'shimmying past her heart, he felt her perfection' - Bad Sex Writing Award 2019

ends with 'buy my book' of course it does haha

This is quite a crop. The Gilbert passage is just straight-up bad writing. Unless she's fifteen, in which case: good job!

A reference to le petit mort, I gather, deployed terribly. xp

― Le Bateau Ivre

to clarify, i wasn't asking what harvey was trying to say with that, it was more "how on earth does one write prose that bad" - "death-life" by itself is perhaps merely a hacky gloss on someone with some vague notion of "French" notions of sexuality, but then to end the sentence with "growingly" - i initially read it as 'growlingly' but no actually "growlingly" would improve the sentence, i think. The overall effect is more laughably crude than more workaday euphemisms like "erect member" - was he attempting to write a Tom Swiftie?

similarly, there is the phrase "luxurious desultory twining". it is _work_ to write this poorly. harvey has either a decent vocabulary or the resources to fake it, and an understanding that words can be modified from their usual part of speech for effect, but chooses combinations of words words that, while they may be individually merely inoffensive and banal, taken in concert are grotesque in both scansion and meaning.

lmfao what a hysterically self-serving pointless tantrum

― imago, Thursday, November 28, 2019 6:11 PM

It's a bit overblown but I think enough of it is correct. It's always been a shitty and unfair award.

"He kisses them. Teases a nipple with his lips. It’s so soft; and then, suddenly, hard.

Wow.

He sucks on the hard nipple.

He has never done this before, and yet; no, wait, of course, it is totally familiar.

The first thing he ever did."

In my head this was an Owen Wilson "wow."

"And then it was the most, and I more or less died." is the funniest punchline, and the excerpt is probably the worst in an amateurish way, but Harvey is really something... else. Gotta go with that

The Gough article is pretty dumb imo w/many faulty premises

if even straight white males, often with major publishers behind them, are going to be humiliated for writing about sex, then is anyone going to be able to at all

I read the first one, then I stopped reading. If any of the rest are worse than that, I most emphatically do not want them in my head. Alas, this debars me from voting.

Can someone make a browser plugin that adds a Goughian 'wow' to random ILX posts?

"Alas, this debars me from voting.

Wow."

Decoin one is fine, with a few mildly effective jokes that might be on the character. The Gilbert one is fine, bar a handful of lit-major eyerolls that might be the character’s voice, not the novel’s.

The other three feel more like they’re indicative of bad books but not especially egregious.

I never knew a penis could taste insipid.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Decoin one feels like it's probably quite racist in an exoticising way? But I don't know enough about the author or book to know if that's just my own "ick" feeling or grounded in reality.

Gilbert one I do think is okay, it's a character voice - not one I care for particularly, but recognisable as such.

Voted for Harvey, despite feeling like in his case it's not the sex part of the writing that makes it bad. A lot of bad sex writing is more like the Costello one with too much specificity and not enough sense, and certainly no sexiness. But with Harvey, he actually doesn't go into crazy TMI detail about the sex, he just seems like he would write badly about anything.

Did any of the organizers write sex or say what sex writing they enjoyed?

Just watched a youtube video called Girls Describe Their Favorite Hentai Scenes, shot at a convention with mostly cosplayers being interviewed and it was kind of funny.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Went the same way as the official award