SpanishRed

Suicide Always Looks Back, Not Forward

It’s easy to want to die when you’re looking back at years of walking through life with a boulder in your stomach. It’s easy to kill an agonising history, but suicide doesn’t kill the past. It kills the future: that moment you first see your baby’s face; the girl you haven’t met yet who will arrive if you just hold on; the promotion that alters the very fabric of your life. Suicide kills the day your future life partner first tells you he loves you. It kills every sunset and every...

The Kink Scene Made Me Unashamed

Before I met Eric, I hid every nth of my sexuality from everyone, even my partners. I was just that terrified of being seen. Something about Eric was different, though. Something told me he might understand, so I shared a secret. He understood. I gained trust. So began a massive unravelling of my psyche. I showed him everything, even the scary parts. This was my first encounter with the kink scene, and it changed me irrevocably. I’d always been taught that shame dies on exposure, and I expo...

I'm Going To Get Sucked Into a Tornado With Glass Shards and Great White Sharks Whirling Around Me. No, Really.

I’m the sort of person who turns every gale into a hurricane. If there’s a fire, I imagine my house burning all the way down to the foundation. Then I never find another home again for some reason. If there’s a storm warning, I imagine a tornado on the way. Obviously I get sucked into the spiral with shards of glass and great white sharks blowing around me. If I have a work shortage, I imagine myself homeless and living under a bridge with a heroin syringe in my arm. Yup. It might take ...

Why You've Got To Eliminate Triggers From Your BDSM Experience

In mid-March, I managed to walk into a wall with so much confidence I broke a bone. Ever the responsible patient, I continued my regular walking schedule. I decided it was just a sprain and insisted it would heal in time. Every time I made progress, though, I reinjured the foot. Weeks later, I dragged myself to the doctor, who told me I had a broken bone that I had to immobilise for five weeks.

It turns out that immobilisation is its own special kind of magic. With my bones in a moonbo...

The Miracle Will Happen If We Don't Quit

When you’re hiking off-path, you must negotiate your route one step at a time, solving each problem as it emerges. Loose rocks, steep cliffs, and white water will block your path, and each solution is unique to your strengths. Maybe you can climb. If you can’t, your solution to the problem must account for that. Maybe you need to take the long path. Maybe you’re a strong swimmer. Maybe you can abseil. If so, your solution will be different from those who can't.

That’s t...

And Mind Games Can Never Hurt You

Degradation was my first experience of BDSM. I wasn’t expecting it. Nobody in the kink community would have called it ethical, but if that moment had never happened, I wouldn’t be in the kink scene today. Eric was the sadist in question. He didn’t know much about kink either, but he did know how to love me. He was the first human who accepted everything about me, even the rotting parts. Even the evil parts. Even the slutty parts. Maybe that’s why his darkness felt like light to me. I ...

BDSM requires us to break free of tradition. As a woman, I only broke free halfway.

As a blogger, I like nothing more than to make readers suffer by misnumbering my lists and Rick Rolling everyone. Laugh if you like, but I do, in fact, have a sadistic streak. It’s not the sort of sadistic streak that could draw blood at the edge of a knife, but it’s there nonetheless. I also love torturing my mentee by forbidding him to use adjectives for intolerable periods of time. Those periods are necessary for his growth, but the gleeful mirth involved is there nonetheless. I’ve n...

Rejection and Celibacy Were Never the Problem

Jennie Young invented a new dating method called Burned Haystack Dating a year ago. The movement “blocks to burn”. We’re all looking for a needle in a haystack, and to find that needle, we must simply burn the haystacks by blocking anyone who doesn’t meet our criteria. It’s a simple idea. It’s hardly novel, but Jennie put it into words, and they resonated with hundreds of thousands of women.

Her Facebook group has been picking up an interesting trend this week. Women have be...

At War With My Body

I’ve been at war with my body ever since I was old enough to feel shame. I began to apologise for my imperfections before I reached 13, not because I was criticised, but because my grandmother tortured herself over her own flaws every day—loudly enough for a child to pay attention, and so I learned that to be flawed was to be hideous. The rest of her lessons came from her silence.

She never spoke about the grand success she made of her marriage, so I never learned her lessons about ...

BlackHippyChick Day: Getting Published

This week, one of my friends was published by our top local newspaper. He’s not an experienced writer. He just set a goal, then worked to achieve it. One day, he had the balls to make a submission, and it was successful. I had a similar experience. A few years into my mentorship, I called up my favourite magazine at the time to give them a pitch. I found their phone number on the first page. How bloody convenient. They accepted the piece and began commissioning me to write more. That’s ho...

Criticism Week Day Three: All Writers Need Polishing

The pain of criticism is often connected to unrealistic expectations of yourself. If you’re experiencing feedback as a statement of your ability, you’re probably expecting too much from yourself. Some writers spend years writing and editing their work before publication. Many of the greats were rejected in the beginning. Some of the best poets degenerated into periods of horrible writing.

When you make a coffee table, you don’t abandon it once all the pieces are glued tog...

Submission Feels Like Stillness

Submission feels like stillness. The instant that fist grabs my hair or my wrists, my entire being turns into stasis and waiting. It wasn’t always that way. When I found D/s outside the kink community, I only had my ignorance to explain what I was going through, so submission felt like chaos. Delicious chaos, but chaos nonetheless.

Sub frenzy was like living in somebody else’s body, and without a term to tell me what was happening, I felt as though I’d jumped into a hot pool of la...

Getting Criticism From Someone Who Can't Read Will Only Teach You To Create Terrible Work

The writing process requires two entities: The writer and the reader. Writing is a cycle, and without a good reader and writer, the magic of the writing process shuts down. We live in an increasingly aliterate world. People might know how to read in the most practical sense of the word, but they lack the sophistication to absorb complex work. Bad readers are everywhere. Not all feedback has merit, so the workshop process isn’t always easy to navigate. You’ve got to assess the value of cri...

Master One Twue Way Never Became a Real Boy

My friend, K, is a gifted photographer. I am not, but I love taking pictures anyway. It helps me to find the beauty in a common sewer drain and the romance in a gutted train. </rhyme> K and I have built a Facebook relationship made entirely of pictures. He posts his gorgeous bird-scapes, and I post my blurry, skew disasters.

K’s good with that. He doesn’t require me to share his views on photography, and I don’t require him to take pictures like an asshole.

He’s a pu...

Criticism Week Day Two: Coping well with criticism is one of the most important writing skills you will ever learn.

A few weeks ago I endured an awful call from an agent in Germany. I’d written a series of features that were clumsy and full of clutter last winter when I was ill. They’d dug up those writings and needed to address the quality of the work. This is going to happen to you. It happens to all of us. There are two ways to respond to a call like this:

a) By insisting you’ve been in the industry for 30 years, and your agent is simply wrong.
b) By listening and absorbing the feedback s...

It's Criticism Week!

During my first year in the writing scene, I often left my workshop in tears. I’d pinned all my hopes on success, and sometimes it seemed I’d never get there. I expected myself to get everything 100% right 100% of the time, and sometimes criticism sliced right under my skin where it really hurt. I let writing feedback reflect on my sense of self-worth, so the feedback I desperately needed also caused me a world of pain.

These days, I’m the Chuck Norris of writing feedback...

The 10 Commandments of Sex

Human sexuality comes with a list of rules long enough to traverse the earth five times: Thou shalt get hard on command or we shall declare your sexuality pathological. Thou shalt not take more than 10 minutes to reach orgasm. Thou shalt have a tidy vagina that lubricates on cue, and once you've peaked, thou shalt have a short refractory period.

If you're a man, thou shalt not enjoy sex so much that you get carried away. Think about your Aunty Mabel and practice breathing techniques com...

Short-Form Nonfiction Week: Logical Fallacies

If you’re going to write nonfiction, you’ll need to create a cogent argument. Luckily there’s an entire list of shitty arguments to draw lessons from. You no doubt know them as logical fallacies, and no credible nonfiction writer should use them.

Logical fallacies are arguments that can be rationally argued away. We’ll start with the easy ones:

Ad hominem attack: Pinning your argument on the personal traits of your opponent. E.g. You can’t possibly know if you need fluor...

Short-Form Nonfiction Week: The Inverted Pyramid

Short-form nonfiction often uses the same story arcs we explored in fiction week, but other forms come into play as well. We call them “ledes.” Inverted pyramid ledes are probably the most used structure in journalism. They’re also a blogging favourite because Google loves them, so they’re more likely to appear at the top of search results in a query.

The inverted pyramid launches the story with the most fundamental, newsworthy information first. This information could be consid...

I Never Wanted To Be Thin. I Wanted To Be Invisible

I’ve always hated my body. It was never thin enough, curvy enough, muscular enough, tanned enough. You could say my anorexia was my solution to those imperfections, but then you’d be falling for the same lies I used to tell myself to avoid the truth of my disease. My starvation was never about thinness, but self-destruction. I wasn’t anorexic because I wanted a body that was easy to love, but because I found myself impossible to love.

I didn’t want to be thin, but invisible. Onc...

Short-Form Nonfiction Week: Are You Writing To Your Audience Or At Them?

I have a friend called Bosco. When I talk to him, I say one of several things:

“Who’s the good boy?”
“Are you the good boy?”
“Yes, you are!”
“Sit.”
And “High five.”

I don’t tell Bosco about what I’m anxious about today because he wouldn’t understand it. I don’t read him poems or teach him how to do mathematics because Bosco is a dog, and his brain isn’t wired that way. He mainly just wants to hear who the good boy is. This mystery has be...

Proof That Boyfriends Are Hobbitses

Hobbits can’t avoid spider traps for shit because they’re too busy thinking about eating breakfast. Boyfriends can’t avoid brat traps for shit because their entire brain is basically made of bacon.

Have you ever known a hobbit who didn’t walk into literally every ambush? No. No, you haven’t, and every year, 869 boyfriends wash their hair with Nair because people (who are definitely not girlfriends) booby trap their shampoo bottles.

Boyfriends are constantly refu...

Memoir Week Day Seven: Memoir Writing Is the Skydiving Of the Literary World

We recently explored story arcs, but your memoir will also need a character arc: the evolution your protagonist undergoes at every stage of the story. To write a convincing character arc, you must rip out the viscera of your history, even when you’re describing terrifying things. You must have the capacity to stare at your flaws and history unflinchingly.

Memoirs are more than mere creative endeavours. No matter how well you write, you will fail if you’re not bringing any substance ...

Memoir Week[s] Day Six: Symbolism

My mentor’s memoir told the story of navigating the world of sex, love, and literature as a person with cerebral palsy. When I adapted it for the screen, I realised I wouldn’t be able to explicitly define Lionel’s relationship with his own body. If I did, the entire message would come across as self-piteous and preachy. I did know about a poem he’d written once, though:

The cat inhabits this moment on the bed
complete, nothing left over, nothing intended –
conscious of o...

Why Your Distaste For the Word Cis is Irrelevant

Dear Oxford University Press

As The People of the Dikshennery, you decide which words stay and which ones go. I would like to submit a complaint about one of the words in your book. I’ve noticed a lot of people have been referring to some M&Ms as redd these days. I do not consent to this adjective. It’s offensive. Someone I know once said redd is a bad colour for walls, so the word is clearly derogatory in every context. If you discuss red M&Ms, you’re saying they’re a b...

I'd Like To Be a Dominate Please

I came across this old thing this morning. I think it's hilarious. 😂😂😄

I'd Like to be a Dominate, Please

Dear John Bakoo

My name is Norman, and I'd like to be a dominate, please. I don't know much about the fetish of greyness per say, but I did watch The Secettary, so I can def. throw a flogger at a hottie from 50 yards. I like hotties, just as all dominates are surely required to do. I also like bewbs. I've attached my top 50 in a PDF.

My mum said I should st...