The Spanking Writers

Today marks the fourth annual “Love our lurkers” day, a great little scheme coordinated by the lovely Bonnie to encourage those of you who enjoy blogs but don’t usually comment to say hello to their fellow readers.

When we’ve tried this in the past, we’ve always been touched to know how many of you out there enjoy “The Spanking Writers” – and it’d be lovely to hear from as many of you as possible. Indeed, when we started the blog (nearly four years ago), we did so for the pleasure of writing; we never expected the degree of interaction that would result with so many wonderful people, and that’s become the real joy for us of running the site.

So, if you’re reading this and have never commented before – or haven’t commented for a while – or just want to say hi to everyone else, do post a comment! We look forward to hearing from you all

I mentioned in a meeting recently that Haron and I were heading off for a four week trip to Japan. “Oh,” one of the group replied, “be careful: they’re the biggest perverts in the world.”

Sounds like a challenge to me…

Anyway, we’re flying out this morning to test her theory! We’re not sure how regularly we’ll get online while we’re away, so we’ve lined up lots of posts in advance. (There will definitely be a new post every day.) And if you submit a comment that ends up in the moderation queue, please be patient as it might be a few days before we’re able to approve it.

As Abel has written before, his 10-year-old story site is getting evicted because of the closure of Geocities. To give his writing a home while our new story site is being built* I have moved the site as was to our own domain.

Thus I give you Abel’s Spanking Stories at their new (temporary) home.

If you had the old site bookmarked or linked, please make the changes now. And if you know somebody who is linking to the old place, please pass on the word – it’s going, it’s disappearing, *poof* it’s gone.

But wait! That’s not it. As I was shifting the site anyway, I’ve added four new stories. (Well, they’ve been seen online before, just not on the site.)

Oh yeah, Abel loves feedback on his stories. This is a hint.

* It is being built! I’ve given up on my own design skills, and we actually have a very clever person doing it for us now.

I know that many of you first discovered my writing through my website, Abel’s Spanking Stories. It’s been around since January 2002; in that time it’s had well over two million hits and lots of kind comments from very many readers.

Sure, it’s woefully out of date – but we’re finally getting round to redesigning “The Spanking Writers” and will be bringing our stories over here in a few months’ time, along with lots of newer material.

I chose Geocities to host the site as, in those days, it was probably the easiest place for an enthusiastic amateur like me to set up a website. Since then, it’s been bought by Yahoo – who have now decided to close Geocities altogether from 29 October, and delete all of the hard work of the countless folks who have their websites there. No redirection to people’s new domains – just “we’re closing, we’ll delete everything, hard luck”. I’m feeling both annoyed, and quite sad.

So if you want to catch a last glimpse of Abel’s Spanking Stories before they delete Geocities, head over and download your favourites. (I’d love to know which they are by the way). And we’ll keep you posted as we develop our plans to set up our new stories pages here.

The school year at the Lowewood Academy blog ended yesterday, and there won’t be another one. Although the blog will stay online, from now on it will be an archive rather than a work in progress.

This wraps up the most complicated fiction-writing commitment I’ve ever made: a story a week for three years, from the point of view of three characters, working in a shared world with a group of other writers. For a lover of school stories, Lowewood was a perfect universe for exploring a wealth of scenarios jumping into my head from day to day. For a spanking writer, it was an incredibly useful education.

As an epilogue, here are some of the things I’ve learned from working on Lowewood:

1. Episodic writing makes completely different demands on a writer than working on a novel does. For myself I’ve worked out that a good Lowewood post has to accomplish several things:

• Be a story in its own right, with a set-up, developing action, culmination, and a resolution. (Cliffhangers notwithstanding.)
• Slot into the larger plot arch of the school year, and move it along.
• Develop your character, moving her/him along in the emotional arch you’ve planned for the year. For bonus points, assist fellow writers in their character journeys. For super-bonus points, also develop secondary (non-point-of-view) characters.
• Drop in some details that will enrich the world of the school.
• Have sizzling-hot spanking action, or at least hot sex. Bonus points if you manage not to make it look bolted on at the last minute, because you were too busy working on all the previous requirements.
• Do all of the above every week, in no more than about 1200 words (an arbitrary length I chose for myself; other writers have other comfortable lengths, but writing short has been a challenge for all of us from the start).

Obviously, I haven’t always succeeded in all of this. Some of my fellow writers are a lot better at episodic writing, and I’m hugely envious of their achievements. I’ve tried to learn some tricks by watching character-driven crime dramas with pen and paper at the ready, mentally substituting crime-solving with spanking/sex. (“Criminal Minds” has been the most useful, because it pays the most attention to character consistency and development.)

2. Your characters are not you. They have to be enough like you that you don’t struggle coming up with emotional responses to the situations at hand, and different enough that you don’t hesitate to them unlikeable if the situation demands it.

I don’t have Sylvie’s finely honed awareness of her surroundings, or Ned’s impulsiveness, or Violet’s don’t-care attitude. At the same time, like me at 16, Sylvie likes the idea of boys more than actual boys. Like me at 16, Ned is deeply romantic. Like me at 16, Violet has a massive ego mixed with teenage self-esteem issues. All that said, none of them is me, which has helped me shape and hurt them to my heart’s content.

3. Speaking of an ego: when you’re co-writing in a big group, it’s essential to remember that you’re all creating a long work together, as opposed to it being just you writing some stories in the same world as your mates. You’ve got to be willing to respond to calls for help with plot and character developments, not bristle at requests for edits and changes, and sometimes write posts to order. Obviously, nobody would ask you to write something you’re uncomfortable with (notice that at no point has anything medical has appeared in my posts), but if there needs to be, say, a play rehearsal on a Thursday, you’ve got to be prepared to volunteer to write it.

4. Deadlines are deadlines, damn it.

These are the things I’ve learned, and even though I have no plans to do a similar project any time soon, the insights I got while writing for Lowewood have helped me develop, equipped me with new writing tools, and have been overall fantastically useful.

I’m deeply grateful to all my fellow writers for the work we’ve done together and the support I’ve had over these three years, to the readers for caring about our creations, and to Jessica for initiating and managing the whole show.

The New Year is here, the old year has gone – and it’s time to reflect on the twelve months just past and express our appreciation of those aspects of the kinky community that delighted and entertained us.

Welcome to our Third Annual Awards! (You can look back here to see the results for 2006 and 2007.)

Best Spanking Blog – Chross Guide to the Spanking Internet: a treasure-trove of information and a source of many thrilling links.

Best New Spanking Blog – This category has joint winners this year. New To Spanking by Eliane and Freshly Spanked by Irelynn and Smudge are both excellent chronicles of what it’s like to be newcomers on the scene.

Best Spanking Event – We don’t claim to have attended every single one (though invitations are certainly welcome!), but our favourite last year has been the boarding school weekend we attended back in March. A magic, memorable weekend of lessons, uniforms and punishments with a group of dear friends.

Best Vanilla Exhibition With Decidely Kinky Undertones – the ‘British Orientalist’ exhibition at the Tate. Other people may have gone there for the camels, bazaars and architecture, but we know it was actually put on for those of us who wanted to see the slave girls and harem scenes. Source of much kinky inspiration – and several instances of girls being ‘sold’ on the streets of London since!

Best Vanilla Book With Whippings – “The Name of the Wind” by Patrick Rothfuss. (Also a winner of Haron’s Book of the Year). A quasi-medieval fantasy university has corporal punishment for students; a must-read!

Best M/M BDSM novel – “Dark Heart” by Thom Lane. An impressionable slave boy meets a powerful magician. Mmmm. (Abel didn’t read it, needless to say, but Haron’s read it, oh, at least four times already).

Spanking Book of the Year – It’s been disappointing, to be honest: we’ve found lots of old volumes in dusty second-hand bookstores, but there’s been nothing to match (say) “Over The Knee”. So we’re going to be cheeky and give this award to ourselves, for our anthology of the best of the first two years posts here at Spanking Writers.

Best Writing of the Year – Mr Justice Eady’s excellent judgement in the Max Mosley vs. News of the World case (conveniently summarised by Abel). The judgement contains serious passages of great relevance and importance for those of us who live a kinky lifestyle, like “It has now to be recognised that sexual conduct is a significant aspect of human life in respect of which people should be free to choose.” And it’s full of entertaining observations, too: “I naturally could not check from the DVD, as it was not his face that was on display.”

And finally, and most importantly:

Person of the Year – Max Mosley, for representing the spanking community in the vanilla world with courage and dignity, and his outstanding, single-minded pursuit of the right to enjoy kinky activity in peace.

We’re feeling just a tad proud of ourselves this morning. See, we started posting here on Spanking Writers back in March 2006, and a quick calculation revealed that today is our thousandth day of posting here.

One post a day, sometimes more, for 1,000 days. Wow. Have we really come up with so many different spanking-related ideas? It seems like we have.

Thanks for all of your support thus far: it’s been wonderful to make so many friends, online and in real-life, as a result of our musings.

Next stop, 10,000. But that celebration will be some time off.

For ages, we’ve bemoaned the lack of interesting gifts for spanko folks. Pervy phrases occur to us: “Wouldn’t it be lovely if we could get a coffee mug with that on,” we’d say. “It’d be great if we could get that on a T-shirt.” But, of course, we couldn’t.

So we’ve decided to make some of our own. Well, not literally *make*… I’m not going to be ironing slogans onto shirts, and neither’s Haron turning into a potter to make the mugs. But we’ve harnessed the power of Cafepress, so you can order a selection of kinky gifts.

If you’ve ever wanted to be a member of the Marquis de Sade Appreciation Society; if you’ve ever wanted to rest your wine glasses on placemats that reflect your inner interests; if you’d like some of the more ‘interesting’ Biblical quotes to feature on household items… now’s your chance.

Just click over to our Cafepress site, “Abel and Haron’s Spanking Gifts”, and see what you fancy. They do all of the clever stuff like taking your order and printing and shipping the goods, and we’ve priced things pretty much at cost just so we don’t end up out of pocket on the deal.

Here’s hoping you like it: do let us know what you think, and which items catch your fancy. We’ve got loads more ideas for other items, and we’ll add more stuff in the new year, but in the meantime… Christmas shopping for spankos is officially sorted

We hereby stake a claim to the prize for the first mention of Christmas on a spanking blog in 2008!

If you’re starting to think about presents for kinky friends, we’d like to remind you that our anthology of the best of The Spanking Writers is available to buy from all good bookstores. It’s packed with 300 pages of spanking-related ideas, anecdotes, stories and startles – and the feedback we’ve had from those who’ve bought it to date has been really good!

You can buy this great stocking-filler from Amazon in the US, UK or worldwide – or direct from our distributor Lulu.com, which we would prefer, as we get more money that way. But ultimately, what matters is that you buy, read and enjoy it.

End of shameless plug. (Hey, it’s our blog. We’re allowed to, just once in a while, right?!)

Cool! Our book, an anthology of the best of the first two years of posts here at The Spanking Writers, is now available from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Spanking-Writers-Abel/dp/095584830X

http://www.amazon.com/Spanking-Writers-Abel/dp/095584830X

Go on – you know you want to! (Perfect summer reading for the beach. Or maybe you’d better leave it in the bedroom?!)

PS we’d be ever-so-grateful if those of you who’ve read the book could leave nice reviews for us on Amazon!