As an author of sexy romances, I’m happy to let you into the secret of creating a smoking hot sex scene of the kind I’m writing right now. Every writer has a different approach and different circumstances of course, but here are the tips that work for me…

• Remember, a good sex scene should be integral to the book, helping to move along the plot, the characters, or the relationship in some way. This means that you may not type [NOTE: HOT SEX GOES HERE] and do it later. No. Bad.
• Repetitive sex scenes, doing it the same way every time, are boring. Clichéd progressions of sexual activity (hand job > blow job > penetrative sex) are boring. It’s all boring. Maybe you could write children’s books instead? That always looked fun.
• Get in the mood! Some authors recommend a glass of wine. If you start writing at 6.30am before taking the kids to school, this may or may not seem like a good idea.
• Start writing the damn scene. Get your characters going and build it up: if you build it, they will come. Wonder if you can in any way work that joke into the MS. Save it for a blog post.
• Answer the doorbell. It’s a random bloke selling fresh fish from a van. Spend ten minutes negotiating over hake fillets and smoked haddock. Realise that you have lost any mood you might have been in, although you have gained about a kilo of healthy fish packed with omega 3 oils, vital for brain function. Maybe you should have lunch now.
• You just ate lunch at 11.15, that’s ridiculous. Get back to the shagging.
• Just goddamn type something, anything. You can’t edit it if it isn’t typed. A writer should just put words on the page, that’s all that matters! Don’t think about The Shining.
• Find a word for ‘cock’ that isn’t ‘cock’. Any word. Except that one, it sounds awful. Or that one, it’s just silly. No, absolutely not ‘member’, what’s wrong with you? Type the word ‘throbbing’. Stare. Backspace. Repeat.
• Create a swooning scene of passionate emotional and physical love, breaking off just occasionally to check that useful site that does models of comparative heights, the clinical how-to reference guide for anatomy, the size and strength of the period furniture they’re having sex on, the way trousers were fastened and style of underwear worn by different classes in the 1880s, the list of physical marks and injuries accrued by both MCs that you didn’t keep up to date as you were working despite all your good intentions and now you can’t remember which side of his face is grazed and where the bruises are, and all your other books because you just typed a really good phrase but now you’ve got a worrying feeling you used it before and you can’t remember where.
• Get in the zone. Finally, the scene is coming together, and it looks like the characters might actually do that too. Feel the rush of writing a really scorching scene that actually works, hot and intense and physical and needy, with a driving sexual—
• Collect the children from school.

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KJ Charles writes romances, somehow. ‘The Ruin of Gabriel Ashleigh’ is out now and A Seditious Affair publishes on 15 December. Offer her sympathy on Twitter @kj_charles.