SpanishRed

The Masochistic Princess and the Pea

As a masochist, I’m a long ways off from the Princess and the Pea. My skin needs a lot more than a teeny vegetable to make an impact. I’m a horrible marker. If you thrash me with a knobkerrie all weekend, I’ll wake up on Monday morning looking as though I was bitten by an ant.

A lazy ant.

On a Sunday.

2025-01-05 11:31:25 +0000 UTC View Post

We're Lucky to Have the Scene

When I first joined Fetlife, I would have defined the kink scene as “Literally the most terrifying thing I’ve ever encountered.” I’d seen Eyes Wide Shut, so I knew you all looked like Naomi Campbell and had black-tie orgies in super secret locations. If you wanted to attend one of those orgies, you’d have to befriend a grey man in a black suit hiding at the back of a random, smoky bar...

BlackHippyChick Day: Sentence Fragments (and a Writing Prompt)

One of the most common errors I see in this workshop is the use of sentence fragments. These are sentences that don’t have a subject or verb. Put simply, they are incomplete sentences. Here are some examples:

Ran to the bakery to buy a cupcake. (Who ran to the bakery? It must have been SpanishRed, obviously, so the sentence has omitted the subject. It should read, “SpanishRed ran to t...

It's Failure Week!

One of poker players’ most damning conditions is known as “full tilt.” Either you’ve hit a massive winning streak and want to hold onto it so desperately that you make stupid decisions, or you’ve hit a massive losing streak that has the same effect. Your brain is spinning and anxiety has taken hold. Nothing can stop the feeling, but tilt demands you keep playing, so you do. This only ...

Things You Should Know About Safari

You don’t really spot lions in Kruger. Nobody can spot lions, so we spot stationery cars. Then you sidle up next to them and say, “WHATDIDYOUSEEEEEEEEE???” and then they say, “Lions over theeeeeere!!!” and then you say, “WHEEEERRREEE?” and they say, “BY THAT TREE!!.” And then you say, “OOOOH!! I SEEEE!” and then you sit and look until a car pulls up next to you and says, �...

Submission isn't a Gift but a Trade

Bobbalicious the Princely Hound once developed a case of kennel cough. Over 30 hours, he was jabbed with syringes, poked with vet fingers, and stuck on scales. Through it all, he sat quietly conjuring up stillness. He didn’t bark. He didn’t growl. He didn’t try to walk away. His doggo brain had no idea why we were hurting him, but somehow, he trusted me enough to wait out the nastiness. 2024-12-29 06:03:26 +0000 UTC View Post

Bad Fiction Week: Is it Bad Sex in Fiction or is it Art?

Earlier in the week, I included an excerpt from the Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. It went like this:

> She did it again and again, holding me with force and moving me to the rhythm of the surf. She wiggled her breasts beneath my hands and intensified the pushing. I went in up to my groin and came out almost entirely. My body was her gearstick.

On the surfac...

As Always, My 100% Accurate Horoscopes for 2025

Aquarius: You will almost certainly do a fair bit of walking from one place to another this year. A handsome stranger will spot you in a supermarket queue, but will probably not bother talking to you because that’s life. Sorry.

Aries: Your year will be an emotional one, with plenty of time spent above ground. If you’re single, you’ll spend even more time in...

It's Bad Sex in Fiction Week!

Every year the literature scene gives out The Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. Here's one of the top contenders:

and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone.

When I said “bad” I meant really, really bad. Here. Have another:...

Dating Me and Real Me

I'm floating elegantly around the kitchen in my oh-so-casual little black dress. I delicately fetch a spoon from the drawer because “dating me” puts her dishes away neatly. Am I wearing underwear? Hell no. This is “dating me”, and she’s too sexy for knickers.

I don’t swear. I don’t burn myself. Oh, no. “Dating me” knows the sauce is perfect because she measu...

Goodbye, Jackson

Jackson was with us for a year and a half. He had a yuuuge fan club, so the volunteers had a farewell party before he went off to his forever home.

Plagiarism Week Day Four: Creating Authentic Characters

Queequeg was the only reason I read Moby Dick. Did I care about the whales? Nope. Did I care who Ishmael was? Nope again. I cared about reading as much Queequeg dialogue as humanly possible.

Queequeg: Ishmael, what is soul?
Ishmael: Soul? Well, that's a difficult question. Do you believe in God? Like a big chief over all men?
Queequeg: Like Ojo?
Ishmael: Well, I reckon so, but bi...

Black Hippie Chick Day: Using Words that Work

I own a book called, “The Highly Selective Dictionary for the Extraordinarily Literate.” Here are some of the words it contains:

Epistolary
Sangfroid
Malefic
Detumescence.

Here are some of the words it does not contain:

Red
Moist
Bloom
Creak.

Did you get as much of a sense of “sangfroid” as you did “red”? Well, no.
Did you f...

Plagiarism Week Day Three: Body Scanning

Abstractions are the most useless words in fiction and poetry. Readers don’t feel or see words like “happy” or “beautiful”. They don’t have a visual component, so your reader must think extra hard to grasp what you’re saying. This is terrible terrain for writing. Bald emoting rarely works, so we must invent new ways to describe emotions. There is only one way to achieve that: By p...

Masochist's Pride is a Lot Like Bad Poker

In any game of poker, there’s that one asshole at the table who bets every chip he has on every hand, even the losing ones. To most players, this is good news--if you play carefully, you can win a huge pot without even trying. Not me, though. I get my revenge with the ingenious strategy of losing every practical thought in my brain and betting all my chips on my own&nbs...

Not too bad of a home town

It's Plagiarism Week!

Ideas are the ink of the writing endeavor. Without them, we can bring nothing to the page, but every pen has a limited supply of ink. If ideas arrived in vast quantities, Hemingway would have written 50 books, not seven. J.D Salinger would never have needed to move into seclusion to overcome writer’s block, and I would have finished my second poetry collection a decade ago.

Ideas are in...

Plagiarism Week Day Two: Look. Really Look.

I wasn’t always a writer. Before I found poetry, I made visual art. To evolve, I had to learn to look at what was there, not what I thought was there. If I didn’t look properly, my art would fail. I learned the world is infinitely more complex than I’d imagined, and that’s how I learned to create realistic images. We must use the same discipline to plagiarise our own lives...

Hardy enjoying his new home and sister.

Why I'll Never Cultivate My Submission

If you want to be a submissive, you must cultivate deference with these seven yoga exercises, this obedience class, and this daily writing task. Do them, and the movements of your body and pen will enhance the compliance of your mind. You will learn to tolerate all the things you despise about D/s. So says a particular niche of knink, anyway, but I’m allergic to piousness in all its forms. I ...

Bosco Getting a Song

One of the volunteers sent this clip of her and Bosco.

Alfie

Alfie knows his ears are his biggest asset, so he makes sure they're in a new position every time you take a photo. Heckin' sexy.

Invisibility Week Day Four: Being Objective

Evil is inherent in the world. It might even be inherent in your characters, but a writer is a storyteller, not a moralist. Your job is to tell the audience what happened, and not what you, as a writer, think about what happened. Your reader will judge the difference between good and evil without your help. It’s not your job to define that for them. Every time you assume your re...

Invisibility Week Day Three: The Unlikable Narrator

IF YOU REALLY WANT TO HEAR about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born, and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my p...

2024-12-13 07:21:35 +0000 UTC View Post

This is Demi

As you can see, she's the favouritist favourite at Tears right now. On the way to an outing. Heckin excellent.

Excuse Me, Sir, You're Cutting into My SNL Time

Let’s say you just opened a restaurant, and someone walks in asking for a free meal. You’re a nice guy, so you offer your best dish. The next day, two more freeloaders come in. You politely decline, but every day, more arrive in ever increasing and noisier numbers, which affects your paying guests. You’re losing brand power and money. How politely do you decline your freeloaders now? What...

BlackHippyChick Day: the Temptation to Write a Memoir

The memoir is probably every new writer’s favourite genre. I’ve met a host of accountants and mathematicians who’ve decided they are writers purely on the basis of their “interesting lives”. The story, after all, has already been “written” and the author knows everything there is to know about it. That’s two shortcuts wrapped up in a single book. Surely that’s a good thing? 2024-12-11 09:39:44 +0000 UTC View Post

Invisibility Week Day Two: Unreliable Narrators

“Today I’m five. I was four last night going to sleep in Wardrobe, but when I wake up in Bed in the dark I’m changed to five, abracadabra. Before that I was three, then two, then one, then zero. “Was I minus numbers?” “Hmm?” Ma does a big stretch. “Up in Heaven. Was I minus one, minus two, minus three — ?” “Nah, the numbers didn’t start till you zoomed down.�...

2024-12-10 07:50:30 +0000 UTC View Post

Things I've Learned About Depression

Despair is a liar. There is always hope, and you will find it in love.

Isolation breeds suicidal ideation. Secrets breed isolation. Sharing secrets brings healing.

Shame will kill you sooner than grief will.

A good medical team is worth its weight in antidepressants.

When you know you have no strength left,...

It's Invisibility Week!

Have you ever gotten so absorbed in a book you forgot that reality even existed? You transmute your entire soul into the story and lose awareness that you were even reading. You barely even knew time was passing. This is one of fiction’s highest goals, and you can only achieve it by becoming invisible to your readers. The story must exist in the reader’s mind. The writer must not. This week...