SpanishRed

Subs Receive As Much As We Give

I’ve been in the scene for years, but I still can’t wield a flogger. Mostly, I just rush at kink with my brain in my vagina. I’m not one of those subs who can handle a bullwhip. I’ve never picked up a hitty thing unless it was to pack it away. I have no idea how to tie a futo, let alone a fisherman’s knot. This is not the recommended approach to BDSM. New subs are supposed to do some topping so that we can grasp BDSM from all angles.

I’d rather give away all my cupcakes.

Memoir Week Day Two: I Don't Want To Read Your Story

The trouble with the memoir genre is that writers frequently tell stories that have already been told. Perhaps you were abused or assaulted. Maybe you spent years recovering from addiction or depression. You might think these stories are worth telling because they are painful and your recovery was unique. Pain, however, isn’t enough. Everyone’s already read the abusive family memoir. The addiction memoir is so common it’s basically a genre on its own. Your work must compete with a verit...

Memoir Week Day Two: Things To Think About Before You Write a Memoir

Storytelling requires distance and objectivity. Memoir writing offers neither. When you’re telling your own story, you’re at a disadvantage every time you recall what happened in your brain during the experiences you’re describing. You can achieve objectivity, but it will require a lot of extra work. Ask me. I’ve been there.

In a way, you could say I’ve been writing memoirs all my life. In days of yore, I only wrote poetry from my own perspective. I had to become...

Someone Was Stabbed On the Way Back Home

In early 2019, someone was stabbed on my train back home. We were scared of missing the train when it set off again, so we stayed in our carriage while the security team tried to find the muggers. We had a schedule, dammit, and it involved arriving home in time for lunch, even if there was someone with a knife a few carriages away. We stood. We waited. We grew increasingly bored because this was just another ordinary day in Cape Town, The Friendly City.

Violence has a way of settling in...

Black Hippy Chick Day: Writing in God-Mode

The average fiction novice knows everything there is to know about their book—what Sara thinks about when she’s not murdering people, what Greg does when he gets home at night, who the victim was, and what their city was like before their protagonist was even born.

This, we call “The All-Knowing Narrator” and he can bounce from brain to brain with the greatest of ease. If you’re looking for credibility, immersiveness, and authenticity, writing your stories in God-mode will des...

Shame and Suicide Are Intricately Linked

Every now and then, I receive messages from suicidal readers. When I try to point them to a doctor or friend who’s made out of cells instead of pixels, the person who was desperate for help just a second ago dials it back to, “No. I’ll be fine.” Wild horses couldn’t drag them out of their isolation even in a crisis.

I’ve been that person. When I was depressed, asking for help felt like the darkest sin. If I was coping, I had no trouble picking up the phone to arrange a night...

Word Choices Week Day Three: The Sounds Matter

The best lecture I ever attended was run by South African writers, Antjie Krog and Ingrid de Kok—both celebrated poets in their own rights. For this lecture, though, they were discussing translation. Both had translated the work of one of our greatest poets, Ingrid Jonker. Krog and de Kok had taken on the translation challenge in their own ways, so they explained why they had chosen the words they had. They were translating from Afrikaans, a language I can passably understand. Passably is t...

Content Creation With Male Dogs

It's Word Choices Week, and I Have an Exercise For You

This is probably the biggest Swiss Army Knife ever built. You’re only as useful as your tools, and that baby has everything from nail files and recessed bit holders (whatever those are) to rivet setters and Allen wrenches. You’re not going to get far with it if you use a nail cleaner to screw in a nail, and your word ch...

Blowjobs Are Objectively Important

If you’ve known me a while, you might have noticed that I’m slightly enthusiastic about blowjobs (and cupcakes). I know that’s more vanilla than ice cream (and cupcakes). It’s not going to win me any kink cred, but hear me out.

Have you ever met one of those men who prides himself on his sexual technique? Me too. After 60 minutes spent tracing the alphabet on my clit, I asked him if I could turn on the television while he finished. Even Tom Hardy could apply those kinds o...

The Double Standards Booty Call

I once dated one of my country’s shadow ministers. He might have been a touch too boring, but he taught me a lesson I apply to every single relationship: If a dude who’s helping run the fucking

country (!!!)

manages to find a decent amount of time to spend with me, sorry, guy, but you’re not too busy to find time for me. You just don’t want to see me all that much. The Politician and I lived an hour and a half’s drive from one another. Th...

Editing Week Day Two: You're a Terrible Editor, and This Is Why

Writers and proofreaders are rarely the same people. There’s a reason for that. Just because we can edit other people’s work, doesn’t mean we can edit our own. Ask me. I proofread my own work all the time, and when it’s passed onto an editor, I still receive a veritable bloodbath of red marks. The size of your own objectivity is at its lowest after you’ve just written something. That objectivity grows with every passing day, so if you do try to edit your work on the day you wrote it...

It's Self-Self-Editing Week

I promised we’d talk about worldbuilding this week, but another theme keeps popping up in the workshop: How to self-edit. This week, we’re going to look at how to process your own work, and part of that has to do with when. The moment you open your work up to other people’s criticism, their feedback weaves its way into your revision. Workshops may give you easy solutions for turning an unedited text into a publishable one. If you’re looking for the fastest route to repair, th...

I'm the Most Unsubmissive Sub You'll Ever Meet

I’m a little shy if I’m tired, and pretty confident when I’m not. I’m submissive with some men, but not all. If you condescend to me, I'll bury you in angry pixels until you use your safe word.

Your safe word is, "I'm a mansplaining internet troll called "Sweetheart."

I'm not domineering or subservient. I constantly swing between the desire to submit and the temptation to take charge. My sexuality isn’t made up of ones and zeros because I’m an organic entity. For me, s...

If You Want Respect, Choose the Right Face In the Womb

An internet stranger once told me that I only write because I’m too ugly to earn popularity through my photographs. Four days later, another stranger accused me of being too attractive. Back when I did have photographs up, men told me I looked too angry. If you have resting bitch face, you should have chosen a different physicality, but if you get tired of that accusation and remove your photographs entirely, dudebros will accuse you of being a bot account.

Our entire lives connect to...

In the Kink Scene You Can Buy Acceptance For a Few Cents and a Can of Beer

When I created my Fetlife account, my health was in tatters. I’d spent two lonely months figuratively chained to my living room. I was too sick to leave my home and too ashamed of my condition to accept visitors. My Fetlife account opened a door to a different universe. You gave me the human contact I desperately needed while I patched up my body. Here, people shared secrets as though you could buy acceptance with a few cents and a glass of beer.

And you could, so I began packing my s...

Black Hippy Chick Day: Adverbs

We’ve spoken about adjectivitis in the past, but adjectives have baby brothers that can become equally problematic: Adverbs. They express the “how” in a sentence:

SpanishRed ate the cupcake greedily. She was grinning madly until Bosco mischievously stole a bite. Red baulked angrily as Bosco hungrily finished his meal.

Adverbs can occasionally be helpful. (See what I did there?)

But usually (see what I did there, too?) they are signs of laziness...

I Don't Give Mental Health Advice Because You Deserve Better

After my rape, I started a relationship with a psychologist. You’d think I struck it rich: at the darkest time of my life, I stumbled on the most qualified person to support me.

I was so, so wrong.

Without the boundaries that come with therapy, he had access to my fucked up psyche 16 hours a day. He could tinker and meddle to his heart’s content before sex, after breakfast, and the second we woke up in the morning. If you’ve ever tried to heal a scab that you won’t stop sc...

Woody Week Day One: Imposter Syndrome

It’s Woody Week, and naturally, our first post must be about imposter syndrome. I’ve known and worked with thousands of writers in my lifetime. Very few of them would call themselves writers, even if they do this as a profession. I rarely call myself a writer either. When people ask what I do, I say, “I write.” I rarely say, “I’m a writer” because those three words make me feel intensely uncomfortable. How dare I declare myself a part of this premium team, even if I’m widely p...

Confronting the Challenges of Growth Day Three: Analysis Paralysis

Writing requires us to be two people: The creative and inspired writer, and the perfectionistic editor. You must be Writer A when you set down your first draft, and you must be Writer B when you edit your work. The more you learn about literature, the bigger Writer B will grow. He’s a bully, and he loves nothing more than to destroy everything that makes Writer A creative. It you allow this situation to fester, you will lose the ability to write completely.

As you start learning about...

Confronting the Challenges of Growth Week Day Two: When You're Getting Worse, Sometimes You're Really Getting Better

University is a terrible thing for a writer. Everyone who graduates has worse writing skills than they did when they signed up—or at least that’s what they think. There comes a time in every learner’s life when they know enough to know how many mistakes they’re making. The more you know, the more critical you are of your own work, and the more critical you are, the worse you think your writing is. If you’re getting worse and worse, maybe you’re actually getting better and better. ...

Black Hippy Chick Day: Mixed and Extended Metaphors

> All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.

That’s one of the most famous mixed metaphors in history, and you’ve probably never thought about it as such. It qualifies, though, because people don’t play on stages. They act or perform.

A mixed metaphor is an incongruous set of comparisons—Like cheese and strawberries, they just don’t belong together. If you’re a great satirist, you can use mixed metaphors in a comedic way, but it takes a lot o...

Why Mid-Scene Negotiations Matter

S was the kind of top who felt his way through power exchange one guess at a time. To him, my limits were just a guide. His instincts knew better, and so he crashed through my boundaries mid-scene as though they were just another object to dominate. I remember feeling myself screaming “no” but not finding the power to voice it. It was as though I’d shrunk to the size of a postage stamp and crawled into the centre of my body. I couldn’t push him away even though we never used rope or g...

Men tell you how much they value you. You just need to listen a little closer

I once had a relationship with a man who was so addicted to his technology that I would find myself repeatedly sitting at a figuratively empty table staring at a wall while he texted people who weren't there. So I left him.

I’ve never regretted that choice.

I’ve also left a man for flaking on me three times in three dates for no real reason.

I’ve never regretted that choice either.

I once stayed with someone who was perpetually late, flakey, and glued to his tech...

Why I Prefer Flaws in My Inbox

I receive enough stylish, stylised, polished Fetlife messages to create my own riveting anthology. The problem is they remind me of my college economics papers. My brain might be delighted at your awe-inspiring prose (how could it not be?) but the messages I respond to tend to go more like this:

“It made made ke cry.”

I don’t need the typos and auto correct fails. I don’t mind them either, but I’m hitting reply on that kind of emai...

We all love to break something that shatters into a hundred pieces, especially on the internet

Logging into Fetlife is like following the white rabbit down the hole into Wonderland. Not a hell of a lot makes sense there. I’ve seen some absurd scenarios play out here year upon year. Groups of people get whipped up into chaos every week, but every time it happens, I’ve seen the truth get knotted up into a tangle of mob justice.

It’s fun to raise people up. It’s fun to knock them down afterwards. It’s a distinctly human trait, in this day and age, to turn someone into an i...

Women Are Not Your Window Dressing

A couple of weeks ago, an internet stranger kindly informed me that I should take all the “ugly” stuff out of my album because it detracted from the pictures of my face. I told him I was primarily built out of personality traits, not skin and teeth, but this proved too complex a point for him to grok. He wasn’t the first, of course. Two years back, another internet stranger told me my new avatar was not to his liking and if I didn’t change it, he wouldn’t send me a friend request. I...

Writing Habits Week: Find Your Rituals

Every morning I wake up before the sun. I make coffee. I review the previous day’s work, and then I do some creative writing. My brain is primed for setting words down before anyone else is awake. Susan Sontag used to keep her mornings sacred, too. She read at night and wrote when she woke up. Everyone knew never to call her before lunch. E.B. White didn’t have the luxury. He lived in a bustling family home, so he said, “A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will d...

I'm Just a Sub With a Sense of Humour

The world of a brat is covered in unicorn colours and bedazzles. On this planet, dildos fly and the rain is made of glitter. We don’t take obedience too seriously ‘round here because we’re citizens of Irreverence, so if BDSM is your religion, you’ll have to travel outside these borders to find a church. Nobody will be treating dominance as sacred in these lands.

You could say I’m a kind of D/s atheist. Much as I love BDSM, I’ll never approach it with a straight ...

A Man Like That Is Hard To Find

D went with sex the way Mentos go with coke. You could almost see his bliss rising out of his body like foam. A man like that doesn’t even need to touch you. His feelings creep out of his pores and into your skin, and no pair of hands will ever feel as sublime. E’s bliss was more grit than fog, but it was equally visceral. There was no barrier between his brain and his sexuality. Most men hold something back as though sex is a secret you’re supposed to keep. Just click on any Pornhub cl...