SpanishRed

If Trans People Were Lawyers

Hello, stranger. I heard you’ve been telling people you’re a lawyer.

That’s right.

I don’t agree with you using that label to describe yourself. I’d like you to call yourself a doctor instead.

But I’m not a doctor. I’m a lawyer.

I disagree, and it upsets me to know you’re wandering the world calling yourself one.

I went to law school. I passed the bar. And now I defend people in court every day. That makes me a lawyer. 2025-02-05 11:26:58 +0000 UTC View Post

Black Hippy Chick Day: When Punctuation is a Democracy

Last week we discussed the idea that commas are a democracy. You choose them on the basis of your pacing and clarity. Commas are often a matter of taste and of poetry. Periods can be a democracy, too. In poetry, omitting a period where one is needed can have a powerful effect. You can speed up your poem by placing sentences together without full stops. You can omit them entirely and rely on line breaks instead. Hell, I often use them incorrectly in my satire because pacing is as important in ...

It’s Ted Hughes Week <And We Shiver In Fear>

Ted Hughes hated the idea of religion in poetry. He said to include religion was to set limits on its relevance to readers. How universal is a piece of literature if it only appeals to Christians or Mormons? Still, Hughes was fascinated by power that fell beyond the limits of humanness. He called it “the elemental power circuit of the universe,” and he managed to communicate it by inventing his own mythology.

You could say he spoke about god without speaking about god. Here is an ex...

My Favourite Dating Website Isn't a Dating Website

I’ve never used Tinder because I don’t have it in me to swipe through photographs as though I’m shopping for wall paper on eBay. I have a friend who’s harnessed the site for what it was first intended: to find sex right now, at the bar on the corner, but only if she’s blonde and waxes religiously. That’s never been my thing, much as I wish it was.

I once spent three boring weeks on OkCupid before I forgot my password. By then, I’d realised that I needed my rel...

Fuck Gary Chapman. Those Are Not My Languages

I don’t know which buttons got switched when they took me out the box, but I don’t interpret romance the same as most. Sadomasochism is starlight and roses on my planet. I’d rather be dragged to a public bathroom with bruises in the back of my throat than to a white tablecloth establishment with flowers on my wrist. (They still do that in vanilla land, right?)

They say there are five love languages, but they forgot about people like me. There’s a scene in (trigger w...

Hemingway Week Day Two: The Modernistic Renaissance

Hemingway was the leader of the modernistic Renaissance when writers discovered the power of realism. I love the movement more than just about any other, so I’ve spent many years trying to learn how to remove myself from my fiction and poetry so the story could feel real to others. For those of you who speak to me one-on-one, you might have noticed that when I recommend a book, it’s one that keeps the rules of that era. I like my fiction and poetry to be utterly immersive, sparse, and unp...

Hemingway Week: It's Not About What You Write, but What You Leave Out

“All you have to do is write one true sentence.” -Hemingway

This is probably Hemingway’s most famous quotation. The agony of his writing experience is wrapped up in those 10 meagre words. Don’t misconstrue him. The sentence is wry and sarcastic. It’s hard to write one true sentence. Some writers go through their entire lives never having reached that goal, so our dearest Ernie spent his entire life trying to wrestle down the idea of “truth.”

...

When Dominants Want to Help You Grow: An Adjunct to Today's Fetlife Post

Every long-term relationship I’ve had has helped me grow, especially the one with my first dom. By accepting all the shame I brought to his door, he helped me to get in touch with my sexuality for the first time in my life. His unconditional love was like years of therapy, just as mine was to him. Every long-term relationship I’ve had has helped my partners to grow, too. This is what love does: it enriches the soil for dominants and for subs. It can’t not—No...

Hemingway Week: Stop Writing Before Your Battery is Completely Discharged

If you discharge the entire battery in your car, it’s rendered useless. It will never hold a charge again. You always need to make sure you have a little life in there. So it is with writing. Writers have little batteries that are prone to running out. You’ve got to make sure you always leave a little charge behind. That’s why Hemingway said, “The most important thing I’ve learned about writing is never write too much at a time… Never pump yourself dry. Leave a little for the next...

Inspiration Day Two: Having New Adventures

Hemingway hunted, fought in wars, and spent time in bullrings, so his books were full of grand adventures.

Anne Sexton wrote about a different kind of war. Her struggle was against mental illness. She lived a life of domesticity as women in the Fifties were wont to do. Both perspectives dominated her life, so that’s where her poetry came from.

Ted Hughes was an academic, so he wrote both about academia and tried new literary tools. He also had children, so he wrote some of the b...

What If You See Your Dad At a Kink Event?

So you’re new to BDSM and when you hear the words “Kink Event,” Jaws music plays. What if you see your dad in a corner getting ball-punched by a leather man? What if your boss finds out you’re into rope? What if you find out BDSM isn’t really for you? You’re not really all that kinky, so you wouldn’t fit in. Kink isn’t all that important to you, anyway. You’re just here to get your cock sucked.

Or to make friends.

Or find s...

Why You Can't Get Laid on Fetlife

The most popular search term for my blog is “How to get laid on Fetlife.” That leads the humble dudebro to a post I wrote about why Fet’s women hate being treated like products at a meat market. And if you scroll a little further, you’ll find a bunch of dudebros who are stewing in their own resentment because we women haven’t been fucking them senseless in response to their How R U messages. The fact that they aren’t getting laid is The Wimmenz fault because replying to every soli...

Personality Week Day Six: The Unexamined Life Is Not Worth Writing About

Last week we covered the character traits required to write well. I’m not even close to covering everything crawling around in my brain, so I’m extending the theme for another week. We’re starting with an excerpt from J.M. Coetzee’s Nobel Prize-winning novel, Disgrace.

“He notices one of his students on the path ahead of him. Her name is Melanie Isaacs, from his Romantics course. […] She is dawdling; he soon catches up with her. 'Hello,' he says. […] He is mild...

2025-01-20 08:20:03 +0000 UTC View Post

Just a Special Snowflake Sub

In my lifetime, I’ve floated from sub to bottom to slave to slut to brat. This has brought me to who I am today: a devolved knot of confusion unable to stick a single label on myself. I’ve erased the orientation from my profile and became a vague and noncommittal “bottom”. My fetish list is a mess of comic kinks because my true fetishes are too fluid to list. They evolve with every partner. I can’t meet you with a head full of emptiness and surrender if I’m dictating how we play. ...

Orlando and his sticks

Suicidal Ideation isn't a Lone Sniper From Up High

Suicide doesn’t sneak up on you like a sniper, alone and without warning from some secret place up high. If it did, it probably wouldn’t be one of the top three leading causes of death worldwide. People who succumb to it are stronger than you think.

No. Suicide ambushes you from the flanks with hundreds of armed units in tow. It has its own kind of intersectionality. For me, it began with rape a full decade before I finally decided to die. Rape gave way to anorexia. I k...

Black Hippy Chick Day: Abstractions

lake Once wrote:

“Pity would be no more,
If we did not make somebody Poor;
And Mercy no more could be,
If all were as happy as we;
And mutual fear brings peace;
Till the selfish loves increase.
Then Cruelty knits a snare,
And spreads his baits with care.”

I don’t know about you, but I was only affected by the poem when cruelty began knitting a snare. The lines that precede it are a stampede of abstractions that require rational thought. I don’t see the...

Character Week: Pride is a giant wall keeping the bad writers out

I request feedback from a host of different critics. Some are writers themselves. Some are simply good readers. Others are aliterate and rarely interested in reading any damned thing, let alone my damned thing. And do you know what? Those aliterate readers have often identified serious problems in my work. The more you gather feedback, the more you learn that even the least evolved book nerds can spot problems accurately.

Nobody will ever be able to teach you to write. This is not a ski...

Georgie learning recall!

Georgie boy bonus pic!

Georgie

A few months ago, Georgie couldn't be trusted in a small kennel. Here he's off-leash in a public dog park. He comes when called. He drops and waits when dogs approach him. He's come so far. Good boi. Boop.

Zoomies in the Tears park!

Motivation Week Day Four: Verse isn't Poetry. You Can Write It 24/7

My mentor used to tell me he wasn’t a poet. He just knew enough about poetry to fake it. I disagree. I think he achieved greatness many times in his life, but he defined the difference by teaching us that verse and poetry are two different things.

Verse is a set of metrical units. Anyone can write it. All you need to do is obey the rules.

Poetry, on the other hand, is a kind of greatness. It’s inspired and viscerally alters the way another person sees the world.

Lionel u...

The Trouble with Self-Titled Mentorship

The scene has a playpen the size of a rugby field full of self-titled masters who have been involved in BDSM since they were yea high to a cricket. Yep, when you were in primary school, a fifth of your class was already whipping subs. They wrote the BDSM textbook at the tender age of four, then mastered shibari in a monastery at the top of Mount Olympus at the age of 11. Every single one of them expects instant, no-limits, protocol-rich submission.

They speak a lot about th...

On Shuffling Off Floofy Coils

I was digging around my post archives and this surfaced from years ago. I thought it might be worth reposting.

Bobby Dog shuffled off his floofy coil on Saturday. He was the best doggo I'd ever met—my four-legged soulmate and favourite friend. Yesterday, a friend and I did Bobbalicious' favourite walk together: the estuary he used to race through as though he had wings.

I've never been good with death, but when my mentor died 20 years ago, he left us a lesson about grief. He sai...

Black Hippy Chick Day: Proofing Your Work

I have a friend who’s a maddeningly exceptional proofreader. She’s actually in IT, and yet she’s a better proofreader than I am. Even worse, she knows more than I do. This is an obvious injustice, but the world isn’t fair. Every morning, she gives me a list of syntax errors and typos from my daily post (with permission of course). She’s taught me a great deal.

I usually proofread my posts approximately five million times after I post them. It’s never enough, though. She almo...

How Smut Was Created: A Bible Story

This is the account of porn when it was created.

Now no decent porn had yet appeared on the earth, and no gangbangs had sprung up, for the lord god had forgotten to create smut directors. Then he formed them from velvet cigarette pants and leopard print overcoats so that he’d get a ton of awesome smut to watch on his new OLED screen. And there was evening, and there was morning—the first day.

The lord took all the new cameramen, fluffers, and moviemakers he had created to the ...

Failure Week: Circumlocutions

Authenticity made my mentor who he was, and it was one of his most important lessons. He railed against overcomplicated words and prose constantly. He’d write rants to the newspaper every week. I earned much of his mentorship by cutting out all those letters because he had cerebral palsy and couldn’t do it himself. That means I read an awful lot of irritation about pseudointellectuals. He hated what Generation X was doing to writing. He hated the pretentiousness and the cliches. Most of a...

It's Not Ink That Produces Writing. It's Thinking.

Christopher Hitchens used to say nobody could live a vibrant inner life without constantly inhaling books—a habit that he maintained his entire life. Writers must live vibrant inner lives if we’re to feel motivated to write. Hitchens wrote for four decades. In addition to his work for some of the best media companies in the world, he wrote around 30 exceptionally sharp books. Who better to go to for writing advice than him?

One of the things you’ll notice about Hitchens is that hi...

It's Motivation Week!

A blank page can be a heavy thing, especially if you’re as uninspired as a Mills and Boon novel. The sheer nothingness of it will stare you down until you hit that “X”. Maybe today isn’t the right day to write, so you might as well not bother. A blank page has a way of instilling fear, but where does that feeling come from?

Self-doubt has a lot to do with it. You can never be quite sure you’ll come up with worthwhile words until you’re halfway through. An unwritten first lin...