My Husband, Your Wife, Our Child – An unusual term in our contract

Co-authoring a book means compromise, but there is usually one author who has to give up more than the other. When my friend, Xaviera, offered me the chance to co-author an erotica novella, I agreed only on the terms that it became romance erotica rather than erotic romance. In return, she insisted that the private messaging that ran between the two of us was added as a bonus at the end of the story. This was designed to explain to her readers (predominantly male) why the story fell short of her usual ‘show the blood and guts’ style. Here is some of our banter.

WARNING:- If you're easily offended, you might not want to read these extracts. My co-author writes erotica for a predominantly male audience and has a mind and a mouth like a cesspit. She is one of my best friends, so I have to forgive her even if you don’t. Xavi insisted that her fans had proof that it was not her fault that her erotica took a backseat. Read at your own peril.

Xaviera: Alex, you're such a wuss. My readers are going to think I've gone soft. Where's all the dirty stuff I sent you when I rewrote chapter 4 for you?

Alex: Xavi, I am NOT going to have my fans read a line that says, he took the tube to dingleberry central. It's NOT going to happen.

Xaviera: You're such a prude. Anal sex is all the rage, these days. So what about the golden shower scene? Would you put it back in if his mouth was closed at the time? I'm serious. My peeps will fall asleep reading the shit you write. I've had more fun on my own with a toilet brush, some orange peel, and a jar of pickled onions, than Beth and Luther had on day two. It IS erotic romance, isn't it?

Alex: Xavi, romance readers have no desire to hear about the size of a man's genitals the way you described it.

Xaviera: All I said was, his cock would put a horse to shame.

Alex: No, what you said was, his doctor thought he was injecting that bad boy with steroids. Balls like grapefruit hung below twelve inches of tube steak, and it was as black as a coal miner's arm before lunch.

Xaviera: I'm sure I mentioned a horse somewhere.

Alex: You did. Apparently it was a fetish she shared with her Aunt Sybil.

Xaviera: Introducing Sybil was a nice touch, don't you think?

Alex: Xavi, have you ever considered the fact that people in wheelchairs would have great difficulty in performing the feats you suggested.

Xaviera: What? She covered her lower half with a blanket in the hospital waiting room, and as for her encore at the back of the senior citizen's bus, I've done that myself. (remember my next door neighbor, Dougie? It was his wheelchair) It wasn't easy getting him out of it. Nobody wanted to help.

Alex: Oh, and by the way, you can't use your uncle Sid as an example. Nobody knows your uncle Sid.

Xaviera: Refresh my memory?

Alex: You wrote, her tits were bigger than my uncle Sid's.

Xaviera: Well, all I can say is that's a great pity. How many men do you know who have a pair of 44 Double D's?

Alex: You measured them?

Xaviera: Didn't have to. I slipped aunt Wendy's industrial strength bra onto him when he fell asleep at the kitchen table. Perfect fit.

Alex: That wasn't very nice.

Xaviera: Oh, it got worse. Aunt Wendy obviously didn't feel it necessary to tell me that her Pastor was coming round to pick up some of her famous homemade raspberry jam.

Alex: Let me guess. It was in the kitchen cupboard.

Xaviera: Are you psychic? Aunt Wendy maintained that because of me, she couldn't show her face in that same Pastor's church ever again.

Alex: How did Uncle Sid take the news?

Xaviera: Aunt Wendy took it off him before he woke up. He still doesn't know. Forget Uncle Sid. We ARE supposed to be collaborating on this erotic romance, aren't we? How come you're keeping all of my best stuff out of it? It was a mistake to agree that you had the final say on what went in and what didn't. I suggest we renegotiate.

Alex: Xavi, I told you when we first discussed co-authoring, that I refused to alienate my readers by forcing them to read about dingleberry’s and the like.

Xaviera: You have no sense of humor, Alex, besides, a lot of men like to tongue women's asses. Don't tell me no man has ever tongued your sorry ass. You know what I'm going to ask next, don't you? It involves... well, I think you know what it involves.

Alex: I have nothing against hot and heavy sex scenes, but they have to be tastefully done. I already told you that.

Xaviera: What about the dirty talk I suggested? Beth is no virgin. I feel quietly confident that screaming expletives as Luther sends her over the edge would be just the sort of thing that your readers would lap up.

Alex: While I don't disagree that even profanity has its place in the bedroom during sex, your suggestion that 'Luther unleashed a verbal desecration of the dictionary' and that 'his knowledge of sexual cuss words was filthier than a two-day old dog shit covered in flies' left me feeling that Beth would have been better off wearing earplugs.

Xaviera: One things for sure, you don't have the soul of a poet. Desecration of the dictionary just rolls off the tongue. You're probably right about the dog shit, though. My dog Jasper let one go the other day that had me in awe. Admittedly, his bowels were loose, but I kid you not, it resembled abstract art. He has the soul of an artist. No doubt about it..

Alex: Slipping a tablespoon of kid’s laxative into his food once a month does not make Jasper a poet or a wet and wild poop artist. Goodness knows what the Humane Society would have to say about that.

Xaviera: I'm starting to think that we should offer two versions of this sleep inducing novella you're forcing me to put up with. My guess would be when the two couples switched houses. We could have both my version and yours, one right after the other and let the readers decide which they preferred. It might be best to put yours first because after reading mine, yours would seem more anemic than an albino model with bulimia.

Alex: It has always been part of my writing strategy to avoid having my readers throw up either before or after chapter five. I've read forensic pathologists reports that were more palatable than your sex scenes, and no, I have no urge to die during the height of an orgasm. My heart giving out when I'm ninety-six will do me just fine, thank you.

Xaviera: You've experienced an orgasm? Good for you. Maybe there's hope after all. C'mon. Tell me. Did you swear the way you know I did when Jasper ran off with my used pad and shredded it on my neighbor's lawn. Dogs with the soul of an artist can get very frisky.

Alex: Transitioning from a real life situation where one partner agrees to carry another's child to wife-swapping has to be done gradually. I think I mentioned that before.

Xaviera: Define gradually? I was almost on the second page when Kurt climbed all over Angie. Hard up against the front window as the Anglican under fifteen church choir passed in their bus added a certain edginess to the proceedings. Kids get sex education when they're about nine these days, so no worries there.

Alex: No worries and no danger it will ever get into print either. Not with my name on the front cover. What's wrong with you? Can't Angie and Kurt do it in the bedroom like everybody else?

Xaviera: Don't tell me you've never done it in a public place? Next to the ice machine in a hotel? Behind the camel enclosure at a zoo? Up against your grandma's washing machine (who puts a camera in a washroom for heaven's sake?) In a supermarket bathroom while another customer was in the next cubicle? The airplane didn't really count because we had barely left the tarmac and to the best of my knowledge, there's no such thing as a not quite the mile high club.

Alex: I'm not about to share my sexual shenanigans with you, Xavi. It might end up in print.

Xaviera: Oh, yeah! That's just what my readers are foaming at the mouth waiting to read. A full length description of you holding hands with the minister's twenty-six year old virgin son.

Alex: You've got a thing about the clergy, haven't you? Some religious hang-up perhaps?

Xaviera: I'd rather not talk about it.

Alex: Oh, come on! This has to be good.

Xaviera: Let's just say I misread the Priest's signals.

Alex: Priest?????

Xaviera: We were young. I was foolish. What can I say?

Alex: You're lying.

Xaviera: Of course I'm lying. No man could resist my womanly charms.

Alex: I hope you noted that I gave in to your ‘public sex’ scene in chapter 11

Xaviera: Call that a public sex scene? It was so weak I’d be afraid to admit to it in confession in case the Priest started laughing. It’s less exciting than kissing your dog’s ear when he’s asleep.

Alex: I take it Jasper’s been the beneficiary of your tongue in his ear on more than one occasion.

Xaviera: No, ma’am. Jasper’s a nervous sleeper. He’d take your face off. I know because I suggested my annoying cousin Billy give it a shot. Judging by the result, he could be an abstract artist too.

Alex: You never liked Billy, did you?

Xaviera: What’s there to like. He’s a walking dingleberry.

Alex: You’re only saying that because he snitched on you a couple of times.

Xaviera: A couple? When I was sixteen, my mother grounded me for a week because of him.

Alex: The Ouija board incident?

Xaviera: That’s right. The room was dark and at the crucial moment I had a friend sneak up behind him and scream in his ear. His nerves were shot. He cried for most of the same week I was grounded.

Alex: You were grounded because your friend almost burst Billy’s eardrum.

Xaviera: Good times, eh?

Alex: Not for Billy.

Xaviera: Serves him right. It was him who told my mum that the police had caught me having sex in the back of a van when I was nineteen.

Alex: I thought you told me you were eighteen?

Xaviera: That was the time before. Billy never found out about that one.

Alex: Where were you that the police kept finding you?

Xaviera: I admit it. A graveyard’s not the place to turn on a torch after 11pm. I was a rookie and Tim was scared of the dark. What a pansy. He’d barely got into my panties when the siren went off. Good job we still had most of our clothes on.

Alex: The police let you off with only a warning. You got lucky.

Xaviera: I’ll say I got lucky. Tim almost pissed his pants when the two officers tracked us down. He was about to admit that we were in the early stages of you-know-what.

Alex: But you saved the day when you assured the said police officers that you had seen a zombie and were giving chase? Please. Don’t insult their intelligence. They knew exactly what you were up to.

Xaviera: That’s what Tim said.

Alex: Then you got caught in the van.

Xaviera: Right. Darren and I were parked in the middle of nowhere. I kid you not, I should have had more chance of bumping into Moses I was so far off the beaten track.

Alex: Going biblical now, are we?

Xaviera: Getting back to the story, whose idea was it to initially call it Another Kind of Threesome? Not only was that weak, it was pathetic, not to mention misleading.

Alex: That would be you.

Xaviera: You lie!

Alex: Nope. I have the transcript to prove it.

Xaviera: Was that the week I went down with a temperature?

Alex: Nope. You were entirely lucid, which is more than I can say about some of your ideas for this book.

Xaviera: Well, at least I had the good sense to change it to My Husband, Your Wife, Our Child.

Alex: No, you didn’t. I did.

Xaviera: You lie!

Alex: I have written proof.

Xaviera: What is it with you? Fancy yourself as a defense lawyer? You could never join the Mafia, you know. Just try to keep evidence on those fellas and see what happens.

Alex: You’re not Mafia. I think I’m pretty safe.

Xaviera: Think so?  I’ll make you kiss Jasper’s ear when he’s asleep.