Laying on the agony

If reading that a spankee has received a dozen slaps is titillating, then getting two dozen must be twice as titillating, right?

That is a trap a fair number of new-comers to writing spanking fiction fall into.  And it leads to several potential problems.

The first, and possibly most significant, is the believability of the set up.  Let us suppose you, as an author, have decided that petite six-former Carol Higgins is going to get twelve of the best for smoking (poor set up, but passable), on the bare (believability dropping) and gets six extra for squirming too much (index way down) and goes home to get another 18 from mom (oh dear) and then finally another 18 when dad gets home... Well, the count was achieved but in such an unconvincing manner, most readers might have moved on before learning how really, really painful the last half dozen were.

But suppose a really plausible set up was made in which someone gets more and more spanks, slaps, cane strokes - whatever?   The sheer volume can overwhelm the tale - and although it is supposed to be fantasy, it is still supposed to be rooted in reality.

There is, elsewhere, the law of diminishing returns.   And in spank fiction, that law may be recast as telling us that once the reader's saturation point has been reached, anything extra now diminishes from reading any more.   In real life, 5 from a paddle is bad, and 10 is about as much as a buttock can readily withstand.

Any spanking story that goes beyond 10 of a paddle is moving from real life discipline into an endurance test of just how much some people can absorb.   Not that endurance tests should never be the subject matter of spanking fiction, just that the set up should be one in which such an endurance test is feasible to the reader and within the motivations of both the giver and taker of what, in any other circumstances, would be abuse for abuse's sake.