Literary drives

• Update: winner announced!
  

Scott Adams has a book coming out. So do I. Here ends the list of similarities between me and Scott Adams, apart from the obvious (white, male etc.).

Mr Adams threw open the doors of his blog to his readers for possible blurbs to go on the back of his book. You'll have to go there to see them all but no harm in reproducing some of my favourites which I would quite like to see on the back of mine:

A delightful read ... it has everything; humor, words, dangling participles, and did I detect a hint of nutmeg?

I was reading this to my mother when she died. She refused to enter the light until I had finished.

Finally, the answer to the question “What would Jesus read?”

A snake made me read this book and it made me aware of my own nudity! Totally worth it!

I don't want to say that this is the best book ever written, but as I slid it into my bookshelf a chorus of angels began to sing and my other novels were engulfed in holy flame. I guess that's a little ambiguous, though.

In other news, I have discovered a new literary ambition: to win the Bad Sex Award ("for the most awkward description of an intimate encounter"), the latest shortlist for which has just been announced. Though sadly not the entries themselves.

One small obstacle to overcome would be actually writing a description of any intimate encounter at all, other than the entirely tasteful alien sex scene in His Majesty’s Starship. I did once write a post-sex scene for Winged Chariot, which I then cut on the grounds that it just didn't work. The couple in question had just been in mortal danger of their lives and I thought nookie would not be foremost on their thoughts.

I was very pleased to have this point of view vindicated by, I think, Pennski at a panel at Eastercon a few years ago. Or it might have been Farah, the third panellist. Whoever it was, her woman's take on it was: he'd be thinking of sex, she'd be thinking of chocolate.

Anyway, thinking hat on. I shall seek inspiration by reading previous winners.

UPDATE: and the 2007 winner is the late Norman Mailer.

"His mouth lathered with her sap, he turned around and embraced her face with all the passion of his own lips and face, ready at last to grind into her with the Hound, drive it into her piety."

No wonder he got through so many wives.