You Made It Weird

I hit a roadblock in my uphill battle to just finish what I damn started in November with my novel, trying to turn a scattered, fragmented mess of words into something I can actually stand by. Separating the wheat from the chaff, I have found that a lot of those 50,000 words were chaff, and that even worse, I can't even fit a great deal of the wheat into the new version of my book. Cleaning up this thing is hard because while I love chopping off the unusable parts, I have trouble not falling in love with the parts I can no longer use, but meant a great deal to me when I wrote them.
The roadblock came about as a result of trying to write a sex scene. I had no trouble with any of the other ones I had already written because unlike those ones, this one has not happened to me in real life. I have written about all of the sex I have had so far in this thing, and the end result is I don't know how to create something new. I can take my life experiences and rework them into fiction, share every humiliating moment that actually happened, and do it with total abandon. What I can't do is write a character I don't already know and then have my main character have sex with them without criticizing my every creative impulse. If I make the character too good-looking, I criticize myself for thinking the fictionalized version of me would deserve someone that good-looking. If I make him too funny, or tall, or nice, or anything else, this little voice in my head tells me what I assume anyone who reads it would think, that I think I deserve that. I trust myself when I write about things that actually happened because I can point to the past and say, "See? That's how it really went!", but when it comes to inventing something, I am judgmental to a point that might be handicapping me.
Fiction is tricky, especially when it's the mundane kind that is just about dating and being a girl and stuff. I don't imagine writing fantasy, or mystery or sci-fi is any simpler, but it must free you up a little to just let your imagination guide you in a specific genre like that. My "fiction" is so reflective of my own life, it barely passes as fiction, and that comes with its own set of complications. As much as this piece of writing is fiction, and my fictional avatar is not me, I pass the same judgments on her about what she deserves, and I end up punishing her because I have come to the conclusion that I deserve nothing. If I deserve nothing, that means she deserves nothing. I have little sympathy for her because I feel that I have earned every bit of mistreatment I have been handed, and any time I try to just give her a fucking break, I have to ruin it for her and make it weird.
I kind of chickened out, and barely wrote any sex. I talked to my sister about it a few days after, and she and I agreed that when you have sex, you don't remember every single thing, and every thing going into a thing, you remember snippets. I don't want to get too fruity with my explanation, but I don't think in terms of what was happening in my vagina all the times I had sex, I think in terms of what was happening in my head. I've given myself permission to not muddy up my book with, "and then this happened... and then THIS happened."
I've decided t's okay for me to not be gross about it, that I don't have to come up with twenty different words for penis, because I'm not writing Twilight fanfic here. I get flinty whenever I bring up what I am writing in conversation, especially with other women, because they always giggle and ask, "Is it like Fifty Shades Of Gray?"
No, you idiots, it isn't like that awful book. My character never says, "Argh!" and her boyfriends aren't control freaks who nag her about eating and make her sign a contract that stipulates getting her vagina waxed. I try to be supportive of all writers, but Jesus Henry Christ that fucking book is doing something to the book-reading public. The lines between erotica and literature have blurred, and while that can be good because sex doesn't have to be brown paper bag/bottom drawer any longer, it can also be bad. It seems that if I want people to ever buy what I create, I either have to force more grossness into my book or just make it sterile; dirty it up or clean it up, respectively. For a book to be marketable, it seems, there has to be a hook, and I don't know if I will ever be able to get published because I don't have that hook. I'm not trying to get anybody hard with my writing, and I doubt anybody would get hard when reading it, not even accidentally. Sex can be useful in writing, especially when it's not about that. It can be informative and funny and sad. I only write it into my fiction, and into this blog, because of all of those uses, not the other ones. I made it weird, but that's kind of okay because it usually does get weird, even when I'm not the one making it weird.