Soundtrack to loooove

** SPOILER ALERT **

Looking back over my unpublished oeuvre, I don’t think I’ve ever written a fictional novel where there wasn’t at least one sex scene.

Actually there’s one, about a teenage schoolboy who become a political activist… no, wait. I just remembered he meets a cute girl at a nightclub and feels a connection because of their shared frustration at the continued selling off of public resources like education.

To cement their understanding, he loses his virginity to her in his parents car after he takes her to an Inspiration Point-style lookout overlooking the city.

And there are certainly sex scenes in Falling, including the first one where Vicki and Dale indulge in some late night Netflix and Chill on the desk of her Bondi Junction psychiatric practice, the faraway lights of the CBD glittering through the blinds.

In early drafts (certainly the first one) I had them fall into each others’ arms because, as a man in my very early 20s I thought about sex often… not too often, I don’t think, just when I breathed oxygen.

I never passed up the chance for two characters to go at it in fiction I was writing, and if a chance didn’t present itself in the plot I did it anyway. I’ve probably written more than one cack handed love scene that didn’t serve any purpose but to titillate me and me alone and certainly didn’t belong.

But as the story developed, especially during the LMR, I knew I needed to improve that. In the first draft the idea of Vicki being someone pivotal to Dale’s past hadn’t even entered my mind, she was just foil to untangle his psyche and bang him.

As the idea of her being someone from the past took shape, I knew two things about the sex scene; it had to be connected to their shared past, and it needed a better reason for them to end up sleeping together than just her finding him sexually irresistible (like I wanted women to find me when I was on my early 20s… okay, I still do).

I also realised at some stage how insulting it was to Vicki’s agency as a woman and common sense as a medical professional to have her throw herself at a patient so carelessly because of the damage it would do to her reputation and career.

That’s actually referenced and addressed in the final version when she invites him to her place to explain the situation and apologise for being so unprofessional… and they go to bed together again (can’t keep that horny 20 year old down).

Anyway, I knew the reason she ends up sleeping with him the first time needed some deep and very strong emotional undercurrent that had to do with her character – maybe the trauma that emerged from what she went through years before.

I finally found the reason, as I detailed in this post, and everything felt right and made sense. I hope you agree.

But the main reason I wanted to write about that first love scene was to give a shout out to the song I imagined playing in the background while it was going on and listened to constantly as I was writing it, Time to Make You Mine by Lisa Stansfield.

It’s such a sexy piece of music it’s like lying in a bath full of melted chocolate and champagne wrapped in a piece of silk reading French poetry while in a naked clinch with three gorgeous members of the opposite sex (or the same, or both sexes if that’s your thing).

I love it to this day, and when they finally make a movie or event series out of Falling I’m going to have a very hard time convincing the director to have a 30 year old, barely remembered love song in the soundtrack when Dale and Vicki play the beast with two backs over her desk, but I’m going to be lobbying hard.