I find explicit sex incredibly difficult, and hugely embarrassing, to write about. I have never included it in any of my stories, though I did dabble briefly with something that might be considered pornography, thinking I might actually get it published, but then I read what the professionals were doing and quailed. Some of it was either embarrassingly awful to read or else was far more imaginative than, shamefully, I am myself.
I haven't actually written anything yet that I feel has led me to a need to describe the details of boudoir activities (which, from my intensive and detailed studies on the subject, is often the last place such athletics are intended to occur) and wonder what I would do, should that happy day ever arise, that a publisher asks me to add a scene of that kind. I might need to hire a ghost-writer.
The scary subjects; deviation from sexual norms, extreme anti-social behaviour patterns, torture and the rest, don't seem to bother me as much as a writer as they would in reality. In a comic I wrote about thirty years ago, I gave a hero racist tendencies, my intent being to show how distasteful characteristics can lurk beneath the surface of people we otherwise like a great deal and to ask how we deal with the apparent conflict it may provoke in us, but I did it in such a ham-fisted manner that it looked as though I was condoning racism. One day, when I have the talent for it, I might tackle the subject again.
Also, as a callow youth, I included a rape scene in a radio play which, rather than the character-changing event I'd intended it to be, came across more as a sensationalist insert performing only a gratuitous function. Happily, the error was corrected before the play was broadcast and the re-write was considerably more satisfying and progressed the character far more realistically.
I have hinted at paedophilia as a sub-plot in another story but not yet been courageous enough to examine the subject in detail. The story itself was probably the wrong place to do that and I wonder, sometimes, when I look back at things I have written, what was motivating me to tinker with things I couldn't have understood.
Which is why I now write about time travel.
I've led such a sheltered life