G is for Good Hiding

The expression "good hiding" is going out of fashion.   When it was in vogue, everyone understood that "hiding" was akin to "tanning" - vigorously beating calf skin or similar to turn it into leather.   Very vigorously.    So a Victorian reader coming across the line "That evening, Suzette was given a good hiding by her father" needed no further description.   Everything was present for the reader to understand precisely what sort of punishment Suzette had received.   Back when the term was in vogue.

Times change.   In turning the classic "Tom Brown's Schooldays" from page to a visual entertainment, film producers have to take the sentence "Tom was flogged the following morning" and turn it into an interpretation with much greater detail.   A modern audience, not understanding what a Victorian schoolboy flogging entailed, need to be given context so they can understand what a fearsome experience it had been back then.  And just how sore poor Tom ended up.

When we spanko authors have the creative juices flowing, we can describe each and every strike of a spanking in enough detail to elicit some empathetic reaction in our readers.   And no, I don't mean the newbie's trap of simply repeating SPANK! over and over and over to express some sort of gay abandon:  I mean more in the manner you will find in "Over a Barrel" on my free stories page.

We have taken rather a round about route to get to where I wanted to go:  when it comes to spankings, we do not always have to spell out every single slap.   If you set up the scenario with enough detail that the reader has all that is needed to connect the dots, it is quite OK to let them fill in the scene with as much detail they need to enjoy what is going on.   (Not all the time, though - we cannot get away with "and so to bed" in the manner of Samuel Pepys every single time and expect our readers to continue to invest their time in our discourse without ever questioning why they are doing it).

I shall give you a practical example.

In the book "Just Wilhelmina", set in the 1930's, the heroine and her three fellow pranksters get whopped and walloped in sufficient detail enough times that on one occasion I was able to utilize what I call the good hiding principle.   Wilhelmina and Violet - both in their mid-teens -  are sipping cups of tea in The Olde Tea Shoppe in their village, when we get the set up:

“I owe you for getting me that strapping from your dad,” Violet said with quiet, yet firm, emphasis.

“You owe me?”

“I still have the cane that my brother used to use on me, back at my house.”

“You have?”

“Twelve would be about right.   That would settle the score.”

“Twelve?”

“And since we are Sigma Sorority Sisters, you would have to repay them straight back.”

There was a careful consideration of this offer, now that had been laid on the table.   Wilhelmina sipped slowly from her china cup while looking carefully at the blonde minx sitting opposite her. She placed the cup carefully down upon its saucer.

“That would be … very acceptable,” she finally said.

“You think this is a good plan?”

“It’s one of the best plans I’ve ever heard.”

“I’ve the house to myself from ten until noon tomorrow.”

“Then I’ll be there at ten.”

“Don’t keep me waiting.   I can get very annoyed if kept waiting.   You would not want to get the cane from me if I was very annoyed.”

“Right.”

---oo0oo---

         Wilhelmina arrived forty five minutes late for their ten o’clock meeting.   Violet was extremely annoyed.

---oo0oo---

That simple payoff line has gotten me more comments than just about anything else I have written.  And not your "Hey - where did the spanking go?" sort of complaint, either.

Sometimes "That evening, Suzette was given a good hiding by her father" really is sufficient.   Which might be one those tricks you need to have in your bag - if ever the spanko version of writer's block hits you.    That's when you really cannot think of a fresh and invigorating way of recounting how a pair of pale buttocks were turned a fine shade of crimson under their latest onslaught.   If you have set up the scene with enough detail, sometimes you can let the reader "write" their own spanking scene on your behalf.  (Just don't do it too often.)

Having read all that, why not now take a trip over to see what Jocelyn Devon has for her letter G?

F is for Fantasy

In modern times, the opportunity for non-consensual spanking gets rarer and rarer.   And that is a very good thing in reality.

In spanko fiction, that a spanking is non-consensual can add spice to the scene:  which gives the author the choices of going back in time or of asking the reader to really, really suspend disbelief in order to enjoy one's latest tale.

The third way out is to go into the land of fantasy:  if you create your own universe, then every law in it is at the dictate of the author.   Creating a whole universe is a bit overwhelming, so we tend to give you insight into just a bit of one.   One that caters to the plot needs.   If we have a brand new "Department of Corporal Corrections" set up in down-town New York, we don't want to bore the reader with too much information about how it got built: just now that it is built, let us follow the adventures of various inmates as they go about their dealing beatings.

I have dabbled in fantasy - "The Gleam in Her Eye" uses eroticobots as a plot device to explore various aspects of the spanko psyche.   ("What's an eroticobot, Dave?" I hear you call.   It is a young lady dressed as a robot to make the tale work.   Don't worry about it - it is all great fun (advt.) ).

I have just loaded on the free stories section a speculative work that takes the notion of the Djinn (or genie) as being not a jolly wish-granter but a being of a deeper darker entity.   Enjoy.

And afterwards to drop in to see Stevie MacFarlane's  piece entitled "Fly your Freak Flag".

E is for Emotions

We spanking authors have more emotions to deal with than authors of virtually all other genres, for we usually get all the emotions you get in those other genres, plus the emotions that emerge from the act of giving or receiving a spank or two.    To the romantic stirrings in a standard bodice ripper, we also have the added tingle of hero and heroine taking delight, or not, in having a smacked bottom added to the mix.

The first trap we fall into is trying to explain why spankers and spankees have the reactions they do.   Particularly when our plot device is to awaken in the spankee and unexpected positive reaction to what most would expect to be extremely negative. 

This is often the result of allowing the delight of fantasy over-rule what would happen in real life:  spank an office worker and you are more likely, in real life to end up in court, not in a romantic embrace.   But in the world of spanko fiction, the sting in the buttocks ignites an unexpected flame of passion - which is far more fun to write about, and read about, than an appearance in court to answer charges of assault and battery.

So what trap do we fall into?   Spanko readers already know all about bottom burn being an aphrodisiac and non-spankos are not reading our works and, in any case, are never going to understand our equation.

There is no real need to give an sort of lengthy explanation - except as a linguistic exercise in trying to nail our experience in a way that, perhaps, gives some new insight into what happens to those who are not an exact match for our own traits.

But the biggest trap an author, any author and not just spanking authors, can fall into when deciding to explore the reactions to having one's bottom turned a delightful shade of crimson, is to tell rather than show.

Elsewhere we have seen that "Tom knew that Sheila liked him" is a tell and is neither satisfying nor titillating.   It would be far better to have written ""Between classes, Sheila was always leaning on his locker when he'd go to open it. She'd roll her eyes and shove off with one foot, leaving a black-heel mark on the painted metal, but she also left the smell of her perfume. The combination lock would still be warm from her ass. And the next break, Sheila would be leaned there, again."   (I cannot claim authorship of those words - they turn up in a creative writing essay on LitReactor).

But you can see the obvious improvement by going from tell to show.

When an unwilling victim turns to their shocked surprise into bed lust, we may want to take time out to resolve the unexpected (to the aforesaid unwilling victim) change in attitude towards a butt warming.    The trick is to show - without being too clinical over bodily processes - rather than give a list of emotions.

We shall deal with clinical bodily processes some other time.

Meanwhile, I am sure that Etta Stark will have an "E" set up for your erudition.

D is for Dungeon

We spankos tend to stay out of dungeons:  dark, dank places full of damp air and whips and chains as well, too boot, no doubt.

The unofficial scale of leaning towards the pain-pleasure conundrum goes:  slap-and-tickle/spanking/bdsm/sad0-masichism.    Most spankos are not sadists, but a lot of sadists do have a spanking streak in their make up, which confuses the hell out of everyone.

Whips and chains lie in the real of BDSM - a bit too severe for your average spanko and yet a bit too mild for even the mildest sadist.

But in fantasy, the spanko can enjoy reading or watching some bdsm activity:  provided the action does not stray too far from slapping bottoms and it is clearly the portrayal of a fantasy (no matter how bizarre).   On the other hand, I am led to believe that who have acquired bdsm tendencies don't only fantasize about such activity, they actively take part in it.

So, in real life we spankos tend to keep well away from dungeons.   But in fiction?  Well, here's a snippet from "Beloved Infidel":

Sandra knew along that this was not going to be good.  She had not dreamed that it was going to be so bad.    Malak tried to hold back a tear of rage.   That Abid!   One day, may it please Allah, that lad was going to learn what it meant to break a vow of silence.

“Come.   The dungeon awaits …”   He led them downstairs to learn the exact nature of their fate.

The lamps high above cast dark shadows on their faces.

Sandra and Malak had taken off their robes, and now faced each other.   A trestle stood between them, and they stood with legs wide apart, their ankles tied to its feet.   Their arms stretch above them, held in manacles which were chained to the ceiling.  Their bodies glistened in the chilled glow of fear.   They stared steadfastly into each other’s eyes.

Maudad picked up a large packing strap, and passed it around both their waists.   As he tightened one end  through the buckle, the two women were pulled together, making their backs arch, and their buttocks move outwards to be more prominent targets for him.   Sandra was just slightly taller than Malak and her pale pink breasts rode up over Malak’s smaller, but firmer, dark brown ones.  To avoid standing nose to nose, each turned their head slightly, to be cheek to cheek.

“The idea back then,” remarked Maudad “Was that  each other’s shoulders could be used to muffle screams.   I don’t expect you to have to do that.  The fifty you will each get will not break the skin.  But tied like this, you will each get to feel the other’s pain as well as your own.”

He paced around, eying them up and down, checking that they were quite secure.  He had not really planned it, but the pressure of the strap pulling them together had made it that they both now stood on tiptoe.   That was a nice touch.

 “The household cannot afford to lose both its number one wife and the mother of the first born at the same time.   And I do not wish to lose either of you.   Therefore, I will  punish you, and that is the end of the matter.  The end.   Is that clear?”

They both nodded.   “Yes master.”

Maudad went into the shadow, and returned with a whip somewhat longer than the one that Feren used on the servants and concubines.  Sandra felt the fear tightly grip her stomach...

 So - on second thoughts, dungeons whips and canes are not off limits, after all.   Erm... provided they are only pretend.

Now I would like to point you to Dinah's blog:  over there you wont believe what "D" she came up with...

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".

B is for Birch

The birch-rod - villain at the center of a myriad of Victorian school day classics - has a curious history.

In medieval times, England's only export of note was Walnuts.   And canny farmers noted that Walnut trees that were close to birch trees would, from high wind interaction, get their bark scarred and thickened by being flayed from inter-tree territorial warfare.   And as a direct consequence, yield a bigger crop than those sheltered from such assaults.

The earliest bunch of birch twigs were assembled to beat up on sapling walnut trees, to make them bigger and stronger.   It is reported that a piece of doggerel from those days read "A woman, a dog, a walnut tree, the more you beat them, the better they be."   (Hey don't shoot the messenger - I am simply reporting what I read.)

The move from using a birch rod from its agricultural role to a means of discipline was inevitable.   And in its early years, it was used as a very formidable flogging implement - designed to break the skin, draw blood and break the spirit the victim.   Doctor Arnold would flog schoolboys, not spank them.   They understood clearly the difference between the two.

Meanwhile, after the pendulum swung away from the public whippings of the 1700's, the rights for magistrates to order corporal punishment for sundry offenses had virtually disappeared by 1840.   And then began the very odd, but widespread practice of them sentencing people to very, very short stays in prison.

Up until 1967, visiting magistrates to Prisons (and before then, the by-then defunct Work-houses) could sentence any inmate to a birching for breaches of prison discipline.   So from about 1850 to 1920, children aged 10-14 were routinely sentenced to 7 days "Hard Labor" for theft and the like.   A visiting magistrate would then order the miscreant to the beating that the local magistrate could not order directly.   A sentence of 14 days hard labor was seen as a request for two consecutive good hidings to be delivered, one week apart.   The letter of the law was met, but the correct punishment was eventually delivered.

For adults, the pain of receiving such a punishment was much, much harsher.   The birches were longer and heavier, and used with viscous efficiency.    To allow for this, short sentences of adults tended to be in monthly increments up to three months.   Serious prison terms started at 18 months: those signficantly less than that was the nod that additional action should be taken.    The de facto "maximum" short term sentence of three months hard labor was taken to suggest three birchings were merited, with at least a month of recovery between each of them.  

The last female prisoner to be birched under the UK penal system was an inmate of Holloway Prison, and that took place in 1962.   Which is quite recent, really, for a punishment not available for use on civilians since 1840.

And over at Kira Barcelo's blog, the B of the day is for Bohannon.

A is for Author

A popular topic among authors, and particularly among authors who write spanking tales, is what is it that motivates us?

Nearly all beginners at the trade claim that they are writing for themselves - they just like putting their thoughts on paper for their own self amusement.

And that might be true - I know I once posted that as my personal opinion to a forum of spanko authors.

But if it ever was, it changes over time. 

The prime aim becomes to entertain the reader.   For those of us who publish for profit, the reward is in sales figures:  there is little in life to equal the joy of seeing a new work attracting a good volume of sales.  Nor the morose kick-the-cat down when a masterpiece to equal all masterpieces dawdles in the doldrums of reader rejection.

Those of us who do not seek commercial success, the venues for showing our works to the general spanking public range from subscribing to sites that accept works from all quarters, or setting up a dedicated site to share your tales, for free, for all who wish to come and read them.

Then there are two measures of rating your success:  how many times a work is read, and how many comments a work attracts from the readership.

Wanting praise from the readers is understandable:  but can sometimes cloud the issue.   A colleague once pulled his entire site off the web on the grounds that some 20,000 people had visited the site to read his stuff, and not one had left a comment.   The desire to be loved sometimes makes us forget that love not freely given is totally without merit.

Meanwhile, over at adaline's blog, she is also dealing with the first letter of the spanking alphabet...

The A - Z starts tomorrow

Starting tomorrow, I shall be posting daily blogs going through the letters A - Z as part of a blog challenge for spanking bloggers.   Since June has more than 26 days, Saturdays are rest days.

Each day, I shall also give you a link, or two, to fellow bloggers who are also taking part in this amusing endeavor.

I hope the results are as much fun to read as they are to write.   :)

Count down deal - Beloved Infidel

Amazon offers all sorts of deals to get new books into the eye of the general public.  And one of my works is now on a promotional deal.

For the next 5 days Beloved Infidel is on sale at 99c a copy (in the USA) - other Amazon markets are offering the same substantial discount.   The book contains three novellas, each about 15,000 words in length.

"Beloved Infidel" tells the tale of a young American lass living in a modern day Harem, where corporal punishment is sometimes used to keep order in the household.   

"Noblese Oblige" is set in an ancient mythical princedom, where living one's life according to one's station is the prime rule:  a rebellious princess finds herself in the galley more than once for forgetting that rule.  

And finally, "Megan" is a modern-day tale about an undergraduate on an "Agnostics Studies" course who seems to take a perverse delight in driving her Comparative Religions professor beyond the limits of his self control.

The Polish Connection

My very good colleague Bożena Podstawska has taken time out to translate "Just Wilhelmina" into a Polish version called Tylko Wilhelmina.   We launched it yesterday through Smashwords, and it will make its way into various e-book retailers over the next couple of weeks or so.

I am not a native Polish speaker, so cannot vouch for the accuracy of the statement that this is the first novel for spankos ever published in that language.   Wow - an assumed spanko population in the order of 6,000,000 Polish speakers - and no literature of any sort to titillate their curiosity,    Who would have guessed?

Well, if you have work that you think would be suitable for translation, drop me a line and I will do what I can to alleviate this dearth of Polish spanking literature.   And it might prove to be a useful additional revenue stream for you.

(Should you know of existing spanking material available in the Polish language, do drop me a line so that I can set the record straight).