Joan, who manages a shop and is a deacon at her local church. And then there’s me, Sarah, and I’m a writer.
I’d been writing romantic fiction for the best part of twenty years, creating modern fairy tales about handsome, flawed, lovable heroes and complex women with complicated lives, finding their way to their very own happy ever after. For the last couple of years I’d been the main breadwinner, paying the bills while my husband, Ray, went back to college full time. To make ends meet, alongside writing novels, I’d also written for magazines and newspapers, for radio, short stories, travel guides, country house handbooks – in fact anything to make a living. Which was what led a friend, another writer, to send me a newspaper clipping about a publisher that was bringing out erotic fiction specifically written for women by women. My friend suggested that we both have a go at writing something. All they wanted was three chapters and a synopsis. What had we got to lose? After all, she reasoned, the sage advice given to all writers is to write about what you know. We were both married and we knew about sex. More than that, we knew about the sex we would enjoy given half a chance, which wasn’t necessarily the same as the sex we were getting.
To be frank, writing erotica had never been up there on my ‘Ten things to do before I die’ list, but it was a new market, I needed to earn a living and I decided it was worth a shot – after all, what was the worst that could happen? They would reject my idea. What I hadn’t bargained for was that it would help change my life for ever.
You’d think writing about sex would be easy, but when, after submitting my sample chapters, I was given a commission to write my first erotic novel and started work, I discovered it isn’t.
You need to find ways to describe all the bits and pieces and goings on so that it doesn’t sound like a public information film; and once you get past the labelling of parts you need to make it all sound sensual and romantic, and take your reader on a slow enjoyable journey towards a rip-snorting climax.
So no pressure then.
I kept a notebook alongside my keyboard with a whole collection of stick drawings in it, a visual aid to help me to work out what you could do given time, patience and no worries about a dodgy back – man woman, woman woman, man man, twosomes, threesomes, foursomes, orgy – as well as where all the bits go. While you can more or less guess what the business end is up to, where people put their arms, knees or elbows isn’t always as clear, so you need to work it out, so that the mechanics are sorted and therefore more or less invisible, and your hero won’t fall over while mid-fuck.
No one in erotica ever falls over unless they’re being swept off their feet and ravaged. They don’t get cramp, or the giggles, or trip over their pants while they’re trying to take them off. No one passes wind and flaps the covers, laughing furiously. Zips never get stuck, everyone always comes, and no one ever has a spotty bum. Humour and sex don’t mix in erotic fiction, or so my new editor reliably informed me.
‘Good erotic fiction should be like the best sex,’ she said during one of our telephone conversations. ‘A long, slow, satisfying build-up, hitting all the sweet spots, filling you with expectation, getting you more and more aroused, slowly bringing you closer and closer to the edge, making you gasp with pleasure, before finally taking you breathlessly to the grand finale. Erotic fiction should never let you down. Nobody in an erotic novel ever thought: let’s get this over and done with, X Factor’s on at nine. Never, ever.’
The downside as a writer is that you need to have great sex in every chapter in lots of different, ever more exciting ways. In real life, not only is real sex not like that but also it doesn’t need a plot. I’d been married a long time, and sex had long since slipped from something you were doing all the time to something squeezed into the to-do list, between cleaning out the guinea pig and collecting the kids from football practice. And unlike when you’re writing about sex, during real sex you generally don’t need to stop halfway through a really good bit to take the dog to the vet or nip out to buy the ingredients for your child’s home economics bake-a-thon.
I hadn’t got an office, so I was writing my first erotic novel on the family computer in a corner of the sitting room, squirrelling it away after each session in a desktop file labelled ‘This year’s tax receipts’ and constantly reminding myself not to email it to my accountant. With a house full of teenagers the last thing I wanted was for them to read what I was writing, so I put an old-fashioned clothes horse around my desk, hung laundry all over it and told them it was to keep out the draught. My husband, although he knew what I was writing, never peeked. No one else in the family seemed to notice that the same towels and sheets hung there for weeks on end.
Halfway through the first book I stalled, stuttered and finally ran out of ideas. There were only so many ways our heroine could shed her clothes and gasp in breathless anticipation. Which was why Helen, Joan and I were all at Gabbie’s, eating for England. They had volunteered to help me out.
‘So it can be anything?’ said Helen.
I nodded. ‘Anything at all that you’ve ever fantasized about. Anything that you’ve always wanted to do, if you could do it without getting caught, and without risking disease or hurting anyone.’
‘Or something we’ve already done,’ said Gabbie, looking pointedly at Joan.
I nodded. ‘I’m stuck,’ I said. ‘I really do need your help.’
‘How tragic is that,’ said Gabbie, laughing.
I was thinking they might come up with sex on a beach or in a sleeper train, or being ravished by a highwayman, but no: once they got going and were halfway through the Baileys, they were swapping real-life sexploits.
One had had sex on a cross-Channel ferry in the 1970s with a Frenchman she picked up in duty free, and when he told her that he wanted to see her again and asked for her name and telephone number, she lied through her eye teeth and told him her name was Freda and that she came from Margate.
Another had had a three-in-a-bed session with two builders who came to fix her parents’ roof when she had been home from college in her twenties. Another admitted to a drunken lesbian romp while on a painting holiday in Tuscany – as she said, it wasn’t something she particularly wanted to do again but she was glad she’d tried it. Which really did make it sound a bit like abseiling or hang-gliding – but she did add that it was incredibly refreshing to have sex with someone who actually knew where all your bits were.
I made notes – lots of notes.
‘Oh, and then I went out with this guy, after I split up with Keith. Do you remember Stuart?’ asked Gabbie. ‘Big, sort of gingery?’ She mimed tall with hair.
We all nodded.
‘He used to like to spank me.’
I stared at her. ‘And did you like it?’
Gabbie shrugged in a non-committal way. ‘It was OK, I suppose. I think he was hoping it would turn me on, but it didn’t. He kept saying that he’d really like to tie me up.’
‘Oh, we tried that,’ said Helen. ‘The kids were at my mum’s for the weekend. We did the whole thing: candlelit dinner, sexy underwear, silk scarf for a blindfold. Gav in this silk bathrobe I’d bought him for his birthday.’ Helen grinned. ‘God, I mean, he spent hours. It was fabulous. The only trouble was I wriggled so much that he couldn’t get the bloody knots undone when we’d finished and had to cut me off the bed with a pair of scissors. I’d got a blindfold on, so it wasn’t until he took it off I realized he’d used Molly’s skipping rope. God, she was livid.’
‘I