Page 2 of For the Plot
Lucy’s voice softened. “Oh sweetie, I know you are. How much do you have left to write?”
I mumbled my response.
“Nikki…”
Sighing, I sat up, picking the phone back up and taking it off speaker. “I’m still not at the halfway mark.”
There was silence on the other end, and I pulled it away to make sure the call hadn't dropped. “Lucy?” I asked timidly, afraid this might be what finally made them lose all faith in me.
“I’m here.” Their voice was reassuring, but distracted. Sure enough, I could hear the keys of their laptop clicking away, and I was sure if this was an in-person conversation, I would seethe tip of their tongue poking from the corner of their mouth. “Sorry, I’m trying to get ahead of this. I will do my best to get you another extension. In the meantime, I needyouto figure out how to get yourself past this mental block. I don’t care what it takes—take up yoga or rock climbing, start meditating, learn how to surf, whatever. Hell, buy yourself a new vibrator. Anything you can think of to get your mind moving enough to keep writing.”
A grin spread across my face at the exasperation seeping into Lucy’s voice by the end, their vibrator recommendation nearly making me choke on my laughter. I shot a look at my nightstand out of the corner of my eye. Yeah, I got that one covered already.
“Alright, I promise. I’ll think of something.”
The clicking stopped on Lucy’s end, and their voice came back more clearly. “We’ll get through this, Nikki. Ride or die, baby. We’re in this together.”
I finally felt like smiling, really smiling, for the first time in days. “We’re in this together,” I repeated back, half to them and half to remind myself.
We ended the call, and I stared at the wall, my mind spinning with ideas of what I could do to get myself out of this rut. Because if I didn’t get out of it… I had been surviving on the first segments of my advance from my earlier book, and if I didn’t get the next portion I would receive once this manuscript was turned in and accepted, I was going to run out of money. My roommates were great, but none of them could afford to pay my portion of the rent, and I would never ask them to do that. And I refused to go back to my parents and ask them for rent money, or even worse, if I could move back in.
No, if I ran out of money I would have to look for another job, and with the job market as hard as it was, that was going to be nearly impossible. And I knew myself. I would burn myself out in two seconds flat attempting to work a job and continuewriting. Which meant that I had no choice. Ihadto figure out how to get out of this slump.
But I groaned in frustration when the thoughts started spiraling faster than I could process, only stressing me out even more. Normally, I could brush off the negative reviews when I stumbled across them. You can’t please everyone, and as much as it killed my people-pleasing soul, even I knew that.
But how the hell was I supposed to get over the reviews saying my sex scenes sounded like they were written by someone who’s never had sex… when it was true?
2
Nikki
YMCA - Village People
Ihadn’tmeanttolie, not really. It had just kind of… happened. More like an omission than a lie. Was I supposed to just announce my sexless status? It wasn't like the wholeworld was entitled to hear about my sex life, or lack thereof. Being a romance author who writes smut could be a mindfuck sometimes.
I considered myself a sex-positive person. I loved promoting depictions of healthy sexuality, and was a firm believer in destigmatizing discussions around sex. But I was also an incredibly awkward human being who hadneverbeen comfortable talking about sex growing up, even with my friends. I didn’t have an issue talking about sexuality or even my (lack of a) sex life when it was all hypothetical. But when it came to the actual thing—being physically intimate, even platonically—I always froze. It was just how I had always been.
In high school while all my friends began falling in love and lust, I just… didn’t. For a long time, I wondered if maybe something was wrong with me. Maybe something inside me was broken if I didn’t feel the same way all my peers, including my twin sister, seemed to. But then again, I was always falling in love with fictional characters. And I did want a partner. I craved the affection and emotional intimacy I saw in my friend’s relationships, the casual touches and looks, the warmth of being wanted and chosen. When I got older, I went on a few dates through a dating app, even kissed some people, and had one mediocre attempt at a hookup, but nothing had ever feltright. The desire for sexual intimacy just didn’t seem to come to me the same way it did for everyone else.
And then in my freshman year of college, I realized that yeah, I did want the sexual intimacy as well. I had just never felt safe enough to explore that part of myself until I read my first smutty romance book and my whole world changed.
That was when I discovered the term demisexuality, from one of the romance books I read. It felt like that piece inside of me that had always been just a little off finally clicked into place withthat label. Only feeling sexual attraction for someone after an emotional connection—that wasme.
Suddenly, it made sense why I always fell in love with fictional characters, but had never fallen in love in real life. With a fictional character, you got to know them, their deepest darkest thoughts and fears, their every internal thought. What was more intimate than that?
And with romance books in particular, the way I could dive into a character's head, feel their sexual desire as if it was my own? Paired with my obsessive tendencies, I was gone. I devoured romance book after romance book, until I was so entrenched in the genre I just had to write my own. I never even planned to be an author, let alone a romance author. It was more like fate, or destiny.
I graduated with my degree in communications, entered the bullshit world of capitalistic hell, and barely made ends meet in my underpaid, overworked retail job. But at night, I had the smutty little stories I was writing to bring me joy and make me feel less alone.
And then Noah, my twin sister, convinced me that I should try to get it published. The asshole snuck onto my computer and read the book I was working on without telling me. At first, I was embarrassed that my twin sister read the sex scenes I wrote. But she just told me how good the story was and convinced me that I should go for it.
And somehow I did. And then I got an agent. And then suddenly I was quitting my day job because I had just gotten a three-book deal for a romance series about three best friends finding their happily-ever-afters, with an advance large enough to fully commit and give this full-time author career a real shot.
But all along the way, that little voice in my head kept calling me a fraud, an imposter. What business did I have writing about people having sex when I had no firsthand knowledge myself?
Sure, there was the copious amounts of smut I had read by that point, the porn I had watched, the self exploration I had done. And nothing annoyed me more than the infantilizing way society liked to treat adults who had never had sex, like it was some mile marker of adulthood. But still, that little voice in my head had persisted.You’re an imposter.
And then, The Review.
