​During grad school, I gave a lecture titled "Writing Sex in Fiction: How Not to Fuck It Up," and honestly, I had no idea at the time how many years that conversation would follow me. Since then, I’ve worked with hundreds of authors across nearly every genre imaginable — from romance and fantasy to literary fiction, thrillers, horror, and sci-fi — and one thing has remained consistently true: writers are often far more nervous about writing sex scenes than almost any other part of storytelling. Not because intimacy itself is difficult to understand, but because writing it well requires an unusual level of emotional honesty.