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EXPLICIT, adj. I’ve been using this word a lot because I have a forthcoming novel that requires such a description, preceded by “sexually.” When you write that sort of thing, you have to make people aware beforehand. Sometimes “explicit” acts like a “do not enter” sign and sometimes it’s more like the lights on the Las Vegas Strip. Either is fine. We gotta have signs to know where we’re going, whether it’s toward or absolutely as far away as possible.
“(Sexually) explicit” is my preferred sign. “Graphic” is a tolerable option, but I do associate it with descriptions of violence, which is the wrong connotation here. In official marketing, I don’t want to use euphemisms like spicy or steamy because—outside of TikTok—it’s fine to say “sex.” Good, even. Simple and clear.
I don’t want to call my books dirty or filthy or smut or porn, except with people who know I’m saying those things affectionately. It’s particularly important not to call these books “porn,” I think, not because porn is shameful or wrong, but because if you are looking for actual porn, you will be disappointed and bored as hell by my novel where more than a hundred pages of plot go by before the main characters fuck.
“Horny,” however, is both a truthful description of my work and also a word I love.
I’ve been taking the long way around to my point, which is that I looked up “explicit” in the dictionary (okay, four dictionaries).
I erroneously thought “explicit” would be related to “licit” (legal) and “illicit” (illegal), but in fact it’s related to my old friend plicō, the Latin verb for “fold.” Just as “complicated” comes from a word meaning something folded or rolled up, “explicit” comes from explicitus/explicātus, meaning something unfolded. In its earliest sense, it meant something clear, definite, plain. All laid out. So an “explication” is related—an unfolding, a laying out. And “implicit” is something folded up.
“Explicit” means “everything here has been made clear.” It became more strongly associated with sexual content in the twentieth century. The OED doesn’t mention sex until definition 3b, and the earliest citation there is 1925. But it’s not difficult to see how a word that means “in full detail” or “nothing left unsaid” came to describe writing about sex.
To be honest, I don’t know if “nothing left unsaid” is a desirable approach to writing sex scenes—I’d allow “not much left unsaid,” but sometimes the unsaid is doing a lot of work, you know? I like a little implicit in my explicit—but it’s certainly a desirable approach to labels and signage.
Unwritten Rules (gay m/bi? m, both cis, contemporary) by KD Casey. I know nothing about baseball, so it’s a testament to KD Casey’s writing that I grasped the emotional valance of all the game scenes in this book. The rules and strategy might still be obscure to me, but the social conventions of the players and coaches were all perfectly legible, and Casey’s descriptive prose is evocative enough that so were all the textures and smells. Landscapes and seasons are so present in this book, which moves from Arizona to California to Maryland to Florida to New York over the course of two intertwined storylines, past and present. The main character, Zach, is Jewish and hard of hearing, two things that are rarely represented in romance. I always love to see that. Zach is closeted and this book is about his journey to coming out and what it will mean for his relationship with his family and his career as a professional athlete. Content notes from the author.
Note: Unwritten Rules is published by Carina Press, a Harlequin imprint, and Harlequin is owned by HarperCollins, whose unionized employees are still (still!) striking for fair labor conditions, but apparently Harlequin is not represented by the union, so the union’s requested review embargo doesn’t apply to this title. I will continue to talk about the strike as long as it’s ongoing. Sign the open letter of solidarity or donate to the strike fund if you can.
Love at First (m/f, both cis and het, contemporary) by Kate Clayborn. Every time I open a Kate Clayborn novel and find myself faced with not merely the first sentences, but a whole book of her meticulous, dazzling prose—like a mosaic made of thousands of perfectly tessellating tiles—I think, God, why do I ever read anything that isn’t a Kate Clayborn novel. It feels almost unnecessary to write about how wonderful and moving the romance here is, though it is, of course, wonderful and moving. I think Kate Clayborn writes my very favorite heterosexual men. We could talk about hands or hair or glasses or whatever—those are all very nice things—but the real draw, to me, is a man so besotted with a woman that he needs to upgrade all her bathroom fixtures and run to the pharmacy for her cold medicine. He wants to do these things with a deep yearning. It is both animal and spiritual. The fact that he can’t be guaranteed a future of taking care of her—because he’s not her boyfriend/life partner/husband—makes him just wilt with suffering. Delicious. To be clear, there is also sex in these books, and the sex is very hot, and that is not to be dismissed. But the reason I am a romance reader is that, to me, the sex is hot because he goes to the pharmacy for her. That is the good shit. That is what I wanted bottled and stored in my temperature-controlled cellar for decades, to be uncorked and decanted whenever I need to remember what I like about being alive.
Apologies, I’ve derailed my own train of thought: I meant to tell you all that while the romance in Love at First is, naturally, the ne plus ultra of swoon, the quality of this book that made me shriek and wail the most is actually the arc of one of the supporting characters. The hero, Will, is an emergency room doctor, and his boss is Gerald Abraham, a serious, even stern, older doctor obsessed with “professional rectitude.” Initially, he seems like a funny minor character, a foil and an inconvenience for Will, and in the hands of a lesser writer he would remain exactly that. But here, Will’s relationship with him evolves into something warmer as both characters grow and change and come to see each other differently. Gerald Abraham ends up not only very endearing (to Will, but especially to me), but also the one who elucidates the book’s central idea. I don’t want to quote it because it’s such a delight to come across the titular line in its original context—perfectly fitted to the occasion like one of those tessellated tiles, but also surprising in the best “look how far we’ve come” way. Anyway, the point is, Gerald Abraham is a full character in his own right, and he’s important, and and he’s part of what makes this book so excellent, and what good is a romantic happily ever after if you don’t also have friends? Content guidance: grief, neglectful parents, hospitalization, sex.
In books that are neither Romance nor romance, I also read Helene Wecker’s wonderful historical fantasy The Golem and the Jinni, set in 1899 New York City in Jewish and Syrian immigrant communities. It has beautiful prose and that wonderful quality in a novel of weaving together many disparate threads into a single, stunning cloth. It does have a love story in it, but I have not “shelved” it with the romances above because the romance, while central, shares a lot of pages with the historical and fantasy elements of the book, all of which are excellent. Content guidance: death (all kinds—of a child, of the parent of a young child, of a spouse), murder, suicide attempt, rape, pregnancy and pregnancy loss, antisemitism and prejudice against immigrants, body horror, and some minor sexual content.
This is not the newsletter I said I’d write, and this is not the date on which I intended to send it, but here it is. I will be back in your inbox in February, and might be once-a-month for the spring—not sure yet. Anyway, reader friends, I hope this new year is treating you right so far. Until next time!