Welcome Back, Libido

Don’t you just love the end of a dry spell?

I admit that I am a “woman of a certain age” and despite being blessed to receive my dad’s “look young for my age” genes, I am dealing with a new stage of life these days. As much as the health articles assure you that older people can have fine, lively sex lives, there have been days recently when I wondered.

Well, I suppose I should have placed more blame on the fact that I’ve been sick most of the time for the past six weeks, as well as that my mother has been in and out of the hospital and my dad struggling with the crises. But as a writer of erotic romance fiction, I suppose I panicked, wondering if my vocation was going to become a struggle, or even impossible. I thought maybe this was it, libido-wise: the end of the sex drive as we know it. I reminisced wistfully of my youth, when so often my thoughts turned to the erotic. Meanwhile, I went days without even giving sex a thought, and wondered if I was done with it all for good. Me, the keeper of the “Erotica with Soul” blog!

Well, yesterday I wrote perhaps the hottest sex scene I’ve written in a couple of years, so I guess I needn’t have worried after all. Seems it was just one of those times when ill health and stress preoccupy the body (and for good reason). Apparently it’s not the end of the line yet for this writer.

The Bible says, “To everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven.” Sometimes one just has to go with that. Moods come and go, creativity swells and falls, and energy waxes and wanes. It’s just another interesting aspect of living.

But I wonder, after watching that sex scene pour out of me, if during the doldrums my psyche wasn’t storing up stuff for a future time. It certainly felt like some sort of dam broke. This will be a comfort to me when next I experience a lull. My subconscious will probably be busy hoarding up erotic material like nuts for winter. I’ll try to trust that and wait for the next breakthrough with more patience, particularly if there are plenty of obvious reasons why I’m in that lull. And certainly if every time I come out of a dry spell, I get ten pages of prose like that, I won’t complain!

Still, I wish there were some reliable treatment, some magic incantation one could use to snap out of the lows. But that just doesn’t seem to be the case. The thing that wakes you up is always something totally unpredictable: the discovery of a new face, a fascinating character in a book, a powerful scene in a movie that you never would have expected to have such an effect. If I could pinpoint a single trigger this time (and it certainly can’t be given full credit), it would be the scene I wrote about in my previous blog on aphrodisiacs. But that isn’t a subject I’d given much thought to before, and I had forgotten utterly about Steven Weber for the past five years and more.

So alas, when becalmed on the seas of desire, it would seem all we can do is wait for the wind to rise again at their whim.

But I do like to keep a few nice erotic romance books handy--can’t hurt, might help.