Viva the Fifties

It feels like I haven't had a moment to myself for weeks now, what with travelling, visiting family and spending nights sharing unbearable budget hotel rooms with snoring kids. No surfing, no blogging and no time to disappear into the fantasyland that is spanko fiction project no. 2 (poor Beryl must feel very neglected).

Image: olderoticart.tumblr.com

I'd even forgotten that my little blog poll on the subject of historical period as fantasy setting has come to an end. It was a close run thing with 1950s/60s beating the Victorian period by just one vote, but the sample of just 37 votes isn't what you'd call statisically significant...

If you did vote, many thanks. I think I may have made a mistake though, as with hindsight I think 1940s and 1950s would have gone together much better. Lumping in the 1950s and 1960s doesn't really work. The uptight, guilt-ridden 1950s don't sit well with all that 1960s free love stuff, do they?

Anyway, I need to go and get ready to see in 2012. Have a great night wherever you are and I hope you'll enjoy exploring the theme of the strict, no-nonsense 1950s with me during the coming year.

Going undercover

I love my snooze button. The alarm clock wakes me up and I reach out a hand to hit the snooze button.
That gives me exactly seven minutes to enjoy being cosy under the duvet and explore some a fantasy or two. If Significant Other isn't out working I sometimes share the thoughts and things get interesting.
But usually it's a solitary pleasure. Seven minutes of feeling slightly horny and then the day has to begin. Or I hit snooze again and go for a bonus seven.
And those seven minutes are going to be my lot until sometime around the New Year. The undercover blogger has to go into deep background mode with a houseful of kids and relatives to deal with, so no new posts for a while sadly.
I will miss it. Since I started blogging in November it has become part of my daily routine and it will be weird to be without it.
In the meantime dear reader, please take some time to go back over old posts. And in the spirit of Christmas leave a comment or two. Maybe even vote in the poll over there on the right. See you soon.

Art class

What is this all about? I came across it this morning at the first-class Old Erotic Art and find it fascinating - in a disturbing way. Both the man and woman are grotesque, but I find the way her elegant outfit bares breasts and bottom really rather arousing.

And what's the thing with the mirror? And why are they in what looks to be the open countryside? Not much chance to do any writing at the moment with Christmas eating all my time, but I'm going to spend some time trying to construct a narrative around this picture. In the meantime, if anybody can tell me who painted it and when I'd be grateful.

Costume Christmas

The great thing about Christmas is that it usually serves up at last one really good costume drama. The rest of the world seems to love 'Downton Abbey' at the moment, but I just can't get into it. It all seems a bit trite to me.
But I really like the look of the BBC's new 'Great Expectations'. In the trailers Gillian Anderson makes such a wonderfully creepy Miss Haverhsam, but also a surprisingly sexy one. She must be at least 20 years younger than Dickens' own character, but hey - she looks marvellous.
I have expectations for 'Great Expectations', but it will have to be exceptional if it manages to be better than my favourite TV costume romp of 2011, 'The Crimson Petal and the White'. An adaptation of Michel Faber's novel, it was absolutely spell-binding. If you haven't seen it look it out on DVD.
Gillian Anderson was fab in that, but the show was totally stolen by the Romola Garai, who played the central character, Sugar. Excellent.
The sad thing though is that in my house costume drama is treated with no respect at all, so the chances are I'll have to record GE and watch it alone. Otherwise I'd have to put up with smart remarks and giggling, which rather spoil the experience.

Christmas shopping and spanko radar

I think Underling hit on something recently commenting on my ramblings on the subject of the poet John Betjeman. You can read it here somewhere, but the jist was that I like to think I can detect a spanko spirit in the work of jolly old Sir J.

But am I fooling myself? Underling said: "I suspect our spanko radar is probably a little overdeveloped, and the sentiments we detect are often our own." Am I a bit too ready spotting spanko references and sentiments where all is innocent? Possibly. 

But possibly not. I've been out shopping today and found myself in the cookware section of a department store. While I was busy looking for the perfect potato pan (to par boil tyhose essential Christmas Day roast spuds) I couldn't help notice the attractive thirtysomething guy who seemed to be spending way too long selecting just the right wooden spoon from the wide selection of spoons, spatulas and other spanking implements on display...

Locating corner time

Corner time. Is there a geography to it? I'm most familiar with it as part of North American writing about CP. But I can't remember having heard about corner time being part of the British tradition, although I may have read it and then forgotten that I have.

As writer, I was just about to send Bee to the corner after her punishment, but then I thought again. Would a 1940s English spankee be put into a corner?

So, to Google. Lots to find, including a photo blog that's nothing but cornertime images. Lots to like their, and I found myself browsing for ages. It's interest to see just how little corner time actually takes place in corners.

The Disciplined Feminist thinks it is a must-have in a discipline situation. It is, she says, a time when she can be fully owned by her spanker and more powerful than other impositions. "For me, none of them have the meditative, calming, centering effect that corner time does," she says.

Then it occured to me that the place to look was DJ Black's The Voice in the Corner. Of course. There I came upon a fantastic story that really catches the mood of corner time, 'Angela’s Story: an anatomy of corner time'.

In it Angela says that the thing about corner time is that you never know how long it is going to last. "You have no idea how long is left to go and whether or not you will be returned to the corner once your spanking is over."

But I haven't come away with any sense of whether a bit of corner time is right for Bee, or whether she should be sent straight to bed instead. Anyone help me on this?

Curing writer's block

I'd earmarked a couple of hours for fiction writing this morning and the time is now up. What have I produced? Maybe 300 words. An extremely poor effort.

Encouragement

What have I been doing? Looking out of the window, putting wood on the fire, messing around with post and lots of online "research". OK, that research has mostly involved delving around in the marvellous Old Erotic Art and feeling just a little "shaken up" as a result. 

Lots of lovely pictures to look at, but I've ended up with very little work done. Writer's block? No way, just naughty slothfulness that should be beaten out of me...

Your democratic duty

Assume a position

Not much time left now to cast your vote in my time machine poll. So hurry, hurry and do your bit to further democracy.
I've done years of blog lurking myself, so I know how it works. Many pass by, few comment. But a quick poll vote can make a weary blogger's day, honestly.

What I'm after is an idea of where you go when you're enjoying a little spanko fantasy. Come clean, where does your mucky little mind wander off to? 

At the moment it looks like a majority of you share my liking for the tight-laced corsets and uptight morals of the Victorian Age. All those meek maids, demure ladies, strict masters and fearsome governesses are just too hard to resist. Not to mention big pants put together in just the right way for ease of access.

But the 1950s could still make a late surge and finish in front. To most of us now the 1950s are beyond personal memory, but our parents remember the decade and it's one that's remembered through a nostalgic glow.
The fantasy 1950s are a simpler, better-behaved time when the fashions were elegant and the lingerie was well-constructed. And, it seems, bottom-spanking was very much part of day-to-day life.

Montorgueil's women

There's something about the women in F/M art. They have presence, poise, charisma or whatever it is. They often have a really good wardrobe too, and nice shoes.

Here's an example - the work of artist Bernard Montorgueil. Did he only do femdom subjects? 
I would love to see his take on FF situations.
His women are so elegant and cool, I love them. 
I've been trying to find out some more about him, but there doesn't seem to be much to go on. This page at Mistress Fantasy seems to be the jist of it. You can see more here, here and here too.
A lot of  what he drew is way beyond my domestic discipline comfort zone. Too many nasty whips and bed of nails for me, not enough of the cosy stuff like hairbrushes and OTK.
But I love the settings, the clothes and the rest of his more domestic stuff. Whoever or wherever, Montorgueil certainly has the knack of creating a kinky fantasyland that I find seductively believable.

PS, since I posted this a kind follower has just emailed me the address of a photoblog called Strict Women, so I could admire the shoes. It's the place to see Montorgueil's women made flesh. And there are some really to-die-for heels there to enjoy too.

A Christmas disappointment

What's really on her mind...?

Bum! Guess who gets left off Santa's Christmas list again this year? I might be getting gifts (see left for paste-on smile), but I won't get what I want.

...something like this, perhaps.

All the spanko stuff in this house happens during the day when the kids are out. Finding 'windows of opportunity' can be tricky. But it was looking quite promising. Significant Other's last shift before the holidays is today and the schools are still in business until next Thursday - four more play days before Xmas.

So, there's been a bit of verbal banter about naughtiness, niceness and what has to happen to the ever-naughty. Then oldest child arrived home last night to say that her course tutor had decided that yesterday should be their de facto last day! I know that Christmas is about family, but really...

Does my bum look big...

...ON this? Yes, the strategic use of pillows, cushions or whatever is a great way of getting the target area just right for cane, belt or tawse. But it doesn't necessarily do a big-boned girl any favours. Anyone's behind is going to look a bit broad in this context. This scan from the 1980s mag 'Blushes' popped up at The Pink Papers and is a great example of the Blushes/Janus way of doing things. Must have been edgy stuff in its day, but the photo sets look rather lifeless now to my eye.

More photo memory

I've touched on this problem before. When you're writing over a period of time a character's looks and personality can be a bit fluid, so it helps to try to pin them down - tn makes for consistency from chapter to chapter.
A (vanilla) friend offered advice. He sticks pictures of people and places on a board in his office after the style of those walls you see in detective dramas. It's appropriate, as he's writing detective fiction.
Not so appropriate for me, of course. What would the pictures be - bottoms, underwear, inspiring implements of correction. My mother's pretty easy-going, but would not, I think, be amused.
Instead I've got a file on my laptop that is a sort of virtual picture wall. For 'A Month in the Country' the picture file got quite full, with images from tumblr and elsewhere that helped me visualise each of the main characters.

Flick, or Gemma

For example, my feisty heroine Flick ended up being represented in the photo file by the actress Gemma Arterton. In early chapters Flick had been a blonde, but as time went on I decided to make her the perfect English rose brunette - which had to be Gemma A.
Now I'm having trouble visualising my new heroine Beryl, or Bee, my 1940s Land Army girl. She's a sporty type who plays tennis and hockey, can handle hard farmwork and is also gorgeous enough to turn heads.
Perhaps she should be a redhead. Handprints work so well on very pale skin, don't they? So, whose picture should I put into the photo wall file? All, any, suggestions would be gratefully recieved.

Statistics and spanking

If you're after a shining example of public service look no further than My Bottom Smarts and Bonnie's 'Ask Bonnie' service, which I've enjoyed following for a while now.

The latest mailbag throws up an old chestnut - how many spankos are there out there. When I was a spotty teenager I was convinced I was the only one, now I'd be able to put the word 'spank' into Google to know that there's a world of us.

Bonnie quotes a recent survey about sexual fantasy that says 18 per cent of men and seven per cent of women fantasize about spanking someone. For being spanked it's 11 per cent of men and 13 per cent of women.

Guess who?

So, look at a group of men and women and start doing the maths (or math). I've got a business event today, which will be boring, and will enjoy playing with the numbers.

Pick 10 men at random and decide which two are daydreaming about a bit of OTK and which is the one who'd like to be over the lap of the women on his left (or right). Or 10 women - who's the one who hankers after playing strict governess and who wants to be soundly smacked.

But when you start thinking about the survey's percentages it gets a bit more confusing. I like to be spanked and from time to time to spank too, so where do I fit into the 13-7 split?

Anyway, must go and get ready for my meeting. I'll leave you with the thought that the survey says 25 per cent fantasize about celebrities. That figure seems a bit low to me, but let's take it as accurate.

So, if you take 100 women, three will be thinking fondly of being spanked by a stong, strict celeb  and about two will be dreaming of dishing out the discipline on the red carpet. Which gives me something to think about on the motorway later - picking my celebs. At the moment I'm favouring gritty, tough Sam Elliott, the lovely Salma Hayek and, maybe, the oh, so deserving Lindsay Lohan.

Name that artist?

Came across this on  the great image site Retro & Creative Porn and I just love it to bits. Anyone know who the artisit is and where I can see more of his/her work?

It's all in the detail isn't it? Just occasionally I go out into the countryside with a pair of binoculars and some chunky walking boots. Not to spy on passionate lovers, but for a bit of birdwatching. So I know that the artist has put a lot of care and attention into getting that great crested grebe just right.

The joy of... bottom marks

Guilty pleasures, I love them. Years ago there was an ad campaign (for cream? or cakes?) that featured the line: "naughty, but nice". I think I mistook it for a life's mission statement, but doesn't it miss the point a wee bit? Isn't the 'nice' bit dependant on the 'naughty' bit? Without one you don't get the other.

What's the connection between cream cakes and the faint lines on my backside this morning? Both are naughty, but for me defintely nice. I love spanking marks and can't stop looking at them, touching them and thinking of them when I have them.

In the past when I had an office job it was a thrill to sneak into the loo at work, pull down my knicks and take a lingering look at my marks. Seeing a bit of bruising or the odd line was a real thrill - a dark secret I could hug to myself through the day.

The set I have at the moment are almost gone, but they have been with me for almost a week. They're like an echo of an incredible intense sensual experience and I'll sorry when they've gone.

Naughty

And I also love the fact that they're evidence of my kinkiness. If anyone saw them they'd know me for what I am. They are, most certainly, a guilty pleasure.

Nice
hardhandsworld.tumblr.com

Undercover celebrity

I love the way the world is now full of what I think of as undercover celebrities. The internet has freed us all to explore and share on every subject under the sun, hasn't it? When that comes to our darker desires that means the people who become the focus in these small, mostly private, worlds become celebrities of sort, doesn't it?

Who's that girl

When I spot a famous face I get excited in a way that bugs Significant Other. As a guilty pleasure I like the celebrity trash mags, while SO thinks they're a disgrace. So, SO is used to the squeak of delight that I can't control if I spot a famous face (or someone very close to, like a Michael Sheen-a-like at the cash machine or a Beyonce chopping onions in Subway).
Said squeak gave my recognition moment away on Saturday night when we went with a couple of friends to a pub we haven't visited before. As we walked in I couldn't help noticing that the blonde barmaid, pretty as a picture, was the image of the lovely Amber Pixie Wells...
For me it was like bumping into Hollywood A-lister. "What is it?" SO demanded, attracting the attention of our friends. With them all looking at me I had to mumble something about mislaying my phone and I know I blushed beet red - idiot.
I then spent most of the night watching 'Amber' from a distance. Presumably she's completely unaware of any resemblance, but a steady stream of spankos must be secretly thrilled by their encounter with a spanking star.

Rights for vanillas?

Bad move, I’ve upset Significant Other. The way things work is that over time we’ve reached an understanding that allows me the space to enjoy reading, writing and thinking things spanko as long as the reading and writing is kept  out of SO’s consciousness.

I also get my ration of CP-related activities too, which over time SO has got quite into. I say ration, because SO decides when and where and believes that too much of a good thing is bad for me. Most of the time the arrangement works.

Undervalued?

But this morning I made the mistake of using the v-word, which SO hates. Being called vanilla is derogatory, says SO.  It amounts to saying that non-spankos are boring, apparently. And, we spankos think we’re ‘so’ special and look down on non-spankos in a way that can amount to arrogance.

That’s me told. At the time I scoffed; surely us spankos are an oppressed minority, laughed at and misunderstood by a righteous vanilla moral majority? But as the day has gone on I’m beginning to think SO may have a point.

Do I end up taking it all too seriously? Actually, me writing this post could probably be used as evidence for the prosecution. I'd better pop off and find something else to do - maybe I see if I can work a poor downtrodden and undervalued vanilla character into Begsi*.

*Current working title of the 1940s novel - Beryl Gets Stuck In (or Begsi for short).

Poetry corner

I'm really enjoying spending time in the 1940s at the moment. The novel I have in mind is going to be set in the war years and I'm at that stage of gathering material, mood and feel.

As well as reading up on the Land Army I've been re-visiting an old collection of the poems of Sir John Betjeman. I had a fierce crush on his work a few years ago, but then fell out of love - so it's great to go back.

1940s tennis girl

My heroine is pretty clear in my mind now. She's positive, sporty and likes - to use an old-fashioned phrase - to get stuck in. So it seemd like meeting up with a friend when I got to to 'A Subaltern's Love Song' and its object of desire, Miss Joan Hunter Dunn.

Written in the early 1940s, Betjeman's  poem is a marvellous tale of unrequited love and pokes fun at the manners of the English middle classes. For some reason that I can't quite put my finger on I find lots of JB's poems sexy in a repressed, buttoned-up sort of way, and Miss Hunter Dunn has 'it' in spades.
She's 'furnish'd and burnish'd by Aldershot sun', sporty, strong and confident.


Love-thirty, love-forty, oh! weakness of joy,
The speed of a swallow, the grace of a boy,
With carefullest carelessness, gaily you won,
I am weak from your loveliness, Joan Hunter Dunn.


I want to be her, I want to be him. It's all a bit confusing (as is his mention of her boyish grace...) And it also feels a bit voyeuristic:


On the floor of her bedroom lie blazer and short,
And the cream-colour walls are be-trophied with sports...


And is it just me but do I dectect a hint of the spanko sentiment? 

Oh! Surrey twilight! importunate band!
Oh! strongly adorable tennis-girl's hand!

Betjeman's dream?

Probably not, but you never know. According to Paul Johnson he liked 'pigtails, gymslips, black stockings and navy-blue serge bloomers' and wrote of his own early CP experiences.
 
PS There was a real Joan, who apparently died in 2008. JB's poem was, she said, mostly fantasy.

Taxi service

Up before six this morning to drive a friend to the train station in the cold and dark. Lots of 'are we going to make it' stress and no time for a coffee. Three hours later I'm now in front of the computer and do have that coffee, but don't want to get on with the Day Job.
Driving back home I had talk radio on, but can't remember a word that was said. My mind was completely taken up with the adventures of my new heroine, who at the moment is known only as B.

So far I know the setting is rural and 1940s and that B is a Land Army girl. I've done a fair bit of reading into the Land Army story, including some great oral history docs on the BBC website.
Reading about uniforms, bunk beds and the dangers of getting nettled while 'spending a penny' under the hedge I can feel B's world coming together. The village hall dances and fresh and flirty Italian POWs are all just too good to pass up. Anyway, that will all have to wait. There's 'real' work to do, so  will have to wait until later.

Word play

Scolded, read the riot act, given a dressing down, whatever you call it. I think of it as being 'told off', which I know sounds rather mild.

During my very polite, middle class, English Home Counties upbringing we lived in fear of a good telling off. No raised voices, just a very stern talking to that nearly always did the trick. Which is maybe why what's said is so important for me now as part of the whole sexy discipline experience. A spanking without a 'telling off' is like ham without mustard.
Lack of verbal reprimand is criminal as far as I'm concerned. Bit of a tangent here, but why is it that you come across so many spanko movies where there's plenty of action during spanking scenes, attention to plot and costume but no decent dialogue?  What a waste.
Anyway, I've spent some time this morning working on what will hopefully be a new novel and have arrived at a scene thatis crying out for a good 'telling off'. It maybe be because it's a wet Sunday morning, cold and dark, but I can't get the dialogue to roll.
Writer's block, but of a particulalry spanko kind. The scolding is misfiring, the 'telling off' won't flow and the bit of dressing down I've got down on paper seems a too mechancial.
What I need is something new. What word or phrase does it for you? Is there something that, combined with a bit of finger-wagging, has the hairs standing up on the back of your neck? Any suggestions that you can pop into a comment here will be gratefully received... 
Alternatively, I could just find a mirror, tell myself I need to 'pull my socks up' and give my legs a sound smack or two (although self-spanking just doesn't really work, does it?)

The finishing line

It's taken two months of blood, sweat and tears but I've done it. The starting point was a question: why can't I find the sort of erotic novel that I like to read? Lots out their, but they weren't hitting the right spot.
So, I decided to write and publish one of my own. I'm a writer by profession so I was comfortable about putting the words together; it was going to be a novella, but then just growing, ending up at around 58,000 words.
What I hadn't expected was how much fun it turned out to be. I really felt connected with my sparky, spanko heroine Flick and rather miss her now she's gone.
And playing around with the historical setting was fun too. Probably because I've been watching too much 'Downton Abbey' I was stuck into a 19th Century/early 20th Century frame of mind.
As it turned out I shifted things back a few decades and made Flick's story into a homage to all that great Victorian country house erotica. You know, 'Frank & I' and that sort of thing. 
What turned out to be difficult was the publishing process. Getting to grips with new software and not being able to ask advice from friends was frustrating (they'd have wanted to know why I was asking and I'm not brave enough to be out-and-open).
Anyway, it's done. I've sent Flick out into the world. Do have a look at the sample at Amazon - I'd love to hear what you think.