Cropping and enhancing photos.

There are a lot of spanking pictures out there - tens of thousands of them - and a group make up the heart of the photo blogs that are so beloved of the true spanko,

Each has been snapped by a photographer proud of his skills - no matter how inept the offering - and therefore often published with some sort of copyright notice.   Sometimes as innocuous as a notice of copyright on the publishing site, sometimes a simple banner in one corner, but sometimes so intrusive that it destroys all viewing pleasure of looking at the snapshot.   Each according to their own, of course - so each owner has ever right to do whatever that owner wants to the material they own.

But once on the web, we viewers have every right to download a copy onto our own pc for us to keep long after any site goes poof for one of the varied reasons that cause sites to go poof.

Now - even if you have some as simple a viewer as the one that comes with Microsoft Office, you get some editing capability.

Say, for instance, the delightful butt displayed on a picture has heavy striping on the left cheek, then the use of horizontal flip makes it seem she now has had a more traditional beating, with the heavier marks on the right one.

Over-exposed?   Turn down the brightness and up the contrast.   Or use auto-fix to let the computer enhance the scene.

Lots of empty space surrounding the area?   A model with an unrealistic look of horror, terror or lust?   Then crop off all the unwanted excess.

And you end up with a tighter, cleaner, crisper and more realistic version than the original.

Only - do take my counsel on this - don't publish the improved version on the net.

You are bound to invoke the wrath of the original publisher for daring to improve such a masterpiece:  and if your cropping has removed the watermark, your site is now laid open for instant deletion by those with the power to instantly delete your site.   Moreover, those re-blog sites that take your modified photo and repeat them again may suffer the same fate.

By all means share them with those who like modified, improved spanking pictures:  but use email and other non-public methods of distribution.   

(If you would like some examples of very simple improvements, send me an email to davids.holly@yahoo.com and I will forward some to you.)

50% off at Smashwords

For readers of my blog, I am giving 50% off the published price of any of my works when purchased from the smashwords bookstore.   I would really like to give the same discount for Amazon customers, but the way to do that is still somewhere yet to be reached on my learning curve with its publishing system.

I shall publish The Gleam in Her Eye on smashworks alone (it does have kindle and all other formats) so that all of you will be offered a 50% discount for buying that particularly heady mix of sex, sci-fi and spanking.

Profile

Now that I have two e-books published by Smashwords, I thought you might like to take a look at my profile that is posted there.

And if you don't use Kindle to read your e-books, that is a fine site for picking up your new reading material.

Smashwords

The two ebooks I have published so far were by using Amazon's self publish tool for Kindle.   Which means that if you do not have a Kindle reader, you cannot read either of them.

I was prodded to go and have a look at the Smashwords site.   They - for a small percent of the revenue - take one file and then publish it on every platform out there.   Including Amazon.

The system is a little slow and clunky:  it took me two goes to get each book accepted into its maws - and now I have to wait a week or so for humans to inspect the documents to ensure that they contain no subtle formatting errors the auto checker missed.

But still - for the results that will be achieved for the small fee charged - service well worth contemplating when going the e-book route.

Tumblr and spanking blogs

The photo blog Spanking My Babygirl on tumblr.com was not the most erudite of sites, but over the last couple of years had published over 10,000 photos, videos, gifs and artwork, all of a spanking nature.   This weekend, someone at tumblr decided enough was enough, and deleted the site.

This is not the first time that tumblr seems to have arbitrarily pulled the plug on a photo blog devoted to spanking topics.

The owner of  this photo blog is now on his third iteration.   Twice he found prior sites that he ran went poof in the night.   He states he has no idea why they went, and that he had no prior warning.   Someone at Tumblr took a dislike to his topic, one assumes, and quietly snuffed his blogs out of existence.

I suppose it is their site, and they are entitled to do whatever they want with it.  But, come on - who are they trying to protect?  Me?   You?   My Great-aunt Agatha in case she should stumble into it while wildly pressing keys to escape from a commercial porno-site she had been lured into?

Perhaps we need a new photo blog site.   One that does not decide what it will permit its members to view,   One where the innocent pleasure of watching others getting spanked is perfectly OK- without a single tut-tut of "mother-knows-best" and a gi-normous censor button.

If there is such an open minded ISP already in existence - the just need to let Chross know.   I am sure he will publicize it and much traffic will come their way.   In the meantime, the rest of us will just have to visit existing tumblr spanking sites and download all material of interest to the safety of our own pc's.   Even tumblr cannot get at any stuff safely tucked away on our hard-drives.   Not yet anyway - but I bet they wish they could.

Road Rage

Road Rage is the latest tale to appear in the Free Stories section.   The protagonist is an outright sadist who is given the opportunity to wreak havoc on a young lady. 

Free Promotion

For five days - March 21 - March 25 - my book Just Wilhelmina is available free of charge to anyone who has an e-book reader that is supported by Amazon.

Making a good spanking video is not that easy.

At first sight, a spanking video has a much easier time than the written word when it comes to spanking fiction.    If nothing else, a film maker doesn't spend hours at the thesaurus searching for suitable synonyms for "buttocks" that won't make the reader chortle at such an odd choice.

But if you watch many videos, you see that they have their own particular problems.

If the piece is scripted, your average spanking actor/actress often has less than perfect acting skills.   If the director decides to get over this by letting them create their own lines as the story unfolds, they come up with words and phrases that totally jar on the average ear:  "I don't know.. I think I shall give you another six, just to be sure..."   Really?

So we seem to have evolved three main styles:

• American - where the emphasis is on hard strokes delivered hard:  set up is usually at a minimum and aftermath often is just a long still of a very bruised bottom.
• English - a great deal of explanation of why the action is taking place, complete with dialogues with the victim to check on how painful the experience is turning out.
• European:  two main schools.   First are those that have no real set-up, just straight into a major blistering of rumps owned by ladies who really, really do not seem to be enjoying themselves.   And second, carefully staged set ups that result in major blistering of rumps owned by ladies who also do not seem to be enjoying themselves.

I think the biggest difficulty film producers face is that they need to fill up to an hour of material, or just produce short clips with higher overheads.

Filling an hour with nothing but spanking is not easy.   You can try the tested and true script of giving her an over the knee spanking, followed by a strapping followed by a caning:  and you still have more than half an hour left.   So we can repeat the exercise with a second schoolgirl (or similar).   Still not there?   How about this for a unique twist:  the person carrying out the discipline is not authorized to do so, and gets the make weight to fill all the time.

And that seems, to me, to be the biggest single problem of video production.   In the majority of productions, the cost of decent scripting is seen to be too much:  people watching "real" spankings don't need a decent set up, setting or aftermath:  all they want is bottoms to be filled with pain.   If you are going to invest in a one hour film, having a good script is - by my way of thinking - absolutely essential.   And even if you are producing 3 minute clips, wrapping them up in plausible stories would mean a lot to your average viewer.

Enough for now.   We shall return to this topic again for a more detailed look as specific areas.

The latest results from the LSF Spanking Survey are given here.

 

The Lure of the Unwilling Victim

Through fiction, we can explore the dark sides of human character without condoning or encouraging such traits.

In spanking fiction, we have a head start in that pleasure from pain is pretty much seen to be on the dark side of our personalities.   But it goes deeper than that for most spankos.

In real life, I would hazard a guess that all participants in all adult spankings are willing volunteers.   Some may be suppressing a natural aversion to the activity, but are willing to undergo the ordeal because it gives their partner so much pleasure.   The willingness is not because of a liking of spankings per se, but the liking of a person who does.

And yet in fiction, over and again the person who gets spanked is very much against the idea.   Blackmail, duty or some newly invented disciplinary regimen makes the hapless lady (sometimes a gent, but usually a lady) accept a non-consensual beating that in real life would surely lead to very serious consequences for the person dishing out the good hiding.  But because she wants to keep her job, or has maxed out her credit cared, or what other non-consensual set up is in play - she reluctantly allows her bottom to be given a good thrashing.

Not only do authors turn to such devices as a standard plotting technique, when the author has the ability to track how many readers read his or her tales - the non-consensual ones have a far higher number of reads.

Which, I think, reveals a well kept secret for those who are tops, doms or whatever name we use to describe a person who enjoys delivering the spanking.    Knowing that the victim, willing or otherwise, is not enjoying the pain their bottom is feeling gives the scene a tighter "edge".   The top lives off the echo of the pain felt by the partner:  the sharper the pain, the stronger the echo.   Unwelcome pain is far sharper than one that is acting as a turn on.  

So - in real life, we strive to make the spanking to be exactly the one that our partner wishes to receive.   But when between book covers rather than bed covers - the more she hates it, the more satisfactory we find it.

After all, it is only pretend.   Except that sometimes our partner may try to act as if she really is not enjoying herself, just to add to our buzz.   We humans are very complex people.