I have disappointedly found out that my kiss scenes suck. How do I know? It is so simple, that it can't be wrong: I don't feel in love when I read them. I don't sense any faster heartbeat, no warmth, no dizziness, no thrill. And I am convinced that this precisely is the unique function of kisses in all arts.
It is easy to say visuals have an advantage here as they impact directly but I disagree. Kiss like you mean it has nothing to do with visual stuff in my humble opinion. Because 'meaning it' alone is far beyond any sense perception, let alone visual.
So leaving all lame excuses aside, I get on a mission to improve my abilities to express someone else's love through words so that it feels like your own no matter who you are.
For a warm up I ask my flat mate Google, what is his pick on the best kissing fiction and he spits out the 13 best contemporary romance novels, 3 of which I manage read in the lonely afternoon of stomach virus that kicked me out of the office straight after lunch. Surprisingly enough I even feel more sick after being through the texts. It is definitely not what I need, such abundant uselessness, also added disappointment comes from the fact that one of the book was promised to make you laugh your guts out and the only place where I laughed slightly was when the 'sheer force' of the kiss was given central role in a description, while I have always been convinced that in practice it is only the thrust force that matters and all in all, focusing on forces is missing the point entirely. I always feel bad when a book is widely labeled as hilarious and I hardly even smile at it. This gives me the terrible feeling that something is wrong with me, that I have a poor sense of humour and am impossible to entertain. Which I know is not true, but it sometimes appear hard to prove. Now to think of it needless to prove either, as no one else but me has any use of this information.
To recap - I read three books, which left me completely indifferent to all their protagonists, bored by the story and as ignorant on a good kiss scene, as before starting to read them. Speaking about the story it is fair to share my annoyance of the fact that I continuously find a subplot of espionage, historical crisis or some other completely irrelevant stuff that I couldn't care less about. One of the books from this afternoon is a memorable mention here, trying by all means to make me interested in the vital topic of who is the spy... ok, but I don't care, I only want two people to kiss, if someone is a spy good for him, famous, fine, even better, yet completely I-R-R-elevant, irrelefant to underline the weight of its uselessness. It is sad that when you strip a romance book from its side stories, which in reality don't at all affect the main story line, you are only left with 10ish pages, half of which is some detailed kissing that feels like rubber and the other half is sophisticated dialogue between people on the verge of sanity with desire for each other.
And I am not pointing any fingers here as my own stories are not an exception, apart from the last bit where my characters usually blabber nonsense while they are getting it on.
How could this terrible situation change? I am not sure, it appears so massively wrong that the 'don't do this' principle looks helpless and useless. In real life all the tension and the pleasure comes from...body and mind being on the different pages all the time - one wanting and the other denying. So maybe the way out is to protagonise self control and lust as their own autonomous entities apart from the characters they belong to.
I can try this. It cannot get worse anyway.