A tricky method

One of the joys of being a fiction author is that we can devise devices of utmost cunning without ever having to show that they would work in real life/

Before the Robo-Spanker and Spank-O-Matic machines hit the market, many a spanking author had used automated devices as implements of punishment and/or erotica without once having to file patents for a real life marvelous invention,.   One could write, say, "as the crank shaft rotated the paddle swung back and forth with precise and vicious efficiency".   That such a contraption could not possibly work was irrelevant - for our reader cared little about the mechanism itself, but the relentless pounding it was delivering to a bottom that truly deserved such rigorous treatment.  All the downside of the invention was set aside under the doctrine of "willing suspension of disbelief" for the promise of an upside of delightful consequences.

We really can get away with almost anything in the world of fiction.   Take nettles.   Delightful plants in the fact they can inflict a sting well on par with just about any implement that might come to a spanker's hand.   But - oh! - the complications.

They need to be quite fresh - old stale bunches are as useful as a bundle of wet noodles when it comes to inflicting a smartness intended to awaken the senses totally.   Also, the sting only gets injected on light taps - grasp a nettle leaf firmly and it will not hurt one little bit.   And we ought to take into account the stems are so soft and floppy as to make them very awkward to use..

But in fiction, we need not take time out to consider why something should not work - only how we can get it to work by making everything come out without mishap.

Pulling a bunch of nettles out of the ground to whack against a bare bottom perched atop our knee would, if you ever tried it, present all sorts of practical problems - from keeping the leaves well away from our own delicate areas, to applying swats lightly enough to draw a howl.   And so on.

Well, we writers just tell the reader that it worked out perfectly, and they will rejoice in the thoughts of  the results of such wonderful improvisation and not start cat-calling and jeering at just how impractical it all is.

You decide that the ordeal will take place in the open air?   No problem - give your hero a huge mansion, a desert island or, if everything else fails, the luck of the devil, and no-one who should not will not come running at the sounds of her yells and her cries for mercy, for pity's sake.    Really fresh leaves suggest the nettles are still firmly in the soil.   No problem, your hero uses a handy hoist coincidentally located just where it needs to be so that with her srists and ankles secured to its hook, she can be lowered, bare buttocks first ,\\, into the awaiting jaws of stinging foliage.

I suspect that when we take such huge leaps of fancy, we should append a warning tag like they do to most TV adverts in which cars are pushed to the limits of their automotive prowess - you know the sort of thing "Professional driver on closed circuit - do not try at home."    If your hero lowers your heroine butt first into a nettle patch, you might consider appending a not dissimilar warning to your epic masterpiece.