C is for Crimson

One of the delights of being a spanko is observing the change of color as a pair of buttocks get thoroughly slapped, belted, paddled, caned or subjected to whatever the  weapon of choice is in use in the media of choice we are using.   Real life being best, but written works and movies have their role to play as well.

One of the problems of being a spanko author is finding a palette of colors that delight the reader while accurately spelling out the action unfolding before us.   Particularly when we have already written fifty or more tales:  you might get away with fifty shades of gray if you are vanilla pretending to be a spanko, but a dyed in the wool spanko sure needs more than fifty shades of pink to cover the same ground.

Basically - after describing the hue of the unspanked butt - you get shades of pink, red, crimson, maroon and purple.    Now - I cannot speak for you - but buttocks spanked purple are not a turn on for the observer:  and I suspect that most spankees balk at a beating so thorough they have purple bottoms.   Maroon also has a lot of blue in it:  I suppose including that in your palette depends largely on the target audience.

So let us work with pink, red and crimson.    (There are other shades you may contemplate but describing the first slap producing a "bittersweet shimmer" may be technically perfect, but is more likely to confuse the average reader than be a turn on).

There are many adjectives to add to our colors:  but again, most are not very useful:   "salmon pink" and "firebox red" have their uses:  but elsewhere I would opine, not in a bedtime reading book.

The two variations that work are "light" and "dark"  - as in a light pink blush (for the gentile) through to a dark crimson stripe (for the more robust).

That gives us a palette of just nine or so shades.   Is that enough?

Well, you will have already learned that they are very few acceptable terms for the hindquarters themselves, and we learn early to cycle through them to achieve the necessary freshness in our writing.   We could use the old term "nates" for buttocks - but may invoke a hoot of derision for trawling up such a word.   Even derriere is more likely to invoke a smirk than the empathy we seek.   We have a very limited repertoire of words to cover the average spanked ass:  we need not unduly fear any restriction in the colors we use to describe the effects of their chastisement..

Taking our victim's bottom through stages of pink, red and crimson works very adequately for those who like the climbing of intensity.    And for the pale moons to receive instant crimson stripes from a firmly swung crop meets the need of those at the other end of the intensity scale.  

I would suggest that the real aim of any spanking scene is to turn the bottom at hand into some shade of crimson.   Anything less would be a missed opportunity.   Anything more severe would be a tad too savage.

Of course, as they used to say in car adverts, your mileage may vary and, for your readers, making a swipe of a belt enhance your heroine's nates with a deep shade of bittersweet-shimmer may be perfection incarnate.   It is the infinite variety that makes our universe such a delight to live in.

Meanwhile, over at Celeste Jones' Blog, I suspect you might find a more eclectic choice for the letter "C"...

And as a postscript to yesterday's post on the history of the birch rod, a correspondent sent me this link with the comment "your explanation now makes more sense of what was going on back then".