Winter Wonders

As I mentioned before, Paul is in England until February, leaving me woefully unsupervised. In lieu of running through the neighborhood stealing cars and chopping down trees (which is what he always says will happen if he doesn't impose rules, structure and discipline in my life) I decided to head to the East Coast (from whence I originally came) to visit friends and family and to do some shooting with producers local to there. If you're located in within driving distance from central New Jersey or within public transit distance from NYC and want to do a session before January 6th, I have limited availability left before I leave. Email alexinspankingland@gmail.com and we'll see if we can set something up. 

I left for New York on the evening of the 11th, and had quite the adventure in not sleeping: I had an overnight flight, but had to leave my house in the valley at 9:00 to drive to Rafa and Zeki's place downtown, since they're using my car while I'm gone. Rafa then took me to LAX and I did all of the usual airport business, getting on my flight around midnight. I had a layover around 8 AM, Eastern Time, at which point I had not slept. I then got on another flight around 1:00, which got me to NY around 3:00. I went directly from the airport to my first shoot: I don't actually have the link to the site at the moment, but I'll update this post when I do, but it was delightfully dark and edgy, including limp/sleepy/chloroform fetish. I was remarkably not dead of actually sleepiness at this point, and I stayed awake even though a lot of the shoot involved me lying around pretending to be asleep! When we finished, they brought me back to the train station and I went up to stay with a vanilla friend in the city. We had to take some time to catch up, of course, but when we headed into her room to go to sleep, we discovered that the heat was broken.

Now, some people can survive when they're cold. I'm not one of those people. Being cold is a huge deal to me, and it was about 7F outside. My friend's room was cold enough that we saw our breath indoors. She didn't have tons of blankets, either, so I just sat up on her air mattress with my coat on and a blanket around me and shivered for most of the night. I didn't really sleep, because I couldn't relax in the cold. The next morning I got up and had the hottest shower I could stand. I was quite warmed up by it, and we went out and bought a space heater since the landlord "wasn't sure" when he could have the heat fixed. Oh dear. 0_0 The space heater was very effective, though! As soon as it got warm, I wanted to crawl into bed and take a nap, but it was time to get ready to visit Kelly Payne for my next shoot for her site, Tantrum Trainers. I'll hopefully have photos from that the next time that I post. In the meantime, here's Miss Payne looking sexy as all hell as she takes me to task:

I really enjoyed being over this lap. :) 

That shoot was very laid back and a lot of fun. I get along really well with Kelly, and I certainly consider her one of my friends. We chatted a bit and caught up before we did our scene. It was very long and quite hard, plus it was all done over the knee. I'm wearing some shimmery stockings. This made me very happy. Kelly spanked me so hard for so long with her hand that she actually got a blood blister during the shoot. Fortunately, she had a paddle nearby to switch to nearby. That paddle stung crazily. The hand-spanking had been long and thorough, and it had sort of mesmerized me. My whole existence was hot and swollen as smack after smack fell on my bottom. The paddling cut through that, making each swat a strong peak of sensation. I was actually thinking about this while I was being spanked, at first, before it overwhelmed me: I was imagining making meringue, and watching as "stiff peaks form" as the recipe describes it. I felt like such peaks of sensation and pain were forming for me. Eventually, though, everything blurred together as I reached the point of being overwhelmed (in a good way, of course). I started to cry and to apologize and, near the end, started to have trouble talking. You know a video has actually pushed me when I start insisting that I can't talk anymore near the end of it (or, in the case of this more severe video, quite early on in the spanking!).

Erica made a post a little while ago about not being able to articulate what happens in her mind during a spanking. I have the same experience. Once it reaches a certain point, it overwhelms my brain's ability to break sensation down and put it into language. One minute I'm interpreting my spanking through a visual metaphor relating to pie-making, the next, there are no words. It's just... there. Everything in my mind is the spanking and it exists in a place which, despite my efforts, I can't reach to describe with language. This is something which commonly happens to me in my "real life" play (it's pretty normal for Paul to try to talk to me while cuddling me after a scene and for me to insist that I "can't brain") but only happens on film every now and again, so it was kind of exciting.

Finally, on Friday night I headed back to my friend's house and went to sleep, after having been awake since Tuesday morning! Following this, I did some more hanging out and had a series of other traveling related hassles (as tends to happens to me: in addition to a last name, I share the characteristic with Malcolm Reynolds that "things don't go smooth.") Eventually, I made my way to Sarah Gregory's house in Connecticut. She and her submissive J_Dogg picked me up from the train station and we went to go pick out a Christmas tree for her house. I'm glad that I got to do this with her, since I didn't have a tree at home before I left. As I mentioned in my last post, my family isn't really fully celebrating Christmas this year since we're just trying to get set up in my mom's new place following losing our house in Hurricane Sandy, so we're not having a Christmas tree there, either. Last year, I had an adorable, tiny Christmas tree (Malignus allowed my friends to give me one decoration each and this was all he'd permit me to hang up, so a thoughtful friend made her one ornament a little, live tree, complete with lights already on it!) and I stayed in South Dakota for Christmas. The year before, my family didn't have a real Christmas celebration because instead we were doing my brother's memorial service. So, decorating the tree with Sarah was the first time I'd done a full sized Christmas tree since 2010, and it was very refreshing to do so! So much so that I put tinsel all over myself:

Chriiiiiiistmassssss, bitches! 

The tree turned out wonderfully, and Sarah and I got to spend lots of girly time talking and hanging out. The next day, we woke up to find out that the world had been covered in snow (and by "the world" I mean "Sarah's town" because it was recently brought to my attention that my common use of hyperbole is "awful"). We got dressed up in snow gear to go outside and have a little frolic. For me, "snow gear" meant wearing tights under my skirt and over my knee socks, boots which Sarah had been so kind as to give me since I had none, my new coat and big, pink bow. And braids. Braids are an important part of being in the snow.

Sarah took some photos of me playing outside, and I was really blown away with them. She's a very good photographer!

Such winter. Wow. What snow. 

Frolics! 

Oh hai from both of us! :)

The roads were not exactly great that night, and I think most people stayed in their houses, but Sarah and I really needed to get out and do something exciting. Sarah took a shower right before we went out, though, and put her hair up in a wet bun. While she was cleaning off her car, it froze. I poked at it a bunch and it was just... a haircicle. Yiiiiiikes. Soon, we were safely on our way (with Sarah driving very carefully). We went to eat at a Southwestern place which Sarah likes a lot called Mo's. I'd never had it before, but we had a nice meal there, and I may or may not have abused the fact that you can add flavoring to your soda there. Cherry vanilla lime raspberry coke is actually not as good as it sounds. After dinner, we went to the local mall and got tickets to watch The Hunger Games: Catching Fire, which neither of us had seen yet. We were a bit early as we'd overestimated the amount of time it might take to get to the mall in the snow, so we did a bit of shopping, getting lots of bows and some other cute stuff. We both enjoyed the movie, and we got home safely afterwards where we continued do more girly talking until it was pretty late. We were doing a shoot the next day, so we had to go to bed.

The next morning, Robert Shore (CTPhotographer) came over so we could do our shoot. We filmed a Christmas special which is currently running on Sarah Gregory Spanking called "Not What She Wished For." In this film, I play a naughty little girl who sneaks down to the Christmas tree to start opening presents without waiting for the rest of her family. When Robert catches me, he scolds me and then turns me over his lap for a spanking, right in front of the tree. I wore some cute pajamas and pigtails and made quite a fuss about getting spanked on Christmas. Originally, I thought that the idea of getting spanked on a holiday was a bit dark, but the scene came out to be very sweet and cute, actually. I played my character as being greatly in need of a spanking, Christmas or not. It was the first time that Robert ever spanked me, but we had great chemistry on camera, I think.

I'm hiding the present I was opening behind my back and pretending to be innocent, but I'm somewhat delighted with my own mischief and can't help but smile. I feel that this is a face that Paul probably sees from me on a pretty regular basis at home!

It's Christmas! Who gets spanked on Christmas!? Soooo unfair!

Handprint!

That evening, I left to go back to NY, as I had a session the next day. I'm glad that Sarah and I finally got to spend some time together, and I feel that we really connected. I'm looking forward to doing more fun stuff with her in the near future! :D♥

A New Project and Some... Changes?

Hi hi hi!
So, today I was made aware that apparently I wasn't just getting the aforementioned spanking for not having been keeping up with blogging, but instead, a "severe beating." Um... *nervous lip biting* back to our regularly scheduled posting and let's all forget about this incident? Does that sound good to you? Sounds good to me. ^_^

Anyway, I have exciting news to share :D

Over the past couple of months, Paul and I have been working on a project together. I really like filming videos with him: this was, after all, our original interaction, and there's nothing better than watching the dynamics between real partners on film. We obviously sometimes film together for Northern Spanking and we've done scenes for other sites but, once we moved in together, we wanted to start doing more scenes with just the two of us, and doing them in a more low-key, natural, domestic setting. We wanted to capture the energy of our household and our relationship and to explore many of the various facets there in. I wanted to be able to say "Haha, that would be a funny video, grab the camera and let's do it RIGHT NOW!" We wanted things that were naturally occurring instead of being pre-designed. We wanted to be able to sometimes do scenes that weren't necessarily spanking scenes. It was obvious that this content needed its own home on the internet.

We spent a while trying to come up with the name of our future site. Most of this time was spent with Paul asking me what I thought would be a good idea and me saying "I don't know, I can't think of anything." I'm horrible at naming things. I felt impossibly clever when I came up with "Alex in Spankingland" (although it required encouragement from my friend Sophie to convince me that it seemed good to others instead of just me). If I hadn't happened upon it, this blog would probably just be called "Spanking Alex." Not very creative.

Paul was the one who came up with the name for new project: Kitchen Sink Spanking. The name derives from a genre of film, television and theater which was popular in the 1950's and 60's in England known as "kitchen sink realism." This genre attempted to create stories which were depictions of the dramas, interpersonal relationships, highs and lows of the daily life of regular people, and were set in apartments or houses, often centering around the kitchen instead of requiring the creation of fancy sets. I think that this fits perfectly with the essence that we were trying to capture.

Everything that we've filmed thus far has been in our own home, and we do it with just the two of us there. As such, the camera sits on a tripod and we don't use a lot of equipment. As such, the films have a very different feel than the formal shoots that we do, but it's actually very enjoyable. I find them to be delightfully voyeuristic.

Are the films simply snippets from our every day life? Not exactly. I make no claims that these videos occurred naturally, or that they're "reality porn." We certainly don't just set a camera up and go about our daily lives and then edit it down to the parts that include spanking. The clips vary in verisimilitude: some are more fun and allow me to engage in fun-for-everyone whining, foot stamping and petulance (this is fun for everyone... right?!). A couple are quite serious. I like this variety. The first film is a cute story about me being first introduced to a new DD relationship, complete with a lot of the aforementioned protestation and a hairbrush spanking. It's the first one we filmed, and we had a lot of fun doing it. The second film follows the same story, but in addition to my getting spanked it includes me getting smacked with a kitchen implement on both the fronts and backs of my thighs. This was entirely unscripted. I was surprised by how the scene had become spontaneously worse. :P The third, still following the same tale, gives rise to this adorable sadface:

There's one which is goddamn adorable and simply a replay of a scene which actually happened, in which I went to Zeki's house, made cookies with her and returned with only the tale of how good they were for Paul, who was clearly in need of biscuits. Justice was served instead:
]

As we went on making the videos, we started making upskirt films, which I find delightfully naughty and which excite my exhibitionist streak. There are a couple of harder scenes, and then there's something... different. Over the course of the past eighteen months, my relationship between sexuality and kink has been developing quite a bit. While I previously described these drives as being separate and parallel, as I grew more comfortable with myself and began to have partners who were both involved in my kink life and my sex life, this division slowly began to breakdown. There's a LOT of writing to be done about this, but 2:00 AM while seated on Sarah Gregory's couch is neither the time nor place to attempt to tackle this topic. Suffice to say, I've begun to enjoy certain combinations of these activities. As such, I decided that I wanted to make my first blatantly sexually charged video. The video is actually quite intense: it's a disciplinary caning which has a lot of energy, and which stirs up a lot of emotion in me. My bottom was already sore when we filmed this, and the strokes are hard. I cry and wail and get rather pathetic. Throughout the entire scene, though, I was very... er... aroused (and I'm very embarrassed to admit this!) and once my punishment was complete, I went to my room to fix this condition in myself. I must admit, I haven't watched it (it makes me feel very awkward to think about doing so!), but it's my only masturbation film out there, and it's entirely genuine. Curious? Feel free to check it out, and I'll have more writing about sexy-kink times later.

I do have this deep fear that people will be upset about this change in me, but it was no longer genuine to perpetuate the idea that there are no longer situations where spanking is sexual for me. I hope you all still like me, even though I no longer have a hardline stance on this issue. :)


I hope you consider checking out the site, as I'm quite pleased with the results myself!
Now, it's off to the bath, and then some glorious sleep! ♥

Gratitude

It's been a little while since I posted: long enough, in fact, that I've earned myself a spanking. Maybe I'll film it and post it here. That would be fair, wouldn't it?  It was my intention to do a Thanksgiving post, but holiday posts are always difficult for me because I am busy celebrating and don't want to tear myself away from festivities to sit in my office and write something. This post, however, got significantly away from me because I've been keeping myself as busy as humanly possible recently, although half of it has been with epically fun things. But I've started this, so dammit, I'm going to finish it!

Thanksgiving this year was significant for a fistful of reasons. For one, it was Paul's first Thanksgiving ever, which made it special! It was also our first real holiday together as a couple: we were together on Halloween but I had a horrible ear infection (I know, adults don't usually get those. Read what you will about me from this, I guess) and we had to spend the night quietly at home. Finally, Thanksgiving was the last day before Paul left to go back to England for a couple of months: he's gone until February. As such, it was important that we spend lots of positive time together before he left!

Our Thanksgiving was certainly a bit non-traditional. It was our original intention to go to my mom's house for the holiday, but since Paul had to leave the next day, that was already sort of in question. Then my mom fell and broke her hip, and she's been in a recovery facility ever since so she didn't want to have a bunch of people visiting. My mom and I have had a difficult relationship over the years, but it's been much better recently. That said, she's had an awful few years. Two years ago last month, my oldest brother passed away from AIDS. Last October, my family home was swept out to sea in Hurricane Sandy and we lost pretty much everything. My mom was displaced and living with friends for over a year. Just as she was getting ready to move into her new house, she fell and broke her hip. Add on top of this the fact that she has Lupus, and it's remarkable she makes it through the days. Anyway, I decided to go visit her in a more low-key environment later because that worked out much better for everyone. So, on Thanksgiving, Paul was not introduced to the madness of my extended family which meant that no one got ridiculously drunk, no one tried to sell us Avon products, there were no pregnant teenagers, everyone was properly showered, we had one pie instead of eight, nothing was cooked in a coffee can and all persons at the dinner table believed that the Earth rotates around the Sun.

It also meant that we could just be ourselves, and do things the way we pleased to instead of the way we were "supposed to." This meant that before I even started cooking dinner on Thanksgiving, I had a Final Exam. This started months ago, during our trip to Colorado, with a book about Bears. I'm obsessed with bears. Obsesssssssssssssssssed. I just think that they're the cutest animal ever. The fact that I visited a bear park on multiple occasions and even got to pet an infant bear cub has only increased my excessive fondness. When we were staying in the mountains, it was my greatest hope that I would encounter a bear (at a safe distance, of course). We never did, although we did see some adorable wild elk with fuzzy, velvety antlers and a couple of gophers/woodchucks/groundhogs/generic small chumbly creatures. In place of a real life bear encounter, Paul bought me a book full of delightful bear photographs and chock full of important facts about my favorite fuzzy friends. When we were apart, I found myself reading it as I fell asleep and remembering our trip together, and soon my trivial and useless bear knowledge was getting excessive. Did you know that baby Black Bears (Ursus americanus) cubs spend up to 60% of their time in trees, and often nap or sleep up there? That some subspecies of the Brown Bear (Ursus arctus) include the Grizzly Bear and the Kodiak Bear? That the darkness of a North American bear's fur is in direct proportion to the dampness of the climate in which it lives? I was probably insufferable if I got started talking about this. One day, a friend came to visit and brought up the fact that bears can climb trees (HE brought it up!) and I had to sit on my hands and force myself not to turn the next hour into Bearfacts o'clock.

So, it was decided (probably mostly by me, to be honest) that I should have an exam about bears. It would combine my never ending desire to play school with my new found obsession. Paul wrote the test and I studied, taking 12 pages of handwritten notes to review from. On Thanksgiving, I did a last minute cram before I donned a school uniform, got out my pencil case and sat at the kitchen table to write the exam:

I'm wearing a tie. This makes me fancy. 

Once I had completed a page of short answer questions and written a two page essay about the process of hibernation, Paul took my paper into his study to grade. Giddy from the fun I had with this sort of play, I then put an apron on (yes, right over my uniform!) and started to make dinner. Since there were only two of us, we ended up having a roast chicken instead of a turkey, but I made it with (what I consider) traditional breadcrumb stuffing. I also made mashed potatoes, carrots, corn bread and a from scratch apple pie. It was a feast for the two of us, and everything turned out wonderfully.

As I cooked, in the kitchen of my sweet little house, feeling happy and healthy and safe, I was very aware of how much I had to be grateful for. I live in a place which truly feels like my home and I spend my time with people who love me and with whom I can be myself completely. I have a job which I adore and which allows me to do the things I'm most passionate about while meeting and getting to know lots of new people. The weather is so warm that in November, I was still constantly getting scolded for walking outside without putting on shoes. I have my cats, and they're adorable and make me happy. I'm in love with someone who loves me back, and who values and respects me and who instead of saying "Stop being so weird, Alex?" takes delight in the things that make me giddy and writes me exams about bears.

In a certain way, all this was bittersweet because the next afternoon, Paul would be leaving for 2+ months, and I certainly had the impulse to be a mopey moper about it, but I kept myself focused on the fact that my life was beyond what had been my wildest dreams and I'm glad for these things. Dinner was lovely, and afterwards, we snuggled for a long time while we digested. Later that evening, it was time for the Spanksgiving part of Thanksgiving. :) By then, my feelings had built up quite a bit, and I felt delicate and vulnerable. It had been Paul's original intention to have an intense and severe scene that night, addressing some of the issues that had remained written in my book and for which I had yet to be punished. I felt nervous and apprehensive about this, and I guess it showed in my reactions to things, because before I had a chance to bring up how I was feeling, Paul asked me if I still wanted to do a scene.

My initial response was "No, I feel too vulnerable." This was accompanied by a lot of feelings. Sometimes, submission can be horribly confusing, despite all the time I've spent ruminating about it. On one level, I want my Dominant to make the choices about what happens. I'm scared of the accusation of topping from the bottom. I have a fear that expressing my feelings and desires for the way that we play will "ruin" things, that I should accept what I get instead of communicating what I want or need. I also have a tendency to feel embarrassed by my emotions, no matter what they are. None of this stuff is healthy, and I'm not proud to admit it, but these are things that developed in my brain over the past couple of years. As soon as I voiced my opinion, I started to cry and apologize, anxiously hiding my face. Paul pulled me up into his arms and spoke to me soothingly, assuring me that I didn't need to feel that way and that he never judged me for what I felt or needed. As I tried to calm, I was surprised by how much of a need to cry was left inside of me. "I just feel like I'll come completely apart," I confided. After a moment, I added "Maybe I need that." Ultimately, we came to the conclusion that I did need a hard scene, but not a punitive one, and we decided to do an arbitrary scene.

A bit later, Paul put me over his lap and began to spank me. It was probably not particularly hard, but due to my emotional state, I soon started to cry again. In the middle of it, he paused and asked "Who do you belong to, Alex?" and I melted into a passive and tranquil state. This is something that pretty much always works for me (when playing with someone to whom I belong, of course!) as it makes me feel owned, loved, cared for and treasured while simultaneously making me feel very passive, safe and small. I probably cooed my response.

Shortly after this, I got a caning. The strokes were hard and the cane in question is dense and bitey, and I had little resistance left to offer between my vulnerable state and my heightened feeling of submission. This didn't mean I took the strokes well, though: I cried and wailed, sometimes sobbing so hard that I made myself cough. At one point, Paul had to pause to give me a cup of water because I think he thought I was choking. When it was finished, I felt warm and swollen, but entirely refreshed (once I cut through the haze of "I can't brain!" that happens when someone tries to talk to me right after a hard scene). As I curled up on his lap, I knew that everything was going to be okay and that while I'd be inevitably sad and lonely while he was away, that I was always protected and I always belonged. ♥

Heavy Play: My Perspective

Warning: this post contains images taken after some of my hardest scenes. They include significant bruising, welting, broken skin and sometimes wet blood. The second post in this series (coming soon) does not include images or anecdotal discussion and focuses more on the concepts behind Heavy Play. I don't recommend this post to those that are squeamish (Not Safe For Erica!). I do hope that lots of people read the other post, because I think the information contained within it is important.

When I first started getting spanked, I had no perception of how hard my playing was. SF, my first Top, also spanked his wife, Audiens, and my friend, V. Between the three of us, I was the one who he spanked the least severely. He and his wife were obviously playing on a totally different level, and V. was always very interested in pushing limits and trying new things, which I felt no need for any of that. I never compared myself to either Audiens or V. in terms of the way we played with SF. It didn't matter to me. We were all different, so we played in different ways. The kind of playing that I was doing was satisfying to me at the time and that was all that mattered. I watched spanking videos pretty regularly, but I didn't compare myself to those girls, either, because in a certain way they didn't seem real to me. Comparing myself to a video would be like comparing what I actually did in real life to what happened in my fantasies in terms of severity. It didn't make sense to me to do that, so I didn't.

My perception of a scale of how hard my play was compared to other people developed pretty instantly when I got on Fetlife. Suddenly, I was aware of the way that a lot of different people got spanked. I saw photos of other girls' spanked bottoms, some red, some pink, some with bruises, others welted. I had no photos of my spanked bottom. I had never taken one. But I started to compare my memory of my bruised bottom to what I saw in these pictures. I must have been getting spanked much harder than so-and-so, I thought, because I look much more reddened after a spanking than she does there. Other times, I saw welts and bruises and thought I've never been spanked that hard. I didn't yet know that everyone shows marking differently, and that the longer you play, the less you color and bruise. I just thought that there was a scale: light pink meant hardly spanked. Deep purple meant the most severe.

It was literally the first day that I was on Fetlife that I started comparing myself to others in terms of severity of play. Right away, I had it in my mind that it was best to be a harder player. I don't know what made me think that, but I absolutely did. The harder you got spanked, the more marked you were, the longer your scenes were, the more severe your implements, then the better. I used to follow someone on Fetlife who just posted picture after picture of extremely severe spankings which he had given. His gallery was just a row of butt shot after butt shot, each with the same background, each with similar purple bruising, "bullseye" marks and uniform bright redness. I didn't feel any sort of connection with the person who gave these spankings, and I didn't like the way that he seemed to objectify the girls that he had spanked but I felt terribly intrigued by the images. In my mind, they were some of the "best spankings." I looked at them over and over.  I'd previously felt entirely satisfied with a long, hard, over-the-knee hand spanking which left my bottom looking bright red and often bruised me the next day, and which would nearly always reduce me to tears. Once I started to compare myself to others, once I started to focus on hard play as a goal, that suddenly seemed far from impressive to me.

This is the first photo of my spanked bottom that I ever took. I obviously didn't know how to take photos of my own butt back then. I also still had a flip phone. Aww. Bless.

When I started to actually talk to people in the scene, it got even worse. There was something so intoxicating about the way that people talked about really severe scenes. They obviously loved them. At the time that my submission was first crystalizing, I heard a lot of stories of very hard play. The two Tops that I talked to the most at that point were both sadists who had done some very, very extreme play. They sometimes described scenes that I would never actually want for myself (scenes that involved intentionally going far beyond the point of broken skin, for example, or which were entirely unrelated to spanking but very intense) and made it sound like they were so proud of those girls and that they earned lots of love and attention by doing them (I was at a point in my development where the idea of needing to earn love and attention seemed acceptable). Some people talked about it like it WAS a contest: one Top referred to the girl with whom he had played the most severely as being the "Gold Medal Winner." Even though I wasn't interested in doing the things those girls had done, I found myself feeling jealous when I heard about them. Maybe I was jealous that they were the favorite one. Maybe I was jealous because they were able to enjoy something that I knew I never would do. It was a confusing emotion: being jealous of someone for having done something that you didn't want to do.

By the time that Malignus and I first met, I hadn't been seriously spanked in probably six months or so. It hadn't been so bad to not be getting spanked when I was deeply immersed in vanilla life, but when I was exploring the scene, it had become agonizing. What I wanted was to be spanked very, very hard, very, very often. I by no means think that this desire wasn't genuine, or that it was a bad thing. It's just what I was focused on then. If you were to ask me to describe what I wanted from any given scene in one word, I would have picked "intensity."

My first few scenes that fell into that category left me incredibly marked:

That giant bandaid is covering a patch of damaged skin.

This took place a couple days later: you can see that the area the bandaid was covering has opened up again.

My legs are healing after my second visit to Malignus'.  You can sort of see the gauze bandages that are covering the areas where my skin was damaged through my panties. My panties are expressing how I felt about that kind of play.

There's another photo which I'm not going to post. Do you remember when I was giving tips about how to care for your bottom after a spanking a long time ago? I mentioned that you should not exfoliate, even using a wiping motion with a washcloth, directly after a scene or else all your skin will come off. This photo shows that phenomenon. You probably don't want to see that.

Anyway, I eventually reached a point where hard play didn't really mark me very much. It primarily just broke my skin, if anything. This meant that light and moderate play didn't mark me at all, which became an asset to me when I began doing video work but was rather disappointing when I finished a scene that I felt had been severe and I wanted to share that with people but my bottom and thighs just looked like a light, rosy pink. There were other consequences from my hard play, though. For one, I got so used to heavy play that I could hardly enjoy light play anymore. This was caused by a combination of factors: for one thing, I think that a lot of my nerve endings just died and I hardly felt spankings anymore. For another, my skin had hardened and gotten leathery: this is why I got so involved in figuring out ways to restore my skin to it's ideal state (which I'm happy to say isn't a problem anymore). Things just hurt less the longer I engaged in hard play, especially hard play without warmups and cool downs (which was almost always what Malignus and I did). 

My scale changed, too. Before, I only needed a hand spanking to bring me to tears. A hairbrush spanking on the backs of my thighs was the worst consensual pain I'd ever felt. That scale was very small, so a hard hand spanking that might include the backs of my legs was very close to the hardest thing I had ever felt. Once I began playing in very severe ways, that same spanking hardly meant anything to me anymore. It was the difference between 3 and 10 and 3 and 100. In the second case, 3 actually becomes quite insignificant seeming.

My emotional stance on things changed, too. My feelings about severe play and intimacy got kind of mixed up. Presently, I find that severe play is often extremely intimate, but is not inherently so. I also find that a huge spectrum of other activities can be similar expressions of intimacy. None the less, there was a period of time where I really only felt like I was making an emotionally intimate connection with my partner if it was being done through very severe scenes. I think part of this comes from the fact that at the time, I was in a relationship which was much less tactile than what I now know I really require to thrive. The connection that I felt during the severe play fed my hunger for all sorts of physical connection, but because it was one of the only things which really did, an excessive emphasis on this was placed in my mind. A tender hand-spanking didn't leave me feeling fulfilled, it left me anxiously wondering why I wasn't getting more than that. 

So, for all these reasons, I was particularly caught up in playing very hard. When I first started to go to parties, I sought out scenes that would be similarly severe whenever I could, even if I didn't have any sort of connection with the Top. Over the past year or so of our relationship, my play relationship with my ex went largely into decline. Things changed between us. This lead to much more infrequent scenes. My interest in finding other play partners who would push me past my limits was intensified. I don't know if it's even accurate to say "push me past my limits" because I stopped really having a sense of what my personal physical limits were. I wanted to be pushed past the limits that I perceived existed for others. I wanted to be pushed past "the" limit.

The decline in how often and how hard I was playing at home (and, admittedly, how much time I actually spent at home as I began to live out of my suitcase since there wasn't any work in my field in South Dakota) lead to a number of changes. I regained my physical sensitivity. I got away from my tunnel vision which focused on severity and intensity as the important factors in play. I treated my skin so it was no longer calloused, nor was it at risk of becoming so again. Spankings became more physically painful for me, and I often made myself more emotionally vulnerable to them. This meant that I had stronger reactions to lesser scenes. I slowly worked my way back to a place similar to where I had started: where it didn't take all that much to leave me feeling satisfied.

The beauty of having gone through this journey is that I now have the best of both worlds. I can play hard. Very hard. Sometimes, I am tremendously gratified by doing very severe, incredibly intense scenes. They mean a lot to me. They give me an exhilarating and unforgettable experience. The difference is that now, I don't need to play that hard. There have been several times recently where Paul made me cry just by giving me a hard spanking by hand. That feels right to me. It makes me feel incredibly vulnerable to be able to let an experience that's so core to my kink, but which had previously become less potent for me, entirely overtake me.

I'm not sure what happened to my competitive nature. It certainly still exists in a number of other facets of my life, and I'm still obviously insecure about a lot of things but when it comes to spankings, I don't feel the need to prove myself anymore. There are bottoms out there taking things that are much more severe than anything I've ever taken. When I see photos of it, or read about it on blogs, I feel glad that they're exploring things that interest them and sometimes a little bit concerned, if the practices don't seem safe to me, but that's all. When I read some of my own, older blog posts, I can see the way that I've changed in this department and I like it.

Because I've had (and continue to have) quite a bit of first hand experience with harder play, at some point in the near future, I'm going to be posting a set of notes with suggestions regarding things to consider when playing to a high level of physical intensity. I hope that at least a few people will find them useful.

Now, it's time for me to go play Pokemon until I fall asleep. ♥

KOTW: Punishment- The Fun Kind

Last time that I posted, it was about my real-life punishment dynamics. This week's KOTW (kink of the week) topic is Funishment, or play punishment. This a wonderfully related topic which allows me to continue on my previous train-of-thought. (Thanks, Jade!)

As I stated last post, I didn't start out in the scene with any kind of dynamic that included play-punishment, or really, play spankings of any kind. Spankings were srs business only. When I started to play with my previous play partner, J, we never had any sort of disciplinary relationship, or any kind of power-exchange at all. It took a while for me to get used to this, at first. The spankings kind of just "happened." I came over and we talked and cuddled, then he spanked me because he liked spanking girls and I wanted to be spanked. Afterwards, I would usually make him some kind of baked good, often without returning to my proper state of dress so he could watch me bob around his kitchen in an apron with my red, swollen bottom on display. It was a great tradition, and I loved those scenes, but it often left me feeling unfulfilled, like something was missing from the interaction that we had just had.

One day, I came over and J. suggested that we do a roleplay scene instead of our "usual." I felt really hesitant about this. "I don't even know how to do that," I remember saying nervously. I had never done anything even vaguely like this before, and I was afraid that I'd somehow fail miserably at it and "ruin" the scene. J. coaxed me into it, suggesting that we play a scene in which my character had similar traits to the ones that I was expressing: nervousness and apprehension are by no means uncommon parts of a lot of spanking scenarios. So we decided to do a scene in which a girl who had never been spanked before was being punished afterschool by a teacher for consistently being late to class. Now, this scene seems so typical and almost unexciting, but at the time, my heart raced. I went into the other room, and we agreed that when I came back in, we'd begin playing.

I stood at the door with my hand on the knob, trying to channel my personal jitteriness into that which I felt belonged to my character. The scene was actually very similar to the things that I had fantasized about for a long time, so I knew how I expected it to go, but I couldn't quite relax. I stood there waiting for a good five minutes before I came out. J. was sitting on the sofa wearing dress pants, a button-up shirt and a tie. I felt my stomach twitch when I saw his serious, annoyed looking facial expression.

"This meeting started five minutes ago, Alex," he chided. "Do you really think it's a good idea to be late to a discussion about your tardiness?"

I felt my face grow hot and I looked down at the ground, nervously twirling my hair and fiddling with a stray string on my dress. "Sorry," was all I managed. I felt unsure about "how I was doing" as a roleplayer, but I felt very immersed in the scene, transfixed by J.'s tone.

J. continued to lecture me, being stern and giving plenty of details about the things that I had done. He was amazing at thinking things up on the fly, and I found myself responding easily and naturally. When it was time for the actual spanking, he pulled me over his lap forcefully and lifted my dress as I gasped and protested. I had never really protested against a spanking before. My attitude towards them had always been passivity, but here, it didn't only feel acceptable to protest, it felt right. J. smacked the back of my leg, hard and corrected me for that sort of behavior and began to give me a flurry of hard spanks, scolding me about how I needed to get myself together and take things seriously instead of flitting around the school in a disorganized mess. It was actually during this spanking, as I was kicking and writhing and J. was pinning me down and punctuating his stern words with firm smacks that I realized what had been missing from my previous scenes with him: energy.

There's a certain energy and drama and that comes from the dance of scolding and protesting that simply isn't there in other kinds of spankings. Some atmospheres create a strong but different energy, like the reaffirmative spankings that I mentioned before, which focus on giving an intense reminder of each partner's role in the dynamic, or spankings that are done for emotional release ("just because you need to be beaten") or as a love act. I love these sorts of scenes, and I do enjoy having entirely arbitrary "just for the love of spanking" scenes now and again, too, but my mind draws itself back to punishment scenarios again and again and again.

J. and I had a successful first roleplay, and we began doing more and more scenes like that, sometimes following up on others which we had done earlier. Still, we played infrequently and mixed our previous "standard" play with the roleplay punishments, so I probably only did a total of ten roleplays before I moved.

Malignus and I never roleplayed together. In fact, we very rarely engaged in play-punishment of any kind, as I felt like I wasn't being sufficiently submissive if I intentionally misbehaved, and he tended to respond to things like that with removal of attention instead of "feeding into it" by punishing the perpetrator. During this time I became very focused on the idea of being a good girl and being as submissive as possible, so when I went to my first spanking get together, I felt at a loss as the other girls ran around doing complex pranks. A friend who was similarly into being good and I made an attempt at hiding an implement at one point, but we ended up wussing out and returned it to it's rightful place. I received no play punishment spankings at that party.

When I went to my first national spanking party later that year (TASSP), I was very nervous about how I was supposed to act. The first night, I found myself sitting with Pandora Blake on the floor of Joe and Ten's suite, having a conversation about this. I expressed my concerns about not knowing how to "brat" and Pandora gave me suggestions based on her experience. We came to the conclusion that intentional misbehavior can't be too annoying, can't be actually malicious or damaging to people or things and should be clever and/or funny. With this in mind, we got a magic marker from somewhere and crawled over to where IMLX was seated and began drawing cats on the bottom of his bare foot. IMLX and I knew each other from the internet and I knew that he was good natured, so he seemed like a good candidate for our naughtiness. It took him a surprisingly long time to realize that cats were being drawn on his foot. I don't know what that says about him as a person. :P When he did figure it out, he playfully spanked both of us, scolding us (including in Russian!) for being naughty, cat-on-foot-drawing girls. It was seriously playfully, and I was seriously pleased.

Overtime, I sort of grew into myself in this regard, and began to figure out ways to initiate playfully punitive scenes. Sometimes I planned roleplay scenarios with people that I liked. Other times, I just whined a little. This seemed to work wonders. :P

My bottom after one such play punishment!

My play punishment life took a turn for the "more frequent" when I became friends with Bad Alex. Why? Because Bad Alex is fucking Bad, and she's amazingly good at it. Her mind is a machine that takes a simple idea and turns it into the most trouble possible. Besides being good at raising hell and getting herself spanked, she's also magically able to get me into play-trouble to degrees that I've never known were possible. For example, at BBW she set things up so I got 16 strokes of the cane because she punched me in the knee. That's talent right there. I'm still kinda reeling from that almost a year later.

When in the "principal's office" and her partner in crime, cutieotk is about to get paddled, Bad Alex thinks it's a good time to play Rude Hand Gesture Bingo.

Bad Alex and I like to roleplay together. While some of the roleplays that I do are dark and serious, the ones that include both the Alexes are always kind of off the wall. For example, at July's Crimson Moon party, we played a scene with our friend Jon83 in which we were sisters who had been caught cutting school to go to the mall by our father. I really like roleplaying with Alex when we're not even caught yet: we just banter back and forth as misbehaving girls and giggle an awful lot. When we came back to our hotel room (in the pretend, our home) after having snuck out of school, we were greeted by Jon, who was none to pleased with us. We then started to try to lie our way out of things. My lies were things like "We just ran home to get our books!" but Alex's were things like "It's National Alex Day! No one with our name is allowed at school! We have the day off!" This threw me into a fit of hysterics, and it reminded me of a detail that had never been discussed: we were supposed to be sisters of the same age with the same name. We made a series of jokes back and forth to each other as we tried to figure out why this was until Jon sent Bad Alex to the corner to separate us, pointing to her and saying "That one! Go to the corner!"

This was the only time in my life that I laughed while getting a hard paddling.

We've done other, really fun scenes since then, and we currently have a ridiculously fun roleplay in the planning stages. It involves us pretending to get kicked out of someplace and needing to be picked up by our angry authority figures, who will then scold us all the way home before punishing us quite severely. In a Fetlife conversation on the subject, Bad Alex stated that she had been DOING RESEARCH into ways that we could get into trouble there.

Bad Alex is a winner

When I first started playing with Paul, I had very conflicting feelings about play punishment. At that point in my life, I had never had a D/s relationship which included funishment: these had always been two separate things. Serious disciplinary and D/s relationships vs. fun play partners and Tops with whom I could do roleplays and non-serious, play punishment scenes. Because I felt a strong and very real sense of submission towards Paul (which I had been aware of from the very first time that we played) I wasn't sure if it was appropriate to try to engage in intentional naughtiness to earn fun spankings. It took a while before I realized that this was totally acceptable, helped along the way by the fact that Mila and I really started harassing each other in sisterly antics at that time and Paul happily took to scolding me for things like "internet hair pulling."

By the time that we had our cabin visit my desire to play in this way exploded. Still keeping in mind the principles which Pandora and I had identified, I spent the whole time messing around. Sometimes when I wanted to be spanked (which was most of the time) I would just directly (although very coyly) ask for it. Usually, though, I expressed this want by doing slightly naughty things: climbing on the furniture when there was a sign that said I couldn't, replacing the sign with another one which said I could, naming a chair after Mila and kicking it, opening a desk drawer while I was sitting on his lap at the desk, finding a piece of chalk and using it to draw on the back of his black shirt et cetera. Usually, these things were met with playful, often affectionate spankings that had the "you're a naughty girl" type of attitude but were ultimately just-for-fun. They were hard enough, mind you, but I only ever felt enough like I was in trouble for it to be exciting, not to tap into that set of emotions discussed before.

Following one such spanking at the cabin!

Occasionally, these scenes were more physically severe. One day, after the chalk had been taken away, I opened the same drawer during the same sort of cuddle to find a few paperclips, which I clipped to Paul's shirt collar. Seeming unamused (in a way that I could tell was not genuine displeasure) he called it "abuse of stationary". I called this "bogus." He produced a hairbrush. First, though, he pulled me over his lap on the sofa and spanked my bottom quite hard with his hand, then he moved on to smack the backs of my thighs. It was hard and thorough, and he was stern and strict with me. I was crying quite earnestly by the time that he had finished with my thighs, but he still continued to get the hairbrush and apply it quite effectively as well. I was a mess of tears when it was done, and in a certain way, I felt legitimately contrite, even though I hadn't done anything. It was like I had the relief and security of having been punished without any of the most unenjoyable parts of it, as I knew Paul wasn't actually disappointed in me for wasting paperclips. The spanking was followed with the same snuggles that would come after a real punishment spanking, and I was left feeling blissful and loved.

Now that we're living together, play punishment is a rather big part of the daily routine that Paul and I have developed. Sometimes it's a quick and lighthearted spanking for something like walking outside barefoot and getting leaves all over my feet (which was delivered in the backyard, by the way. Oh the embarrassment!) and other times it's more emotionally intense and physically severe, like the paperclip scene. Still other times, we engage in roleplaying just-for-fun, but with a punishment scenario (such as a scene where when Paul went away to find something to spank me with, I hid in the other room's closet and might have at least gotten away with it for a few minutes if my cat hadn't sat himself down in front of the door and meowed loudly until Paul came and dragged me out).

Ultimately, play punishment is now up there with "reaffirmative" for my favorite day-to-day style of spanking. Besides just being fun, it also opens up the door to a lot of possibilities. For example, I feel horrible about myself if I don't take a real punishment spanking well. If I protest, or move out of position, or make too big of a fuss I just feel terrible inside afterwards, like I didn't properly atone for the original misdeed and I'm still being a disappointment (note: I'm not made to feel this way. It's just residual insecurity). During a play punishment, though, I can happily enjoy thrashing around, resisting, protesting, shouting "No! No! No! No!" and otherwise doing everything in my power not to take my spanking well. It's delightful to be overpowered, to have my protests fall on deaf ears and to be MADE to take the rest of it. It's also wonderfully exciting to play with non-consensual themes during roleplay which I obviously wouldn't be exploring in any other way. There's something invigorating and yes, sexy (gasp!) about that. ♥

KOTW: Punishment (the real kind)

So, this Kink of the Week post is blatantly late. I don't know if it will even get posted up on the KOTW page, as it's technically Tuesday of the new week now, but I wanted to write about this topic anyway, so I think it'll be a worthwhile post even if it "doesn't count" in the end.

This week's topic is "real" (as opposed to "play") punishment. Discipline and punishment are things which I've always been open about as existing in my life. They're a huge portion of what I get out of TTWD, yet I've only written about disciplinary scenes a handful of times over the course of the past two years. Usually, I've included the story when what I did wrong can be retold in a way which is comical, like this post from a long time ago or my recent "Target Incident." This is because I find actual punishment to be very private, personal and intimate. I used to feel very uncomfortable sharing this aspect of my life with the general public. Now, I feel a lot more comfortable with it, although I sometimes don't want to talk about the things that I've done to require the punishment. So this shall be my first post ever which is explicitly about this.

Spanking first entered my consciousness at an incredibly early age. I remember no inciting incident, simply a burning obsession to know more about it and a feeling of secrecy and shame about my ever developing "interest." All of the thoughts I had and the fantasies that I made up were about disciplinary spankings, as was the entirety of the media that I encountered that had spanking in it, although that was extremely sparse. In my mind, spanking was a very, very serious thing. It was a severe punishment, the ultimate sanction, the consequence of the worst behavior. As I became a teenager, I craved guidance, structure and discipline in my life, longing for the feeling of being loved and taken care of that I imagined would accompany those things. Spanking as part of  sexual activity didn't occur to me at that time. Spanking as something fun and enjoyable seemed like a weird and alien idea. This contributed to my early confusion about my desires. I characterized this activity as something entirely unenjoyable, but desired nothing more than to experience it for myself.

When I turned eighteen and I *did* get my first spanking, it was for demonstrative and introductory purposes. After that, my relationship with SF (my first Top) was entirely disciplinary. It allowed for a lot of space, which is to say that he never policed me. I simply came to him and self-reported about the things which I had done which were against the standards which we had mutually agreed upon and he punished me for them. The relationship was very sterile and austere, with an understanding of affection and caring between us which was rarely expressed. We were kind of an odd pair, me and SF because he's Forever The Most Serious Man Ever (SF stands for 'Serious Face") and I'm patently ridiculous, but he had a pretty decent amount of patience for my antics and I enjoyed his stern nature. It was really, at the time, everything that I wanted because it was everything that I had ever imagined that a spanking relationship could be. I did my best to be good. I sometimes was not, and when that happened, I was soundly corrected.

For the first five years (I think) that I was getting spanked, it was only by SF. After he went back to England and, a little later,  I moved to Los Angeles for the first time, I started to venture into the scene there. When I did, I had trouble with my identity and I struggled to identify what I actually wanted. At first, I attempted to find someone to replace SF, which I found tremendously disappointing. Everyone wanted something different from spanking. Some people wanted dominance. Some people wanted sexuality. Some people wanted to embrace and explore the younger, more vulnerable side of me. Some people wanted to do complicated roleplay. Some people just liked smacking a girl's bottom without any reason for it. It was during this time that I realized that needing to be punished and needing to be spanked weren't the same thing. Both were real and valid needs, but spanking could be a variety of other things. With my play-partner, J, I explored playing "just for fun" and did my first forays into roleplay. I explored arbitrary and enjoyable spankings with a variety of friends that I met in the local scene, many of whom weren't spankos, and therefore had a vastly different attitude towards playing than that which I was used to. Eventually, I met Malignus and began to question whether or not I was actually interested in submission. I determined that I was and began the process of exploring that with him.

While punishment was a fairly significant part of my first D/s dynamic, I'm not going to go into the details of how it worked between Malignus and I. At the time that I started blogging, Malignus and I discussed what parts of our relationship he was comfortable with me posting about and we decided that the details of my punishments were too personal to be written about, although I sometimes asked if it was alright for me to post about a particular scene (like the post I linked to earlier) and he always agreed. Although our relationship has ended, I am going to continue to honor this agreement because I feel that it would be disrespectful and "the wrong thing to do" not to. It's not like there was anything secretive or mysterious about this aspect of our relationship that others shouldn't know about. That's just what we decided at the time, so I'm sticking to it. Punishment certainly wasn't the center of our relationship, though, and I'd say that it was probably the least common reason for me to be spanked, as the most frequent spankings were arbitrary, goal-based or D/s centric, reaffirmative scenes. This was a huge change from where I'd started out, but it was a positive difference, as I had expanded my options for what a spanking could mean.

Fast forward to the present time: I'm extremely comfortable with my role as a submissive, and as I continue to grow in the my spanko identity, I've branched out to embrace forms of play, atmospheres and additional kinks that I would have never thought I'd love so much when I was first starting out in my exploration. In my relationship with Paul, punishment is both something that we play with for mutual enjoyment and something that can be as serious as can be. Playing with lighthearted punishments for silly things by no means dilutes the actual act, and it's just as important to me now as it was when it was just a daydream.

Sometimes, punishments happen immediately after the punishable behavior takes place (like in the "Target" story). Other times this isn't possible, and I'm punished later that evening (usually right before bed) if that's an option. If not, the offense and the requisite discipline are entered into a notebook entitled "Alex's Behavioral Record" and the punishment is meted out at a later date. The "book method" of dealing with things was the only way that punishment was delivered when we were in a long distance relationship: things got recorded and then, when we saw each other, those things were addressed. I really, really like the fact that things don't get forgotten just because "too much" time has passed since the original behavior. It's obviously more effective for me to be punished as quickly thereafter as possible, but the inevitability of knowing that at some point, no matter what, I'm going to get corrected for the things that I do that I shouldn't gives me a marvelous sense of security.

Basically all of my punishments are corporal, ranging from OTK spankings to a series of hard smacks on the insides of my thighs to strappings and canings. Since all these activities are also part of our "for fun" play, the only differences are atmosphere, tone and mood. Being punished makes me feel very vulnerable, and Paul takes a very stern approach towards punishing me (which I like very much). Often times just the scolding brings me to tears, and when I'm in that headspace, there's very little pleasant about the spanking that follows. I say "very little" instead of "nothing" because being punished makes me feel particularly loved and taken care of, and I do enjoy that feeling, even as it's happening. Being disciplined almost always makes me cry, and afterwards the seriousness of the actual punishment quickly melts away and I climb onto Paul's lap, sometimes continuing to cry for a bit as he tenderly comforts me and assures me that I'm a good girl again. Everything is right in the world during those moments, and I couldn't feel safer.

Amoni Jones took this candid photo at the end of a spanking shoot. It's not post-punishment, but it captures the same sort of moment. 

As much as I enjoy "for fun" "play" punishment, and as ultimately positive and edifying as the experience of being discipline is for me, at the end of the day, I want to be a good girl. I want Paul to be proud of me, and I do my best to avoid getting into real trouble. It's intricate, the way that something which is so enjoyable in a different setting can be made truly punitive, but it's not a novel idea, nor is it a particularly rare phenomenon.

I hope that this is at least somewhat articulate: I've just recovered from having been ill, and I'm struggling to get caught up, so I wasn't able to really draft this the way I usually do for posts that are this wordy, and I was getting really tired by the time I was finishing it. I'll be posting more about other aspects of this topic in the future, so stay tuned. ♥

CCM: Thursday, part 1

On Thursday, I woke up as late as I could get away with, since I had fallen asleep around six thirty or something in the morning. I wasn't thrilled to be going into a party on that little sleep, but it was sort of inevitable and there was nothing I could do about it.

The day started out with Paul and I filming with Sarah Gregory for Northern Spanking-- you can read his notes on the shoot here. Paul started working out ideas for scenarios weeks ago, and it was kind of fascinating to see his process. Because we were filming in the hotel, Paul created a set of scenarios which made sense for us to be in such a setting instead of trying to pretend that we were somewhere else and this lead to some rather creative thinking on his part. I was a little nervous about filming because it was my first time ever being on camera for some of the scenes and it was my first time actually filming with Sarah! We've known each other for a while, and we roomed together and I shot a scene for her site while we were at TASSP, so we were comfortable around each other, but we had never actually done any films together until this day.

From my shoot for Sarah's site back in June

Filming with Sarah went quickly and smoothly, since she (obviously!) knows what she's doing. Two of the scenes we shot included her bottoming, which she only does rarely these days, so that was kind of special. The first scene involved Paul playing a seedy private detective and Sarah being a cheating wife who he catches at her meeting place. This was the first time that I got to watch Paul spanking another girl for a film in real life: every time we'd filmed together previously, I was the only one getting spanked. I enjoyed getting to watch this scene, even if through the camera, especially because Paul's character was a bit wicked and I've always enjoyed those sorts of scenes. :D Sarah looked great, too, in her sexy lingerie (but then again, she always looks great!)

The second scene involved me getting spanked by Sarah and is the first film that the two of us have done together. We'd played during group roleplay events before, but never on camera. Sarah is a great top and is easy to roleplay with, and the spanking that she gave me was delightful. Additionally, this was the first time in my entire life that I wore heels with jeans, and I think I like the look! I'd never done it before because I avoided heels except for the most specialist of occasions since I used to have height related self esteem issues, but those don't bother me anymore so I've been enjoying experiments like this. :D In the film, I play a sneaky, snarky writer who gets caught in a hotel I've written poor reviews of many times by an irate manager, played by Sarah. I consider scenes where I'm unabashedly not repentant for me behavior a challenging area for me, but I think I'm getting better at it. When I need clever snark, I ask myself what Erica Scott would say. When I need to be bratty and awful, I borrow a page from The Bad Alex's daily life. I think that the film ended up being great: funny and full of delightful girl/girl spanking action. ^_^

Scene number the third was between Sarah and Paul again, with Sarah playing a second-rate erotic author and Paul playing her irate publisher. This scene ended up being particularly funny, and I had to keep my composure behind the camera and not giggle at their antics (which I did manage to do, thankfully!) Sarah looks lovely in jeans, I have to say. :P

The final scene was between Paul and I, and it was actually the first time that we'd played on camera since the end of March, so that was pretty exciting. This was our original type of interaction, and it was nice to return to it, now bringing the massive chemistry that comes when two people know each other as intimately as we now do. It was also the first time that we did a film in which we played a couple since we actually became one, so that was a bit sweet. Paul was vague about the description of this film's content in his post so I suppose that I had better be, too, but it's a cute story with a delightful caning in it which was hard enough that when it was finished, Sarah marveled at my composure.

I helped pick out some of the images that Paul put up on the forum when he wrote about this shoot, and this was one of the ones that I chose. I like it for the normal reasons: I look scared and vulnerable, Paul looks determined and threatening et cetera, but also because of his shadow on the curtain. I like imagining that we're on a ground floor and a passerby might see this silhouette from outside and perhaps stop to watch the shadow-puppet version of my thrashing. How deliciously voyeuristic!

When we had finished shooting, I had to run off pretty much right away because I had an appointment in Detention! Joe (Drlectr) and Mama Blue were running a series of short "Principal's office" detention scenarios and I was scheduled for shortly after the filming finished. Joe and I have played hundreds of times, and he's one of the people with whom I've played the most intimately and emotionally intensely, but we've never really done any roleplay scenarios. I know that he's fond of school style paddling scenes, and I love any kind of roleplay which is highly formalized, so I figured the scene was going to be good. I take great delight in the embarrassment of having someone else watching me be punished, like Vice Principal Blue!

I was already in my uniform so I ran up to Joe and Ten's room to wait outside the doorway. They were talking to someone in the room, so I had to wait outside.

Waiting in this hallway, knowing that in a minute, I was about to be paddled and that it would be quite severe was something directly from my fantasy life. Everyone on the floor was at the Crimson Moon party, which meant that everyone who passed and saw me stood outside Joe's room in my uniform knew that I was waiting for my detention. This also meant that they weren't judging me, but that didn't remove the squirmy feeling in my tummy every time someone walked by. Finally, Joe, now Principal Lectr, opened the door and called me in.

A lot of my roleplay characters are helpless and innocent, but that was certainly not the case today. The scene that Joe and I had written involved me being in trouble for attempting to seduce my male teachers, and I was full of confidence and eroticism, flirting with Principal Lectr even as he lectured me on my wicked ways. "You seem to think this is alright!" Vice Principal Blue said in dismay. "You're going to have to start seeing the school counselor once a week!"

"Will it be a male counselor?" I asked with a flirtatious grin. The authority figures had had enough of me, so I was bent over the desk for eight paddle swats, which were delivered firmly and on the bare. The paddling wasn't much of a sanction for me, though, and I kept up my act, hoping for a little extra attention. I got just that, in the form of a hard, OTK spanking after the paddling. When the scene was over, Mama Blue took off and Joe and I got to enjoy some time together. Joe is wonderful. I'm so lucky to have him in my life.

After this, Joe walked me back to my room and we told Paul about our roleplay. Then Paul and I took a little time to regroup before heading down for dinner. We hadn't had much lunch, so we mostly used this as a time to socialize and see who was at the party already before heading out to get a bite and some drinks nearby. During dinner, Naughty Freckles asked me if I'd be willing to be a rope-bunny for the "Fit to be Tied and Spanked" demo later that night, which I gladly accepted. Bondage can be a lot of fun, and I do get a little thrill out of performing in front of a group. Between dinner and the demo, Paul and I ran to the store (without me ever bothering to change out of my school uniform!) and then got back in time to be able to socialize a bit before I needed to start. Paul finally got to meet LLB, who is very dear to my heart, and a handful of my other friends.

Then it was time for the demo! Kinkmedic, from 12:11 Kink taught some basic ties and showed how they can be used for spanking. This included tying me up, including in a bent over position where he then balanced a cup of Mountain Dew on my back while I tried very hard to stay still. Afterwards, they passed out rope and people practiced the ties and I allowed people to practice on me, too. It was a lot of fun, and the ties were effective, easy and comfortable. "A+ would be tied up by again!"rating!

After the demo, we snuck out and ate dinner, then ran into about 15 of my favorite people who were entering the restaurant as we were leaving. We headed upstairs, where I probably got changed again and we went to Joe and Ten's suite. There were only a few people hanging out in there, since most everyone else had gone to dinner, but I had a good time talking to everyone, including the person behind Spanking Resource (I don't know if he uses a particular name online or not!) and a few others.
At one point I did something out of line and needed to be spanked (gasp!) so Paul selected one of Big Bubba's Bible Belts and applied it to me. Big Bubba is a friend of mine who does leatherworking, and his belts with "Bible" stamped on them are a perennial favorite. It started out as just a pun, but the belts are fairly lightweight, delightfully pliable and capable of being used across intensities. This instance of the implement belongs to Joe, and it's obvious that he's spanked about 108 girls with it because it was delightfully well broken in and clearly an implement "of joy!" It was stingy in a light and delicious way... dare I say it was even "sensual." I didn't want the spanking to stop, ever! I made Paul promise that we'd buy one for ourselves at the vendor's fair.

The next thing that I wrote in my notes is "Bad Alex is Bad." I have no idea what particular incident this refers to, because that's kind of like writing notes on a day out hiking and saying "The sky is blue." A while before the party, Bad Alex and I were arguing back and forth and I called her some kind of awful insult, as we tend to do to each other. Instead of just responding with one of her signature, creative insults ("your breath smells like Bigfoot's dick") Bad Alex decided to write a long and carefully worded email to Paul, explaining how I had wronged her and how she wanted to keep my "good girl status intact" by telling on me "for my own good." I'm sure she said "I'm just a little girl" somewhere in there, too. Of course I ended up getting caned, because there's no fairness anywhere in the Universe when Bad Alex is involved (remember, I once got 14 strokes of the cane because she punched me in the knee!)
At CCM, she continued this masquerade of being a good girl who is unfairly accused by me by being sweet and polite whenever Paul was around and then turning around and insulting or slapping me when he wasn't looking. He always seemed to be looking when I retaliated, though, and I was soon jumping up and down at the unfairness of it all. I had high hopes of seeing Alex properly punished sometime this weekend, though, and my best bet was at Spanking Court on Saturday night. Bad Alex claimed she had a foolproof defense, but I wasn't so sure. As soon as the box was out in the main room, I filed a class-action case against her as "The Good Alex representing the people of CCM vs. Bad Alex for harassment."

This seems like a good stopping point for this post. I suspect that CCM will be broken up into about 5 or 6 posts total, since I took notes and everything. Please stay tuned! ♥

Pre-party: Prux, Panda, Presents, Punishment

I first met my friend Prux over fetlife nearly a year ago. We got to see each other in person for the first time at BBW. I was practically shocked by what a sweet girl she is: caring, gentle, kind, polite and loving. We got to spend much more time together at July's Crimson Moon party, and it was then that I knew that we were going to be really good friends. My favorite memory from our interactions during the summer was when we both stayed the night at Joe and Ten's house following the July party. The Brat Brigade was in full force and ridiculous hijinx were happening all around us. At one point, Bad Alex had gotten me into trouble and I was waiting nervously for the consequences of my actions. Prux came and stood next to me sweetly, holding my hand.

"Do you want to go hide?" she asked. The other girls had been running around the house all evening, hiding in closets and attempting to escape spankings. At this point, I'd never hidden to avoid punishment before in my life (and I'm quite sure Prux hadn't either), so it seemed like a possibly fun experiment. First, we hid in the closet but it was dark and a bit scary in there, so when no one was looking, we crept up the stairs and out into the front yard. We considered hiding under someone's car like cats, but decided that was not a wise idea and simply crouched behind it. We stayed there giggling and holding hands for quite a while before we realized that no one was looking for us, so we gave up and wandered back to the basement where everyone was hanging out and confessed what we had done. I took my spanking and then Prux and I cuddled. It would have been fairly anti-climactic if she hadn't been so damn adorable. That night, we both slept on the same L-shaped sofa, having arranged ourselves so that we wouldn't poke one and other with our feet.

I got to see Prux a little more at Shadowlane, but that was a particularly busy party for me so I didn't get to spend as much time with friends as I would have liked. We chatted lots after it, though, and I was really excited to see her during this party. We planned to spend the Wednesday before the party fully started together, and Prux obviously gave careful thought to what we should do together for the most adorable, girly fun possible. Unfortunately, Paul and I didn't end up getting into Chicago until about 4:30 or something, so we weren't able to do as much adventuring as we would have liked. I was still one of the most excited girls in the whole world when I saw Prux pull up to meet us at the airport! I couldn't stop hopping up and down. It was exciting to introduce her and Paul: I love it when the people that I adore finally get to meet each other.

We had to do a couple of errands before going to the hotel, and Prux and I chatted happily while we did them. I had forgotten several important things when packing (as is always the way with me). One of these was a coat-- it had been in the 70's when I left Los Angeles on Wednesday morning, so I left my coat sitting on the chair in my study. I was sorely missing that in Chicago as the wind whipped around. Prux kept giving me cuddles whenever we were outside to keep me warm. :D Another thing I had forgotten was a stuffed animal. When we stopped at the grocery store for other supplies, we noticed a shelf full of stuffed toys. I asked Paul if I could get one.

"Of course," he responded. "You'll need something to clutch desperately while I'm beating you." My tummy felt funny when he said this, but Prux helped me pick out an adorable pink panda to be my newest companion. I named her Penelope.

Meet Penelope!

After errands were done, we went to dinner, where Prux and I had nearly excessive cuddles and I managed to get ketchup in my hair. Then we went to the hotel and got checked in. Here, Prux gave me a present: one of the sweetest ones I've ever gotten!

It was a "bag of sunshine": she had assembled a yellow bag full of fun, adorable yellow presents to represent what she said was the "sunshine that I bring into her life." I couldn't stop grinning as I unpacked it. Everything was carefully selected, and the whole thing was made more excellent by the fact that yellow is my favorite color!

A puzzle, candy, yellow flowers, cider mix, face masks, nail polish, gummy bears, glitter crayons, a candle, silly string, cute animal containers filled with candy, a giraffe which is also a fan and a card with a sweet note. There were also two rubber ducks, who aren't shown because they were in the bathtub.

The bag included a puzzle with cute ducks, and Prux and assembled it together (this was the second time that Prux had done it, because she checked to make sure all the pieces were there before giving it to me, which I think is over-the-top sweet!)

Artistic rendering of Prux and I!

After that, I had to take a bath because I was super gross from traveling and had ketchup in my hair. We chatted while I was bathing, and SheldonFT texted to see if he could come say hi to Prux. Soon a small group of spankos had assembled in the living room area of our room while I sat naked in the bath. Paul had gone down to the lobby and got to meet the handful of friends who were in the room when he came back, then he came to talk to me where I was sitting in the bathtub. He instructed me to turn over in the bath so my bottom was up and he gave me my first few swats of the party, scolding me for making such a mess in the restaurant. It started out playful and tender, but then I decided to suddenly drop down so that my bottom was submerged. He wasn't expecting it, and the next spank made an enormous splash, getting water all over him. The rest of the spanking was much more brisk after that!

Once I had finished in the bath, I came out and got into pajamas and saw Sheldon, Naughty Freckles and LilAngelWings. The group of us chatted until it got a bit late, and then everyone returned to their rooms. I had to say goodnight to Prux, since she wasn't staying in the hotel that night. I gave her the biggest hug ever and a million thank-you's for her sweetness. I'm so grateful to have such a wonderful, loving friend. After our hugs time was finished, she shyly and adorably asked Paul if she could hug him, too, which was of course very acceptable indeed!

Once she was gone, though, the evening got slightly more serious. I had done something (personal) I shouldn't have earlier in the day, and I knew that I was going to be punished for it before going to bed. Paul instructed me to sit on the bed and wait for him while he went downstairs to smoke. I sat on the bed cuddling Penelope and being very still and quiet, my heart racing. I wasn't sure what exactly was going to happen, but I knew that I needed to be punished for what I had done, and I felt a sense of serenity in the knowledge that my correction was inevitable. After what felt like approximately eight years of waiting, Paul came back and sat down next to me on the bed. He scolded me for my behavior earlier in the day and reminded me why I needed to be punished for it. His voice was gentle the entire time, and his touch sweet. "I thought about it and I've decided that I'm not going to cane you for this," he told me. "It's the start of a party weekend and I'm partly responsible for what happened this morning. That wouldn't be fair." I let out a little sigh, as I had been fairly confident that was what was coming. "Instead I'm going to strap you." Oh. Well, fuck. "I know you think that's worse," he acknowledged.

When other people say "strapping" they could be referring to a spanking given with any of a number of  leather implements, some wide, some narrow, some light and delicious and others bitey and cruel. In my household it only means one thing, though: the tawse. I'm sitting alone in my bedroom writing this, and I still blushed and shuddered to type that word. Mila and I have taken to calling it "the other thing" (with "the first thing" meaning the cane). No other implement has ever focused my mind so much. I'm not entirely sure where my extreme, obsessive love/(but mostly)hate relationship with this implement came from. Part of it comes from the fact that it appeared in stories and historical things that I read and in films which I saw during my pre-spanking fantasy period. Part of it comes from the fact that early on in our dynamic, Paul sent me a very detailed email about how intended to use this particular implement on me and how it was going to feel. I received this message at a time when I wasn't really playing, and certainly not in the way I wanted to be, and it became a seed that grew into a fantastic tree of delightful and terrifying fantasies. Then there's a film from Nimue's World entitled "I've Seen You" that I've been a bit obsessed with in which Paul plays a wonderfully creepy character who beats Nimue rather mercilessly with said implement. This film is dark, but in reality, totally consensual and I find it very, very hot. Then, of course, there's the reality of the thing. "The other thing" hurts, to me, in a way nothing else does. Hot, pinching, biting, swelling, firey hurt. I think it has a 100% "made Alex cry" rating still. Owwwwww.

To return from my tangent, I sat on the bed wringing my hands at this announcement. I seriously considered begging for a caning instead, but I maintained my composure, as I knew I had messed up and I knew I needed to be punished. If I had asked for something else and received it, even if it had been severe I would have felt like I got away with something. It wouldn't have put me in the headspace that I needed to be in. So I just looked down at the ground and was quiet and obedient. Besides, he had approached this as an alternative to a caning and mentioned that I "think" it's worse, which could have seemed patronizing but wasn't. To me, it suggested that it wasn't intended to be (this time).

First there was a warmup, which happened OTK and was very short and made me pretty sore itself. I had tears forming behind my eyes before the proper punishment even started. The proper punishment arrived soon, though, and I was ordered over the end of the bed and it was announced that I'd be getting eight: the rounded-up version of half my usual punishment. The first stroke landed and I wailed and started to cry, although I recognized that he wasn't doing it quite as hard as he usually did. On the second stroke I dared to look over my shoulder and saw that, indeed, he wasn't swinging with the ferocity that he usually had. This didn't stop it from hurting terribly, but it was more manageable. I couldn't help but cry at each stroke, though, especially when I focused on the careless thing which I had done earlier in the day. I let the pain focus me on my desire to be a good girl, and I cried out my frustration with myself and my guilt at my earlier behavior. My cries got louder as the number got higher, but soon, it was finished. It wasn't a severe punishment: a lot of it had been in my head, but I felt much better for it.

It took me several minutes of lying on the bed gasping and clutching Penelope before I managed out my thanks for the punishment, but once I did I was reminded that I'm a good girl and wrapped up in a delightful snuggle. Then it was time for photos and to get ready to actually go to sleep!

See? Not TOO bad!

Unfortunately for me, I had a hell of a time sleeping throughout the entire party, so at six AM, after having no sleep the night before, I accidentally woke Paul up because I was literally in tears from insomnia. Awww, that's pathetic. He gave me a sleep aid and cuddled me and stroked my hair and eventually I did fall asleep. I had a big day ahead of me... ♥