I love writing blog entries with Haron around. We spark ideas, toy with phrases – and sometimes moderate each other’s ideas.
Take my recent musings on the strict Master Librarian. I ended up writing a line in which he, rather menacingly, explained how rarely a caned girl returned for a second punishment. I’d originally toyed with a slightly different phrase:
“I always present a girl with her cane at the end of her punishment. It acts as a reminder and a deterrent. It is rare that she has to bring it back to me to be applied a second time.”
I rather liked this – especially combined with the idea of a nail above each dormitory bed, on which the canes were to hang: an ever-visible mark for the girls who had been thrashed.
So did Haron, but counselled that a librarian with a seemingly endless supply of new canes might just possibly be seen as a tad pervy. And, as that wasn’t at all the impression I was trying to create, the lines came out. I think she was right, but it was a close-run thing.
In Abel’s Master Librarian world, what would happen if a girl should misbehave on more than one occasion? Would she have to have two (perhaps more, lol) canes nailed above her bed – and thus be publicly branded a recidivist – or would she be sent, in disgrace, to retrieve the cane already hanging there?
Maybe, although this would probably have been a bit too much backstory, the girls have to purchase their own canes (not choose them, mind you, just pay for them) at the start of term. It would be a school supply fee, just like for books or other ephemera of academia. If the cane is never used on the girl, she is refunded at graduation, and the cane waits eagerly for the next girl, who will, with any luck, be far less well-behaved than its previous student.
Lovely comments!
Catherine: I’d envisaged there being just the one cane per girl. How easy it would then be to see which were the punished girls, which as-yet-uncaned. But the idea of an ever-increasing line of canes above a girl’s bed is wonderful.
Abby – you’ve inspired a great story idea about a father noticing the cost of an additional cane on a girl’s end-of-term school bill