SpanishRed

Writing Psychology Week Day Two: Don't Be One Writer. Be Four.

There are many kinds of writerly types in my brain:

The poet—She’s the one who feels and creates. She’s scruffy and emotional. She doesn’t use rational thought much at all.
The editor—She’s the one who thinks like a reader and can thus give readers what they want. She’s exceptionally good at jumping into other people’s skins.
The blogger—She’s the one with all the opinions.
The proofreader—She’s the one who knows things about Oxford commas.

I climb...

This Week, We're Looking at the Psychology of Writing

Most of you know I volunteer at a dog shelter so I work with traumatised dogs. Some are terrified of humans. Some have converted that trauma into aggression. Some bite. Some run. All of those problems can be cured in just one way.

When you walk into a kennel, don’t approach the dog. Don’t expect anything of the dog. Don’t even look at the dog. If the pooch allows you into its kennel, find a low spot. Sit down. Hang. Wait. The dog will almost always approach you*. Dogs are inherent...

Breaking Rules Day Five: Write Words, Write Words, Write Words

It’s the second day of NaNoWriMo month—the annual event that’s supposed to help novelists all over the world to overcome their compulsion to over-edit. The event requires you to produce a 50,000-word book in just a month. It breaks the task down to 1,600 words a day and demands you to produce that count no matter how awful your writing is that day. The process addresses two common causes of writer’s block: A compulsion to over-edit and an unwillingness to write unless you’re inspire...

The Kink Scene Butterfly Effect

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. You’d give him The Password, and if he thought you were sexy enough, he’d give you another pas...

Breaking Rules Week: Adjectivitis

New writers usually suffer from the disease of adjectivitis—a near fatal condition that kills their work in five seconds flat. Adjectives sound impressive, so try-hard writers often throw them all over the place like glitter. They’re not as sparkly as they might seem, though. They rarely give you a visual or emotive response. They tend to be abstract, vague, and distracting. Less is more, even in writing. Anything an adjective can do, a metaphor can do better. The best writing has immedia...

Black Hippie Chick Day: Thoughts on Publication

Many of you are already ready to publish, so it seemed a good topic to cover for Black Hippie Chick Day.

When I began writing, my mentor told me to hold off on publication. He said, given the terrible standards of poetry in those days, I would probably be accepted for publication if I tried, and that was the problem. It was intended as an insult, and it was a valid one. Did I really want to leave traces of my terrible work lying around for everyone to see in perpetuity? Well, nope, so I...

Breaking Rules Week Day Two: Sometimes Grammatical Mistakes Work Best

Emma Donoghue’s Room begins like this:

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.” “Through Skylight. You were all sad till I happened...

2024-10-29 12:14:05 +0000 UTC View Post

Kink Parties Versus Vanilla Parties

Last night I went to a kink party. I met a domly Arctic Explorer, a brat in spectacular braids, and an Uber Dominatrix in fishnets, who ‘splained the benefits of dying in a zombie apocalypse. If it had been a vanilla party, a Karen in florals would have ‘splained the benefits of voting for the Democratic Alliance and a Chad would have ‘splained the benefits of tampons over cups.

I also met a sub on a leash who spent the night doing her best rendition of Lee Holloway�...

Poetry Week Day Four: Expect Failure

Poetry is considered one of the highest art forms, second only to music. Its capacity to evoke universal emotions is rare and precious. It’s not easy to achieve that much power. The average poem consists of 170 words. That’s twice the length of this paragraph. Novelists get 80,000 words to make an impact, and poets only get a couple of hundred. That means every single word counts. Extraneous language must be removed. If a word isn’t performing several jobs at once, it’s probably not ...

2024-10-26 10:52:56 +0000 UTC View Post

  Fetlife is the perfect dating website because it’s not 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 wallpaper 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. That’s never been my thing.

I once spent three boring weeks on OkCupid before I forgot my password. By then, I’d realised that I needed my relationships to evolve organically. Shopping for romance among strangers mad...

Black Hippy Chick Day: How to Destroy Your Work Absolutely

Writers have two selves:

The writer (That’s the magical, mystical, inspired “you” who puts down the first draft.
The editor (That’s the anal, precise “you” who fixes that draft.

Your inner editor is hazardous to your inner writer, and your inner writer is hazardous to your inner editor. They each need their own rooms, but keeping them apart isn’t always easy to achieve. If you make a mistake and let one of them into the wrong room, you stand to lose some fantastic...

What Oral Sex Gurus Get Wrong About Clitorises

Last week, I read a how-to post about oral sex by a self-professed expert. He said the best way to manage this rare skill is by looking a woman in the eye while simultaneously giving her a rim job. You should then eat her out for three seconds, kiss her mouth, eat her out again, and give her yet another rim job. Then dance gangnam style while circling her clit and telling her how sexy she is. I’ve concluded that he’s an alien with two tongues, metre-long arms, an...

Poetry Week Day Two: Line Breaks Aren't as Easy as You Think

Conductors show the orchestra when they should play slowly, when they should stop, and when they should speed up. In poetry, we conduct “orchestras” too, and one of the ways we set the pace of reading is with line breaks.

If you write
Your words
On separate lines with breaks
It’s a
Poem. That’s
What they
S
A
y.

This is why
We
See so many pieces of prose
With line
Breaks.
Because line
Breaks
Make everything
A poem.

Even ...

How Kink Turned My Body into a Home

In my teens, sex was sticky and dripping in guilt. You’re not meant to have sex before marriage, you know, so here’s a poster of seven STIs, one teen pregnancy, and 50 million kinds of ruination. Here are 10 reasons you’re a slut.

When I became sexually legal, I was already in my first long term relationship with a man called Ash. We tried public sex. We tried Five Awesome Sex Positions You Won’t Believe are True. We played with ice and porn and The Godawful 69™. ...

It's Poetry Week!

During Sylvia Plath’s first pregnancy, she described the child in her uterus to have “feet to the stars, and moon-skulled […] Snug as a bud and at home like a sprat in a pickle jug.” With that beautifully-handled language, it’s impossible not to visualise her unborn child floating upside down in the dark. It’s also impossible to miss the affection of her mother.

The poem, called “You’re,” is probably the most superb list of similes and metaphors that has ever existed.<...

Why I Removed the "Looking For" Tab on My Profile

On Fetlife, everyone is looking for something or someone. The mindset is so integral to our online existence that it’s carved into our profiles with a carving knife under the “general info” tab. We’re supposed to be looking for subs or doms or friends or mentors. Isn’t that why this site exists?

Me? I’m just looking for the perfect slice of bacon and maybe a little world peace.

I receive a lot of mail from interesting people, and...

Authenticity Week Day Five: Seeing

When I was a little girl, my grandmother pointed at a wall and asked me what colour it was. I was a smart seven-year-old, so I naturally said white. She was an artist, though, and she’d spent a lifetime looking at the world as it really is. She pointed to the greys and blues in the shadows. She pointed to the smudged ochre dirt and the pewter in the cracks. She said I wouldn’t find a single stitch of white on that wall, even though it was coated in ivory paint.

Writers must engage i...

It's Authenticity Week! This Week, We're Writing Colours

Every year at around this time, I develop an ungodly craving for oranges and lemons. I don’t know what to tell you. I crave orange juice in the spring, but I want the unadulterated type. It must not be watered down by deflavoured grape juice. It mustn’t have the cells removed. It mustn’t be diluted with water.

The best orange juice contains nothing but oranges.

This isn’t an easy thing to find in a supermarket. Most people want almost-orange juice that’s sugared and wate...

Consent is not a series of noes. It’s the safety that gives us the freedom to say yes.

Consent can seem like a restrictive thing in theory. If we laid out all our “don’ts” and “should nots” end to end, they’d make it around The Citadel 50 times: Don’t negotiate mid-scene. Never ignore a hard limit. Don’t mistake an alcoholic “yes” for a sober one. Never involve yourself in other people’s scenes without an explicit invitation. Ad infinitum.

But the truth of consent is not in what we remove from the kink pile, but how much we leave on it. ...

Coping with Rejection

When I began attending my mentor’s workshop, one of my favourite writers there was a man called Roy. He earned his literature degree, then spent years writing a book of fiction. He threw himself into the writing scene and became one of the city’s most prominent mentors. We spent two years workshopping that book. Every Monday night for almost 700 days, we sat down to a new and brilliant instalment.

As he finished the book, he ran creativity workshops. He published poems. He made webs...

Masochism is Like Learning to Fly

Before I was old enough to fill out a bra, gymnastics was my favourite sport. I couldn’t balance on a beam or vault over a pommel horse, but oh, I could fly. I was a natural tumbler. When someone is guiding you through the air, pain is a necessary evil, so I always went home after class covered in bruises. You can’t learn to fly unless you’re willing to fall, to hurt, to cry.

I fell. I fell until I was no longer afraid, and that's when I truly became airborne.

&...

BlackHippyChick Day: Write What You Know

The first thing your English teacher probably taught you about writing in high school is “write what you know.” It’s an adage that you’ll return to no matter how far you evolve or how much you grow. Neil Gaiman said it best when he said, “Start telling the stories that only you can tell, because there’ll always be better writers than you. There will always be people who are much better at doing this or doing that—but you are the only you.”

Gaiman has become one of the mo...

Storytelling Week Day Three: Writing Nonsense

In Alice in Wonderland, eating can make you grow and drinking can make you shrink. Caterpillars can smoke hookah pipes and little girls can float through keyholes. Welcome to the world of surrealism, where only the writer’s own rules apply. There is no reason at all for your fiction to resemble reality. Sometimes, you can teach larger lessons and explore more truth in a magical realm.

Literary types have developed all kinds of theories about Alice. Some say the rabbit hole is a birth ...

Storytelling Week Day Two: Symbolism

Snow-White and the Seven Dwarves is one of the most famous pieces of folklore in human history. It’s been sanitised, animated, and turned into poems. It’s even been turned into a few horror movies. What are the reasons for its longevity? Let’s find out.

The Grimms’ fairy tale describes the corrosive effects of jealousy, pitting dark against light and good against evil. The original tale tells us that innocence always wins in the end and that jealousy is a destructive force. In t...

It's Storytelling Week with The Brothers Grimm!

In 1811, there was no Cinderella, no Snow White, and no Red Riding Hood. In 1811, poison apples and magic mirrors did not exist. No princes had gone out to find feet that fit in glass slippers. No stepmothers had tried to murder beautiful girls, and no dwarves had rescued them. Can you imagine a world without a Cinderella? I can’t.

The Brothers Grimm published their first book of fairy tales the following year, and they were so compelling they became an intrinsic part of our lives for...

It’s amazing how effectively one person can alter a subculture.

When I created this profile back in 2014, being a good sub meant melting into a subservient puddle of jelly at the sight of a dom in a black T-shirt. Good subs were masters of pain. They always obeyed, usually while kneeling. If you weren’t an Uber Masochist who spoke in S/slashy S/speak, you were obviously a switch in disguise <ptuey>. Switches were the Fetlife equivalent of litter runts, so we used to talk an awful lot about topping from the bottom.

We’ve come a l...

Muse Week Day Five: Finding a Thousand Muses

My favourite uncle started writing at the tender age of 75. Before I’d read his work, I expected to see what I usually see in these scenarios: Excruciating writing laden in typos but, incredibly, he took to writing like Reds to cupcakes.

Asshole.

It happens, but it’s rare. Writing is one of the most popular life goals I’ve ever encountered. Everyone has a book in them. That’s what they say, but few really know how to write it. Just because you can set words to paper, doesn...

BlackHippyChick Day: Tone

One of the most famous passages in literary history goes like this:

“O Romeo, Romeo, my dude, wherefore art thou, bloodyhell?
Deny thy father, and refuse thy name, like, please, guy.
Or if thou wilt not, be but sworn my love!
And I’ll no longer be a Capulet. Like, seriously, fuck Capulets.
‘Tis but thy name that is my enemy, you sexy beast. Mmmm!
Thou art thyself, though not a Montague.
What the fuck is Montague?””

That is how it goes, right? Well, no. ...

Meeting Our Muses Day Three: Honour Your Inner Muse

As a writer, I've always been taught to say the hard things: those that make the blood rush out of my head. For writing to change lives, you have to dig into the viscera of your rawest self where the blood lives. I'm not suggesting we all manage to achieve that much. That's a job for the legends. The rest of us can only try, and we do try because we believe in the power of the written word to connect people and make the world less isolating.

In the Sixties, two women sat d...

A Sort-of-Subly-Mostly-Masochistic-Occasionally-Slavish-Oddball.

BDSM is not poly or monogamish or monogamous; not sadomasochism, age play, or mind games. BDSM is not rope, not fire, not wax or toys or degradation; not total power exchange, subservience or chastity. BDSM is what you and your partners want it to be.

As long as your lifestyle doesn’t harm or prescribe to others, you’re allowed to define your own dynamic. If you want to build BDSM out of one serving of sadomasochism and 70 servings of vanilla sex, I have news for you....