The Spanking Writers

Here’s an issue that’s only tangentially related to spanking.

Clearly, if one’s to deal with a girl, one’s likely to – at some point in the punishment – lower or remove her knickers (or to instruct her to do so). But what’s one going to find underneath?

Actually, I always find it a rather enchanting surprise to discover whether a young lady is, ahem, trimmed down there or not. Whilst it’s clearly all about what she is most comfortable with, and what makes her feel best, I’m not personally a huge fan of the bare approach – which seems the preferred option for so many in the scene. To me, that looks perhaps a tad unnatural; even, maybe, too innocent in some of the scenes I play. Countering that, it can be very sensuous indeed to the touch, presents a beautiful target for (let’s say) the riding crop, makes a girl look very naked – and making someone shave herself in a scene is a hot thought indeed. And a full untamed and unkempt bush is perhaps even more of a surprise.

Oh well. Just wanted to share. I’ll go back to thinking about spanking now…

Amidst the formality and security of the imperial buildings in Vienna, I spied this gate rather surprisingly ajar:

Too much for a pair of giggling girls on a school trip to resist. They’d sneak through; dart upstairs; ignore the “no entry signs” and push open a heavy wooden door; explore private rooms that we clearly not meant for public access…

…until the gentleman interrupted them as they took photos reclining on a chaise longue in a grand drawing room.

“What are you doing in my rooms?” he’d splutter.

“Just exploring, sir,” they’d respond.

“These rooms are private. The signs are very clear.” He’d pick up the phone and start dialling. “Security…?”

“Please, sir? We didn’t mean any harm.” Such dread of getting into trouble with their teachers – and parents back home…

You can tell where this is going, of course. The phone put down; the offer of the age-old compromise. Each girl in turn taking down her jeans and bending over his lap for a hard hand spanking. Tears. Apologies. Them being sent on their way. And no mention of it ever again – not even from one best friend to another…

A remarkable post on Plector’s (excellent but decidely NSFW) Tumblr site the other day featured the front page of the LA Times from 26 January, 1938. Hidden towards the foot of the page was the following item:

Oh. My. Goodness. “Spare the hairbrush and spoil the wife”? 59 such clubs around the US? “Daughters of Spanking Parents” societies? ”Wanted: venue with lots of cushions for regular meetings”, I assume!

Surely someone was playing a trick on the esteemed newspaper. At least, I rather hope so, much as I can’t help but wonder what they actually did in their gatherings…

So, here’s a fun little exercise that’ll drive you mad – and it’s nothing to do with spanking! Nic Steele (who comments here regularly, and who’s become a dear friend) and I have spend the past few months on and off swapping lists. It started with me commenting that a particular play probably ranked in the top ten I’d seen; that moved onto writing the full list; we then debated films, and finally (at a lovely lunch a couple of days back) the most important category of all – books.

Just for fun, I thought I’d share my lists, which are each in order (favourite first):

THEATRE

Black Watch

Jerusalem – Rylance

Breaking the Code – Jacobi

Richard III – Russell Beale

Equus – Radcliffe

Richard III – Spacey

Frankenstein – Cumberbatch, Miller

The Entertainer – Lindsay

Hamlet – Russell Beale

Never So Good – Irons

FILMS

The Third Man

Brief Encounter

Before Sunset

Lost in Translation

Schindler’s List

Ratatouille

Romeo & Juliet (Luhrmann)

The End of the Affair

V for Vendetta

Waterland [or does 'Of Gods and Men' creep into the list?!]

 

BOOKS

The Great Indian Novel

Gilead

The Remains of the Day

Pride and Prejudice

The Night Circus

I, Claudius

The Reluctant Fundamentalist

The Indian Clerk

Middlesex

The Weekend

It’s amusing to reflect on some of the characteristics of the lists: eight of the ten movies have reduced me to tears, for example, and a fair few are a retelling of the same story (“Brief Encounter”). Yet the books and plays tend to have moved or impressed me in different ways.

I’d be really interested in any comments on my lists, and on what’d appear on yours… But I warn you: if you embark on writing your own lists, you will find yourself refining them for months to come! (Books, for example: how can I possibly leave out “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” or “Little, Big”?!). And huge, huge thanks to Nic for playing along – and for such a lovely lunch on Thursday!

* yes, “High Fidelity” was written with me in mind; no, that didn’t quite make the lists!

Sunday wasn’t really a Sunday for me this past weekend – given that it’s a business day in predominately-Islamic Egypt. As a result, rather enjoying a day of rest, I found myself in the office.

How to stop feeling sorry-for-myself, especially when faced with a succession of cheerful tweets about folks’ fun on their days off in the UK and US? Partly, the cynical tactic: thinking of the money I was earning and the fun I could have spending it if, as I’m contemplating, I head off to South-East Asia over the Christmas period.

That still didn’t work, so more creative tactics were called for. Over the morning coffee break, I moved into schoolmaster mode. This was no longer a training course, but a weekend detention; the delegates no longer senior managers but a room full of boarding school girls. Their friends and classmates would be enjoying a lie-in, before wandering into the local town later for a weekly taste of freedom. Yet this group? Up at the usual early hour; in their neatly-ironed (and especially carefully-inspected) uniforms; copying page upon page by hand from the dullest books in the library, each wondering whether her name was on the list of those worst-offenders who’d be called into the headmaster’s study at the end of the morning to be caned.

Frankly, it didn’t really work: as soon as I walked back into the classroom to be faced by a nearly-all-male group of middle-aged senior managers from across north Africa, the fantasy was unsustainable. But it did rather bring a smile to my face for a few moments…

There are a few books I’ve read over the years that have truly captivated me beyond any others. “The Great Indian Novel”; “Gilead”; “Middlesex”; “Captain Corelli’s Mandolin” spring to mind.

And now I can add another to the best-loved list, perhaps almost the very top of it: the freshly-published debut novel by Erica Morgenstern: “The Night Circus”, which I finished a week or so ago.

Ever read a book, love it, then read it again immediately from cover to cover? That.

“The circus arrives without warning.” It’s about magic; about love; about a challenge – a girl and her father, a boy plucked from an orphanage and his tutor. Some readers here might even find that hot, although there’s no kink involved.

It’s about destiny:

“I am tired of trying to hold things together that cannot be held,” Celia says when he approaches her. “Trying to control what cannot be controlled. I am tired of denying myself what I want for fear of breaking things I cannot fix. They will break no matter what we do.”

It’s about storytelling:

“There are no more battles between good and evil, no monsters to slay, no maidens in need of rescue. Most maidens are perfectly capable of rescuing themselves, at least the ones worth something, in any case… And there never are really endings, happy or otherwise.”

It’s erotic, usually implicitly, on one occasion not quite so:

While she undoes button after button, he pulls blindly at fastenings and ribbons, refusing to take his lips from hers. The meticulously constructed gown collapses into a puddle around her feet. Wrapping the unbound laces of her corset around his wrists, [he] pulls her down to the floor with him.”

And them, with fingers stained from a fallen ink bottle, he makes love to her, “leaving faint traces of ink” marking his naked girl.

And it’s utterly, utterly brilliant.

Read it. Read it now. Please?

“I would dearly love to read the reactions, the observations, of each and every person who walks through the gates of Le Cirque des Rêves, to know what they see and hear and feel… We add our own stories, each visitor, each visit, each night spent at the circus. I suppose there will never be a lack of things to say, of stories to be told and shared.”

I’d like to talk a bit about my story in “The Spanking Collection”. It’s called “Honour Among Fools”, and it’s a school story (I know, right, a major surprise there).

It came about because, on the one hand, I wanted to write an M/f school spanking story, as that was what I thought the anthology needed based on the balance of other authors and subjects, but on the other hand I was very wary of falling into the cliche trap and writing a story we’ve all read many times before.

The way to deal with the cliche issue – while still keeping the story recognisably within the M/f school genre – turned out to be using a boy as a protagonist, and have him observe the girl’s punishment. I’m far from thinking this is actually a really original move – there’s no such thing as an original move when you want the story to be arousing within the bounds of a specific fetish. I’m sure others have written stories along these lines before. But I hadn’t, and that was good enough.

I think it’s an okay story as a result.

The ever-wonderful Emma Jane and Catherine threw the most wonderful housewarming party on Saturday – a “Famous Five” themed event, described in more detail in a lovely post on EJ’s blog.

Late-ish in the evening, after much fun play during the day, EJ (aka George, or Georgina) found herself led upstairs by HH (Uncle Quentin) and yours truly (her tutor) to play a short scene. As she describes it on her blog:

I had the upper hand of knowing the back story. Of Mr Rowland spying on Uncle Quentin’s work and George finding him snooping where he shouldn’t. In essence she was being punished for her rudeness to her tutor but refused to apologise. It was a lovely scene with all the righteousness in the world on my side, Uncle Quentin being strict but fair and Mr Rowland being very mean.

There’s always a wonderful dynamic when the three of us play together, and this was no exception. Such scenes always seem to make me extra-mean, too – albeit on this occasion, even a fairly light whacking was enough to be cruel given the state of EJ’s backside from her play early in the afternoon. And having suggested to HH beforehand that a hand-strapping with my new light(ish) tawse might be in order as the main part of the punishment, I was happy to take a back seat and let him do the honours, knowing how much that works for the two of them and enjoying watching EJ’s face as she took the six painful strokes.

What was strange, though, was that my character was clearly something of a villain. George may have been rude – but her allegations that I was spying on her father were (as I understood the back story) actually true. It was hugely disorientating in the scene. I’m used to my characters  having having clearly-defined authority, being in the right about the girl’s misconduct, and being justified in administering the punishment – or, very occasionally, simply being utterly and callously mean and cruel (say, as an evil prison guard, pimp or kidnapper).

The latter option really wasn’t appropriate with these characters. Yet I couldn’t slot completely comfortably into the former either – the tutor’s spying on Quentin meaning that my character’s hold on the moral high ground was tenuous, to say the least. Spanking a girl, when you know she’s in the right – and you’re not actually playing a dark, abusive scene? It was perhaps the first time I’d come across that in a  roleplay; I wonder whether it’s actually really possible to do convincingly and well?

Two trains, fifteen minutes apart, wend their way from central Stuttgart to the suburb in which I’ve been working this week. The first – always packed – arrives at 07:44, allowing the commuters to enjoy the five minute stroll up to their office at a relaxed pace.

Yesterday morning, I took the second – still well before I needed to be at work. It pulled in at a minute before eight; the smartly-dressed young lady in front of me set off up the hill in haste.

I pictured the conversation a few minutes later, in her senior manager’s office, the door firmly shut behind the new graduate and her mentor. “Remind me of your contractual start time, young lady?”

“Eight o’clock, sir.”

“And your arrival time this morning?”

“Almost at eight…”

“Almost. But not at. And not for the first time this week. Your colleagues can make the earlier train: why can’t you?”

She’d have no good answer, of course. It’d be a simple choice: a report to HR with a formal warning noted on her employment record – or he’d deal with the matter there and then. She’d have seen the cane hanging on the wall on her very first visit to his office; it had silently dominated every conversation since, and now her fears and curiosity would be satisfied.

“Eight strokes would seem an appropriate number,” he’d explain calmly, patting the top of his desk. “Bend over…” And they’d be administered slowly, thoughtfully, across her tightly-stretched black suit skirt.

Afterwards, as he made her dry her tears before venturing back to her desk, he’d offer words of support: how well she was doing, how much they liked her. And then she’d be gone… until the next time, which would naturally be on the bare.

–

Now, of course, my mind’s wandering deliciously. He’s her ‘mentor’ as well as her senior manager, offering her encouragement as well as discipline. She’s been curious about the cane. There’ll be a next time. Oh dear, my nice non-consensual fantasy may just, you know, have deeply consensual undertones… And that wouldn’t possibly do. Oh no…!

There was a time when, if I felt sad or vulnerable, a spanking would be the best thing to sort it out. Pain would allow emotions to well up to the surface, bubble over into hot tears: cleansing, soothing.

Now? I would rather be pampered, spoiled, brought treats, and under no circumstances caused any pain at all. Not even a little bit.

Isn’t it strange? It really does feel weird.