The Spanking Writers

Whilst we’re on the topic of things we’ve posted elsewhere, you might enjoy a couple of short pieces I’ve just posted for the soc.sexuality.newsgroup’s SSC, the Summer Story Contest – which has been running each year since the mid-90s.

There’s word limit of 500 words per entry, which makes it an interesting writing challenge. My two pieces, ‘Her Red Hands’ and ‘Equally Culpable’, are both online if you fancy a quick read. (The links take you to Google Groups, but if you get to newsgroups by other means and want to search for them, they both went up on 15 September).

I am deeply flattered by the amazingly generous feedback that they provoked from Alex Birch, himself a renowned spanking author and blogger, hugely respected within the scene. He described them as “Two fabulous short stories by the supremo of very British spanking stories.” Wow. Thanks, Alex: hearing that from you really does means a great deal.

Apologies to the client with whom I was working the other day, for any embarrassment I may inadvertently have caused. My lack of knowledge of Microsoft Word means that when I clicked on “File”, ready to “Save” the document we’d been working on together, the menu displayed my four most recent files.

I don’t think she blushed because of “C:\…\Actions”.

“C:\…\The Girl from the Choir” doubtless hinted at my deep-seated interest in Gregorian chant.

She’d have to be one of us to have understood the reference in “C:\…\Rev Jenkins – Lowewood Post 3″.

But I doubt “C:\..\Whippings in the eighteenth century” left much to the imagination.

And why, oh why, had I chosen to plug my laptop into the lovely projector in their Board Room whilst we were editing the document, thus making sure it was displayed on the big screen in the largest letters imaginable?

How we must shock people sometimes. Take dinner last night, in a local hostelry, with kinky friends.

Quite shameless, we started to discuss Haron’s recent hard caning from a friend. I was surprised when she piped up that, severe as it had seemed from my vantage point, it had been a less daunting thrashing than many I’d given her.

Why, I’d wondered? Were a stranger’s blows less intense than a lover’s?

Pace, it seemed, was part of the answer. Our friend had laid on his improbable number of strokes metronomically, in very quick succession. My canings are typically much slower – more calculated, perhaps: allowing a girl to savour each stroke to its peak, mentally and physically, before she takes her next stripe.

And there was another dimension. With our friend, the silence had been broken only by the swish of the strokes, and by Haron’s shrieks and sobs. He himself had remained silent. Whereas I, of course, talk incessantly: commenting, counting, scolding. The voice, it seems, is the harshest implement.

Oh, the stresses and strains of running a reformatory these days. The grants from the parish funds never quite cover the costs, you know. We’re forever having to seek new ways of raising monies.

The Governors kindly approved my two latest schemes this morning. We’ll have to see if they do the trick.

“Reform Your Daughter” is obvious enough. So many gentleman bemoan the challenges of bringing up young ladies in this modern era. At a dance last month, Sir C——, for example, bemoaned young Mary’s impudence, even though she has been lately striped with his riding crop. And it struck me that we might just have the perfect solution here in the Reformatory – all the equipment, the location, to administer thrashings that could just resolve their difficulties.

How I can imagine the conversation: a girl led by her governess into her father’s study. The gentleman reaching for the cane, administering a sound punishment. Then threatening that any repetition of her misconduct would result in a trip to the Master’s office in the Reformatory. That should cure them – or, if not, add a few gold coins to our coffers here.

“Sponsor a Birching”, though, is my favourite, a bright idea that came to me as I was watching young Victoria howl her way through her stripes last week. For a modest fee, our benefactor would be sent details in advance of the time of the forthcoming flogging, and the number of strokes to be administered. His (or, maybe her?) name would be read to the offender before the punishment commenced. And I am proud that the reformatory’s staff have developed the girls’ literary skills to the extent that the offender could be made to sit at a wooden desk to write a lengthy “thank you” letter to her sponsor immediately after her thrashing.

We have some premium services in mind, too: witnessing the birching might raise another guinea or two. And regular customers might even be allowed to wield the rod for a suitable fee. Of course, we’d have to be confident that they were proficient: we couldn’t risk the punishment being too light, as we do have to comply with His Majesty’s Regulations. One might have to interview – nay, inspect – a few of their servants to check that they knew how to administer discipline in a suitable competent and severe manner.

Abel (Master, Spankville Girls’ Reformatory)
August, 1808

Day in, day out, we blog about spanking. Snippets, stories, startles, scenes. And yet one thing’s missing.

That’s right, folks: this blog’s a sex-free zone.

Actually, it rather amuses us. Here we are, crafting a blog that, presumably, classes as erotic. And yet – by design – we miss out what many might see as the main ingredient.

Pure as the winter snow, us. Honest

PS and any of you who happen to have met my gorgeous wife will realise why I can’t keep my hands off her, in far more ways than one!

We love getting comments on our posts – it’s part of what makes blogging worthwhile. But it never ceases to amaze me how much spam shows up for the comments section of our blog: many thousands of items a month. Fortunately, our spam filter spares us, and you, from the worst excesses of these deeply irritating notes.

That said, we do always risk deleting links that might interest some readers. I should therefore apologise to those of you who would happily have clicked on the links we deleted this morning to ‘wet thongs’, ‘trashy lingerie’ or ‘busty babes’.

I was tempted to reply sternly to the ‘fighting girls’. We all know what consequences they should face. And as for the young lady – a ‘University student’, no less – who wanted our readers to purchase ‘rabbit vibrators’…

(Poor bunnies. Someone should call the animal protection people).

That said, The Spanking Writers is apparently ‘awesome’, ‘great’, ‘nice’, ‘wonderful’, ‘informative’, ‘cool’ and ‘the greatest’. We promise not to let the honour of being so-praised by computers around the world go to our heads.

Pride of place, though, went to the poster who commented: ‘Your site is very useful’. Ahem.

Over the weekend I sat at a lecture by a well-respected Russian writer of fantasy. He said many useful and wonderful things about writing: nothing I didn’t know, exactly, but plenty I could do with hearing again. About fantasy and SF he said that if it’s good, it needs to be constantly surprising. Bad fantasy is based on recognition (ooh look, another elf!), good fantasy keeps you amazed.

Many people may disagree, but if he’s right, I may have just figured out why it’s so bloody hard to write good spanking fiction (or any erotica) set in a fantasy world.

I’m convinced that a good spanking story, if it is to appeal to your id, mustn’t be surprising. We have our kinky buttons. We like them pushed in a particular way, just so. There’s only so much room for maneuvre before a piece of erotica becomes too surprising, too creative, too vaguely connected with your particular brand of kink.

This isn’t to say spanking stories have to be boring: just that there shouldn’t be so much extraneous stuff that you get distracted from having a finger jabbed at your buttons.

Where good fantasy fiction must surprise and amaze, erotica must provide enough familiarity to still get you off.

When you try to mix them in together, well… Chances are, one side will suffer: either the fantasy element will be weak and cliche, or you’ll get so excited by the magicky gadgets that the spanking side of the story will limp along, as though it was put there as an afterthought.

One or the other will sound jarring. One or the other will seem extraneous. “Why did you put all this spanking into a good space opera, huh?” “Why did you mix in all this complicated geekery and spoil my spanking story?” Well, see, I really tried to make it work, but…

I’m still convinced you can do fantasy erotica well. I am, in fact, convinced that some of my own fantasy erotica is pretty good, you know? But it’s hard work. I’ve noticed before how hard it was to keep the balance. I guess, now I know why.

I’m spending much time hanging out with my childhood friends. It’s the first time in months that I’ve been around vanilla people for days at a time.* I’m not used to this any more.

Obviously, when I’m with kinky friends, spanking isn’t the only thing we ever talk about – yet, it’s always there, like a comfortable background tune. This has been the only type of communication I’ve known recently. Coming to the UK to study, I needed to make a whole new set of friends, and I’ve consciously stuck to the spanking scene.

Thus, returning to Kiev, I find that I’ve forgotten how to communicate with people who are not only vanilla, but also chaste, fresh and unknowing. Even the saucy japes we throw at each other are of an innocent kind. We blush when we swear; we don’t talk of sex, but whisper. Most of the time, conversations are not just vanilla, but sexless: life, memories of school, work.

When you make a living writing erotica, it’s kind of hard to discuss work with your childhood friends. They know, but they don’t really want to know the details.

I love my friends in all their chastity. They do baffle me, though.

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* Note to t’Larien: of course, I don’t mean you, dear. But you really are the only kinky childhood friend I have!

A rare musical interlude here on Spanking Writers. Caught a wonderful new song on a music channel last night by a band called Passenger, and – thanks to the wonders of YouTube – I’ve been playing it non-stop ever since.

It’s not even about spanking, but the title – “Wicked Man’s Rest” – and some of the lyrics have a nice kink-friendly tint, such as the chorus:

“I rise to meet you as your trust dissolves to shame,
Oh this innocence has turned & lost its way,
Retrace the footprints off the path from which I came,
I’m the beast in you, the beast in me.”

The video’s well worth a look on YouTube. (Were I more technical, I could probably embed it here. But I’m not, I’m afraid, so you’ll just have to click on the link!)

Remember, when they’re famous – you read about them first here. Spanking Writers: number one for kink, number one for cool music. Or something like that.

One of my favourite pastimes when I have to hang around in town waiting for something, is to go into a public library and browse the biography and memoir shelves for porn. (That is, mentions of spanking.)

I was pinning a lot of hopes on Lord Byron, I really was. He was notoriously ill-behaved in the sexual sense, and so it was reasonable to expect sordid sado-masochistic affairs in his biography.

No such luck: there’s incest, there are orgies, there is lots and lots of garden variety sex – but I haven’t found any whips and chains. Damn.

Moreover, even though he went to Harrow (you know, one of those places where they used to flog people), the regime didn’t make enough of an impression to be mentioned in the biography. It spends more time describing how the boys used to sleep several to a bed.

Either I was reading the wrong biography, or the famous libertine was completely vanilla.