This year's Bad Sex Awards are out!

[elfs]

My own writing mojo has been at an all-time low recently, but that doesn't stop me from being amused at other writer's train wrecks. Literary Review's Bad Sex in Fiction Awards 2008 is out, and the winner is Rachel Johnson's Shire Hell:

Almost screaming after five agonizingly pleasurable minutes, I make a grab, to put him, now angrily slapping against both our bellies, inside, but he holds both my arms down, and puts his tongue to my core, like a cat lapping up a dish of cream so as not to miss a single drop. I find myself gripping his ears and tugging at the locks curling over them, beside myself, and a strange animal noise escapes from me as the mounting, Wagnerian crescendo overtakes me. I really do hope at this point that all the Spodders are, as requested, attending the meeting about slug clearance or whatever it is.

I actually find that one kinda tolerable and don't see what the fuss is all about. I'll ignore the Updike entry; it's just not worth the effort. My favorite is the extract from The Reserve by Russell Banks:

It had begun slowly, tenderly, face-to-face, with long, lingering looks at each other, like devoted siblings at the start of a long absence taking their last leave of each other, gathering in all the details they had neglected to notice up to now. They removed their clothes, their own and each other's, delicately, precisely, as if preparing to model for an artist, and once naked, seated side by side on the bed, they turned to face each other, and with their hands on each other's bare shoulders, they kissed – sweetly, as if in relief and gratitude for having come to the peaceful end of a painfully protracted argument. And then they embraced and with their hands caressed each other's breasts and backs and arms – her skin smooth and creamy and soft as fine silk, his alabaster white and tautly drawn over muscle and bone – and their separate bodies gradually lost their boundaries and merged into a third body, one that contained all their female and male differences and erased all their anatomical contrasts and inversions.

"Long, lingering looks," indeed. A good writer might be able to pull that off in first person, but third?

Still, I suppose I've done worse:

Hot and sweat-slicked, we writhed together like immaculate beasts. I crushed my mouth down about hers and our tongues engaged like the rest of us, desperate and hungry. I could feel the desire flay us, lay us open, and demand that there be more contact, more skin, until we were rolled up inside one another. When we came, the universe stopped to listen to us.

(And before you ask, no, I haven't posted this one yet.)