I Wrote Smut For My Winter Term
By : Natalie Frank, Contributor
Winter Term, a.k.a. the time for Oberlin students to bullshit their way through a project or internship for a month. “Oberlin’s Tradition of Immersive Learning,” my ass. Some students might dread the month of sludging through an unpaid micro-internship or faking it in a group project (or worse, not faking it).
But not me. This year, I decided I would take bullshitting to a new level. I cracked my fingers, flexed my neck, and typed an email to my millennial boss in the Career Department, begging him to be the advisor to my project. I was going to write the filthiest smut for Winter Term.
I started writing my fourth fantasy romance novel this October, about halfway through the month. I wanted to finish it by December, and by December, I mean January, and by January, I mean February.
The book ends up being about a fairy princess (don’t laugh) who falls in love with her enemy, the Queen’s Champion (I can see you laughing).
Here’s my elevator pitch. The princess is a prisoner in a glass castle, punished for her rebel involvement in taking down a classist and tyrannical regime. Rich denizens of the kingdom drink sunlight and gain magic-like abilities but drain the land of Night. It is a consequence that the rich do not experience, but those relying on harvest cycles do. Stopping the magicked should be an easy battle, but the lines between good and evil are rarely so clear. Featuring dragons and jesters and revolutions and curses and drunken nights spent on betrayal and revolution.
And smut. The fairy princess falls in love with the Champion.
The thing about smut is that I have a hard time explaining it to people. No, my book is not only about politics, magic, or smut, but to exclude any of them would exclude an important part of the book. I know that my book could hypothetically do without open-door sex scenes, but my book could also do without the princess’s black dragon sidekick. In my opinion, smut is important in building trust, love, and hope between characters. It’s also fun to write, fun to read, and fun to evade people’s questions about what you’re smiling at.
This Winter Term, I finished the book. I woke up every day at the ripe hour of 9 am 10 am to scroll on Pinterest for an hour before eating lunch and writing 1,000 words. Rinse. Repeat. By some miracle that I concocted from a mix of sleep deprivation, pure desperation, and wanting to procrastinate at my campus job, I wrote 40,000 words in January. Bada bing bada boom. Book done.
February rolls around, and so does that one not-so-friendly reminder that I need to share proof of my Winter Term project with my advisor (a.k.a. my boss). Of course, I would wait until the last day to send it because I’m not a #suckup #teacherspet #ontopofmyshit.
“Natalie,” my friend asked me on February 6. “Will you share your very explicit, definitely-not-YA, cover-your-ears smut with your boss?”
I brushed the dust off of my lapel. “If you insist, Office of Winter Term & Study Away.”
I shared it with my advisor, feeling pretty accomplished, pretty adventurous, pretty smut-is-an-art-form-and-fuck-your-elitist-academic-snobby-image-of-literature.
And then, on a whim, I opened my book to the first sex scene. Let me tell you, seeing “flickered,” “tongue,” and “slit” in the same sentence is enough to blind me in my left eye.
That’s the thing about writing smut, it’s like being drunk. I can pound out 4,000 words of sex scenes in two hours easily. When I finally end the chapter, I’m elated. I’m the best writer since Stephen King got off of cocaine. Brandon Sanderson is paging me, and Sarah J. Maas put my headshot on her Apple Watch. I go on with my day, pumped-up and gleeful, until I remember I’m only a teenage girl and not, in fact, the next bestseller (not yet). I write the next chapter and the next and forget about the sex scene.
Then, I send it to my boss in A Very Real Adult Job. I sent him my first draft with the warning of “explicit material.” If I were an adult with nothing better to do, I would ctrl-f to find such explicit material (but maybe that’s a me problem.) I meekly add that he can skim it if he wants… or read it too, you know, but you really don’t have to do that.
Of course, by the next morning, he’s promised he’s “looking forward to reading it!” That is terrifying. I’ve handed my life’s (January’s) work into the hands of another human being. For free.
I mean, come on, what if he adores it? What if I’ve written conflict that parallels our complex system, and what if I’ve captured the essence of political instability?
And what if he hates it? What if my smut is the worst thing he’s ever read?
If I have a job by the end of next week, I promise to stop adding alliterations to my smut scenes (“fisting,” “feasting,” “final”). I will never again rhyme slicker and lick her. I will stop writing adult fantasy books, and instead, write personal growth books about the important of nine hours of sleep, drinking enough water, and meditation. Learn your lesson.
On second thought, ignore that. Don’t learn any lessons. Don’t waste unpaid labor and countless hours on a boring Winter Term project. If anything, choose the most exhilarating, fulfilling, and craziest project you can. Skateboard down the Appalachian Mountains. Go on a vegan retreat. Eat a hot potato (I’m running out of ideas). Make a story to tell of your January. If you don’t feel somewhat humbled sending it to your advisor, you know you’ve done it wrong.
