About Blogging

The frequency with which I post to this blog has changed drastically in the past year.
I miss it. I miss sharing with people. I miss connecting with people. I miss having a place to organize my thoughts.
But it's become extremely hard for me.

Part of it is time. When I lived in South Dakota, my days were filled with nothingness, and I looked for things to fill them with. Now, I'm usually busy. I work a lot, and I spend a lot of time doing "behind the scenes" type work. Furthermore, for the first time in years, I have an active, vibrant local social life. With Paul in England until mid-August, I tend to keep myself busy with lots of socializing when I have downtime. This means that many nights, I come home and go directly to bed, without having a chance to sit down and blog. I'm a slow writer. I have a short attention span and I'm very fussy about making sure that I get things the way that I want them before publishing something to the internet, so blogging is time consuming for me.

There's another big issue, one which is difficult for me to talk about. Probably 80% of the archive of this blog is about my relationship with Malignus. I don't like to be negative, and I'm private about the things in my life which are so. Therefore, I only wrote about the positive aspects of my relationship with him. There were many positive things there. During that relationship, I learned, grew and discovered things. We had lots of intense and wonderful scenes. The things which I wrote about were true. They were real experiences, real emotions, real understandings which I reached. There were also parts of it which happened out of the public eye which were extremely negative. Ultimately, the sum of my relationship with Malignus was destructive towards me and my emotional wellbeing. Because of this, it feels weird to sit and write in the same place but have such drastically different feelings. I need to make this clear before I can really relax into my blog again. The things I wrote about Malignus were true. I loved him. We had amazing scenes. He took me to places that I never thought I'd go. He also did things that were bad to me, and I do not condone his behavior, support him or encourage others to be involved with him. I know that the time in my life when Malignus and I broke up was poorly documented and that the transition from what was going on then to what's going on now was clunky. That's how it had to be, though.

The final reason is because my computer is ancient. I got it seven years ago. It's been an amazing machine. It visited six countries with me, and was probably on at least a hundred flights total. It's been assaulted by cats, covered in stickers and drizzled with tears. It's seen WAY more pornography than is probably recommended. Now, it's pretty crippled. The battery doesn't work, so I can only use it while plugged into the wall. The power cable doesn't connect too well anymore, though, so a quick movement or the nuzzle of a cat can unplug it and instantly make me lose everything I was doing. The wireless card no longer works, so I'm also tethered to an ethernet cable, reminding me of life back in 2005. The disc drive doesn't work anymore. The keyboard is missing so many keys that I have to use an external keyboard and sit this on top of the one which is built in. It overheats frequently. The hardware is too old to accept anymore software updates, which means that I don't even know how to use the most recent versions of Mac OS.  The past year has been expensive: there was a time when I was going to get a new laptop last year, but I ended up spending that money to move to Los Angeles (which was definitely the right thing to do). Since then, I haven't been able to save much. My computer is still working, though, which is a very good thing, but because it's become such a hassle to use, I'm less likely to want to spend more time on it than I have to.

Despite all this, I really do miss blogging. For a long time, I've wanted to get motivated to get back to it. Recently, I met someone for the first time at a spanking event and he said "I didn't realize you were actually into spanking."

I found this really upsetting. I know that not everyone is going to read my blog (obviously) but I miss having that line of communication with the spanking community. I'm looking forward to having it back.

I'm not going to make any promises about an update schedule or anything like that, but I am really going to try.

Because I miss you guys. ♥

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 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. ♥

KOTW: Understanding Tickling

Well, my plan to write more has been working to some extent. I've been working on a kind of big "theory" post that deals with a concept that I've been struggling with for some time. As such, it's hard to get through the writing. I keep going back and forth on what I want to say.
Because of this, I haven't had a full post for you since the last Kink of the Week (le sigh!) but I can promise an interesting one soon. Not that KOTW isn't interesting.

So, onto the post!

The KOTW topic this week is tickling.
I've always had a very neutral feeling towards tickling. I'm rather ticklish, but I don't particularly dislike being tickled. As a child, I found tickling to be a pleasant interaction, although I grew up in a family where that was considered a bit too much physical contact to be appropriate. As I grew up, it sort of stopped being something that I thought of very often.

From time to time I meet people in the scene who sort of roll their eyes at my spanking fetish.
"Spanking? Really? That's hardly even kinky. That's so childish. That doesn't even hurt," they say. Then I get all kinds of flustered and annoyed and defensive. Let me tell you a long list of reasons why your wrong. But this hardly matters, because the person with this opinion just doesn't "get" spanking or understand what it means to be a spanko, so they can't really be convinced.

In the process of brainstorming for this post, I discovered that my feelings towards tickling were quite similar to the feelings that I hated having directed towards spanking.

In my mind, tickling is a tender, playful interaction that doesn't feel kinky to me. There's something that seems sort of unappealingly childish about it to me (and I'm sitting at my very small desk dressed in my fuzzy nightshirt which is printed with cartoon owls and a pair of Hello Kitty panties with my hair in pigtails, typing this on my sticker-covered laptop). I decided that these feelings aren't really fair for me to have, and they certainly aren't very educated.

I decided to start looking at some Tickling sites to learn a little bit more about it. A lot of them presented tickling in a way sort of similarly to the way I was imagining it: two girl-next-door types gently rough-housing and tickling each other in their lingerie, sometimes using colorful feathers. The presence of the feathers connected it to something else in my mind: "sensation play."

Via Teaseglam.com

I originally thought that sensation play was a pretty milquetoast idea, as well. This was during a period of my life when I was very focused on submission as being challenging and where I frequently intentionally denied myself the enjoyable side of things like spanking. The idea of "things which feel nice" seemed, well, lame to me. Later on, I started to break down the barriers between things being "nice" and things being "kinky" and I discovered that I like quite a lot of sensation play. I like the feeling of something cold being placed on my bottom after a spanking, or the startle of it touching me on my unaffected skin. I like soft materials on my body and especially on skin that's sore. I like the feeling of pressure as something weighted is pressed against me. I like focusing only on my body, and making my world very small, and sensation play lends itself to that very well. Just as pain is a focusing device, so can be any sort of touch. I often find gentle touches with a single finger being run slowly over my body to be some of the most erotic. This motion when repeated over and over can become a slow tickling sensation. I can see how this would be enjoyable, positive and nice.

But tickling fetishists don't always think that tickling is nice, right? Sometimes tickling is a torture. I think the primary reason that I can't imagine tickling as being particularly kinky is because I've always had tickling stop before I even got particularly tired of it. I've never been held down, restrained and tickled until I wanted it to be over. I know that many people enjoy combining tickling with bondage, and I can imagine the point where anything becomes unbearable and apply that to tickling to create a scenario which is not unlike the point in a spanking where I feel like it's difficult to endure it any longer. This is the place where submission is required, where I have to focus on passivity and give myself over to the spanking. I can imagine that tickling can come to require a similar kind of submission.

Then there's the idea of tickling as being a rougher, harsher activity. If you tickle someone with your nails, for example, that somewhere between tickling and scratching. If you use a rough or abrasive motion, especially on the tender parts of the body, tickling can be strangely painful. Once or twice, Malignus "tickled" me in a method that he calls "deep tissue tickling." I don't fully understand what he did, but I think it combined massage techniques with tickling motions to create a sensation that was similarly invasive to the pain that I felt when we experimented with bastinado. It felt like there was a creature loose inside my body, or sometimes, like I was being stabbed. It was so invasive feeling that I wasn't able to be submissive towards the feeling. Again, we didn't do much of this. :P

So, at the end of the day, I can see the appeal, I think. I've certainly found a new appreciation for why it might be enjoyable and how I could possibly relate to what a tickling fetishist enjoys. I'm glad that I explored this because I don't like not understanding something, and I hate to think that I'm not giving something a fair shot in my mind.

As always, I'm open to questions and comments.
I promise that there'll be a post with spanking in it very soon. ♥

KOTW: Experiments with Bastinado

I did one "Kink of the Week" post during the summer, and since then, I haven't participated.
This is just because I was having a hard enough time keeping up with my regular posting, let alone try to add in something with a *gasp* deadline!

For those of you who don't know, Kink of the Week (or KOTW) is a feature on my friend Jade's blog. Every week, she posts a particular "kink" as the theme. These things are sometimes activities, materials, practices, ideas et cetera that a person might fetishize or enjoy as part of their kink play. She then invites other bloggers to write up their opinion, interests, ideas or "take" on this topic. Everyone's links are posted to the KOTW page, so readers can get a variety of opinions on one topic.

It's a bit hard for me to write these posts sometimes because I see my kink play as being fairly limited because my fetishistic interests are pretty straight forward compared to some people. That said, I have dabbled in a lot of things and I do have thoughts on basically everything. That's the beauty of having a brain, isn't it? :P More importantly, I like the *idea* of KOTW. I like having a variety of minds come together and describe their thoughts and feelings. I like the fact that instead of it being a thread on a forum somewhere or a place where you can comment on her blog, Jade allows us each to showcase our own work. We write and format our posts in the style that's natural and comfortable for us, and we do it in our own spaces on the internet. When we invite others to read our KOTW posts, it draws attention to each person's blog or site and allows us to find people whose thoughts and words are powerful and important but who we would not normally encounter.

For these reasons, I've decided that I'm going to try to make myself write about the KOTW topic each and every week, though, even when the kink is something that I don't fetishize or usually practice. I don't know how much I'll have to say about these topics, or how great my post will be, but we'll try it.

Relatedly, this week's topic is Bastinado.

Bastinado isn't something that I've ever fantasized about. I think this is probably because even though it's a traditional form of corporal punishment, it's very removed from the domestic/institutional corporal punishment base of my fantasies. It feels darker, to me, but it doesn't fit with the dark parts which draw me in. In general, the basis of my darker interests is always a change in theme or intensity, not a change in the style of play. Then there's the fact that my feet are very sensitive and because I'm very clumsy, I've injured them a lot of times. There's nothing particularly exciting about a sensation that I associate with accidentally hurting myself.

Still, I've experimented with getting hit on the feet on two different occasions. The first was during the very start of my relationship with Malignus. During the time that we first started sceneing together, we tried a lot of things that I had never done before, many of which we would never do again, just for the sake of experimentation and new experiences. One day, while we were hanging out in his living room (this was before we lived together), he grabbed my foot and applied a sharp smack to the bottom of it with a wooden spoon. I found the sensation of this to be something which I can only describe with one word: "invasive." I don't mean that it was invasive to my personal comfort zone that he did that or anything like that. I found the pain to be invading my body in a way that I'd never experienced. Because the hurting traveled up the body of my foot, the feeling seemed more akin to a foreign object entering me in a place where it wasn't meant to than just feeling sore. I thrashed around, trying to shake the feeling out of my foot. This kind of sensation made me very uncomfortable and almost a little disturbed, like some shockwave of hurt was wiggling around in my body.
We never did that again.

Target? 

The second time that I experimented with this was very recently. Someone with whom I was playing asked if he could hit my feet very gently. I decided to try it, to see if gentler, more percussive sensations would be different. Besides, it had been years since my previous attempt at it, and my tolerance for different sensations had increased. So we tried it. He used a leather paddle to lightly strike the bottoms of my feet, avoiding the arch and the toes. I wouldn't call the sensation pleasant, but I didn't have the same reaction that I did last time. It felt very similar to being struck on the hand, although it was being done in a much less intense way than my previous hand-striking experiences. It hurt, and but it radiated in a traditional pattern. Afterwards, it felt a bit odd to walk around on tender feet, but the feeling dissipated quickly.

Maybe you could give warmup strokes over socks, to make a foot-baring ritual and borrow from the spanking routine?

I don't see myself playing this way much in the future, but I am starting to understand why people who enjoy it might. I think that for some, the unusual, almost exotic nature of it could be exciting. Of course, if you're into feet, then that's a huge bonus. One of my friends described the feeling of being caned on the soles of her feet as sending shockwaves through her body which felt similar to the sensations that she felt during orgasm, and therefore she finds it tremendously arousing. I would imagine that both this positive reaction and my initial negative reaction would have been caused by the layout of nerves in the foot: she's just getting struck on nicer feeling ones than I was. Or perhaps they're the same and the feeling that I found invasive and frightening feeling excite her.

I've mentioned this idea before, but I always find it very humbling when I play around in a kink other than my own. I can get to feeling very tough indeed when it comes to taking spankings. I can have a very high tolerance (I say "can" because in a vulnerable situation my tolerance is laughably low). It almost fills me with awe at how much things hurt me that *aren't* on my bottom or thighs, and my bastinado play experiments are a good example of that. Still, I think that when I want that feeling of being shocked by how painful something is, I think I'll stick to something that I find thematically more interesting (like my hands).  ♥

Turn and Face the Strange

I haven't written anything all month long.

This is one of my longer hiatuses. I have gotten a few concerned emails, asking if I'm alright, or if I've retired from blogging or something. I'm just fine, and I've certainly not gone away for good. I haven't *meant* to go away at all. It's just been difficult to update recently, due to a combination of circumstances.

The changes in my life sort of began in earnest several months ago when Malignus and I ended our romantic, and then later, our D/s relationship. At the time, I didn't feel that I could write about it without being dramatic or excessively emotional, so I simply didn't. It wasn't a secret, obviously, but I didn't feel that it was appropriate to sit down and write a big post about how we'd split up. The process was obviously not easy, but it was ultimately the right thing to do.

Additionally, and un-relatedly, YS and I have recently decided to end our D/s dynamic. We've grown and changed as people, and our dynamic was no longer serving the same purpose that it originally did. The dynamic had become punctilious, and more of a formality than anything else as we both developed in different directions.

SF is currently taking a hiatus from the scene because a horrible personal tragedy befell him recently, and it's taking a long time for him to recover from it (quite understandably). I know he'll eventually be back, and he knows I'll be there when he is! PTL and I have a horrible combination of impossibly busy schedules (hers much more extreme than mine!) and therefore have little time for bossing interactions these days. That was mostly just "for fun" anyway.

In the meantime, this means that my flowchart has become pretty straight-forward:

Current Bossiness Flowchart

As opposed to this, 9 months ago:

This didn't happen by design. It's just been a year of changes. Nothing's quite as sure as change. There's lots of room for off-chart bossing in my life, of course, and there's a good handful of people that I choose to listen to when they tell me to do something.

There's another very big change that's happening in my life: I'm in the process of moving from Sioux Falls back to Los Angeles. It was time for that, and it just makes sense right now. Last week, Epipelagic came to visit and she helped me to pack ALL MY STUFF into boxes and space bags. Space bags are one of the greatest things of all time, by the way. Watching all the air get vacuumed out of the bags is extremely gratifying. Once everything was packaged, Epipelagic did most of the organization of my car. It nearly defies the laws of physics. She turned my car into a bag of holding. She's a wonderful friend, by the way, and I'm so glad that I'll be living near her again. I value our friendship so much, and I can't wait to see how it grows and develops in the coming years.

Leaving Sioux Falls was hard. It's never easy to leave a place where you lived, even if I was never truly suited for life in a small, Midwestern city like that. I'll miss everyone that I got close to there very much. I realize that I didn't have a very drawn out or formal goodbye process as I left. I can't really say why that is-- it just felt like leaving quietly was the most comfortable thing for me to do. The other day, I drove from Sioux Falls to Denver, where I had a few shoots before continuing on my way. Driving away from the place that had been my home for the past two years was difficult. I was dazzled by the beauty of the landscape as I passed into the part of the state that wasn't so flat. The sun was shining through the clouds, and it would start to rain, but the rain never lasted long.

I'm in Denver for a few more days and then I'm going to Texas to see Mila, WYO and LLB, do more shooting and sessions and probably swim in the pool in my underwear some more, because that's how I do. After that, Mila and I are going to drive from Dallas to Vegas, stopping in New Mexico to visit Heather Green for a bit, and in Phoenix and or Tucson for shoots on the way. Vegas, of course, will be Shadowlane, the superlative spanko gathering place! We'll be heading to Los Angeles from there, where Mila will visit for a few days and then I'll begin my new life there. It's tremendously, amazingly exciting. I can't wait. I love everything about the life that I'm going to have.

So, that's the state of things right now. I'm ultimately in a very good place, and my life is only going to get better and better.

Stress and Relief

(I'm posting Valentine's Day next. OUT OF ORDER. CALL THE POLICE*.) 

Updated, due to some poor wording that upon re-reading kind of made me sound like a bitch.

Well, I'm blog posting again. It's been a while, I know. I'm very sorry for not having been diligent. I've just been very busy recently, and rather overwhelmed. In addition to working on several long term projects, I'm getting ready to leave home for six weeks. I've been gone for this long once, but the whole thought is very intimidating. As much as I know that I'll have a remarkable time, I tend to get very nervous before trips. There's so much that needs to be planned and organized, and if I'm being honest, I'm still very bad at that. As babyish as it sounds for someone who likes to fancy herself a strong and independent woman, I feel a preemptive sadness about leaving Malignus if I let myself. Before I left for July Crimson Moon, I got so upset about it that I almost didn't want to leave at all.

This morning, I had a few pieces of news that made me more stressed out. I knew that later that day, I was going to do something that I was nervous about because it involved confrontation. The day started the way that they usually do, despite this. Malignus and I spent time together before he had to leave for work. Then he started to get his power cables together to take his laptop and phone charger with him to work. Then he gave me a fairly strong swat with the bunch of cables. I very nearly cried.

"Did that hurt?" he asked.

"Yes, Sir," I said.

"Come here, I'm going to even it out." I walked over to the bed and plopped on it with my bottom up. "Well, take your pants down!"

"You gave me the last one over my pants, though!" I protested.

"Are you arguing with me?" he asked very seriously.

"Yes," I admitted, feeling very sheepish. I pulled my pants down and tried very hard to get in position. I knew under various layers of stuff that I really, really wanted to be spanked. I was stressed out, and spanking is the greatest stress relief possible in my life. I just couldn't find submission through all the nonsense that was worrying my brain. It took me a good minute before I finally accepted the fact that I was going to be spanked. Even then, I didn't do the best job of taking it, wiggling and protesting for the ten strokes which followed. I fell out of position at one point and had to be coaxed back where I belonged. I was crying and struggling, even though there was nothing particularly challenging about the spanking compared to others.

"This last one is going to be hard. Do you understand?" Malignus asked me. I couldn't catch my breath from crying. "Yes, Sir?" he prompted. I just lay there, not yet ready to answer. Finally, I did, and I was met with a very hard stroke which pushed me to cry even more.

"Come here," Malignus instructed, beckoning me to sit next him on the edge of the bed. I pulled up my panties but abandoned my pants and I sat down. He wrapped me in a hug that filled me with a sense of safety and comfort that I've rarely ever known outside of the spanking world. I clung to him. Then he said "I'm going to hit you some more." This time, I tried to accept and did a better job of being resigned. He raised his hand and began to smack the fronts of my thighs. This is a very sensitive area, and one which makes me feel particularly submissive. I know that while he hit me quite a few times, none of them were particularly hard compared to what I was used to, but I sobbed. Everything in my existence was about crying and continuing to cling to him. It was in that moment that I realized that I needed this. I needed to get the stress out of my body. I needed to let go. I needed to trust him to do what was best for me and fight against this. All these feelings fueled me to cry more and more, until he stopped and I found myself nearly hyperventilating. I held my breath for a second as he stroked my back and then gently and comfortingly rubbed my thighs, then returned to a fairly normal breathing pace. "Have you returned to that place of calm?" he asked and I affirmed: "Yes, Sir." "Good girl," he praised, and I basked in this for a moment. Once I was feeling safe and good, he told me to get up and started to put pillows in position for an OTK spanking. "We'll finish this up with something nicer for you," he told me. He didn't grab an implement, and that made me feel very relaxed and loved.

I kicked my panties all the way off without really knowing why, but probably on some internal level because I wanted to feel very vulnerable, then I got over his lap. The spanking was not too hard, not too fast and made me feel very, very comforted. Still, at one point, when he picked up the intensity a bit, I started to struggle and protest. "This is still a spanking, Alex," he reminded me, and I tried to be passive. I was never really as successful at it as I would have liked to have been, but that feeling of being loved, of being elevated and safe and relaxed kept coming back and it was wonderful. "Do you want to decide how hard you're spanked?" he asked me.

"No, Sir," I responded.

"Do you want to decide how long your spanking lasts?"

"No, Sir."

From there on out, I managed to remain relaxed, although the time wasn't substantial. When we finished and Malignus hugged me again, I felt much better. I know that it's my responsibility to take care of my own stress, but there's just something wonderful about the feeling when someone chooses to step in. I'm a very luck girl to be loved as much as I am. :)

*Note- Please do not actually call the police. Reporting a false emergency is a crime. 

Intimacy, Vulnerability, Safety

On Thursday night, after Malignus and I had returned home from the various things we'd done that day, he called me into the bedroom. His tone was very gentle, but the words that he chose left no room for confusion. "Come into the bedroom and shut the door," is Malignus for "it's time for a spanking."

It was the 31st, and therefore time to finish up the remaining spankings from New Years. There were five days worth of spanking left to be accounted for. Instead of grabbing a handful of random implements like he did last time, though, this time, Malignus was simply holding one: the hairbrush.

This particular hairbrush is a formidable adversary. It's an antique, oval shaped brown ebony hairbrush that WearYouOut gave to me as a gift, and it's as solid as a rock. It has a fairly small spanking surface compared to some other hairbrushes. Being totally honest, it's probably my favorite implement that is currently in our collection. Hairbrush spankings just feel right to me. They work perfectly for OTK and they have the traditional and domestic feeling that I really prefer over the more BDSM-y feeling implements. There's also the fact that a hairbrush was the first implement which I was spanked with all those years ago, which gives it the highest level of familiarity to me. This particular hairbrush is a favorite because while it's very emotionally comfortable for me, it hurts like a sonofabitch. It's one of the most severe OTK implements that we own. I'm all about the combination of feeling emotionally comfortable while being physically pushed towards my limits, and this is an implement which works well for that.

The hairbrush in question is balanced on my back after PTL and Heather Green gave me my first ever spanking with it at Shadowlane.

As warm as my feelings are towards that hairbrush, it certainly causes my stomach to flop whenever it's about to be used. The idea of getting five sets of 67 swats with it was a little intimidating, to say the least. Still, I was excited. I really wanted a spanking. It had been absolutely freezing outside that night: -32F after the windchill and I had been outdoors and walking through the snow far more than I would have preferred to. I felt chilled to the bone. I could think of nothing that would warm me like a spanking would.

Malignus sat down on the bed and set out pillows for my face as I bared myself for the spanking. I was wearing layers to protect from the cold: jeans under a sweater dress. I decided to take my jeans all the way off, then pulled down my panties and gathered my dress at my waist. Then I got over his lap. Malignus rubbed my back gently for a moment and then announced: "I'm going to spank you now."

The first line of conversation during a spanking starts the tone of the scene for me. "Hold still, I'm gonna hit you with stuff" is the start of a lighthearted or arbitrary spanking. "Why are you getting this spanking, Alex?" leaves no question in my mind that the spanking to follow will be chastising. "I'm going to spank you now" makes me feel instantly submissive. In the context of a scene, just hearing the word "spank" sends a shiver down my spine. It makes the spanking feel very real right away, and gives me a sense of safety and security. The calm and confident assurance that I'm going to be spanked makes aware that while the spanking is something that I personally desired, it's happening because it was decided by him, and that's a feeling that gives me a lot of comfort.

The spanking itself was hard, and it hurt in a way that only a spanking given to me by Malignus with that particular hairbrush has ever hurt. It's a deep penetrating hurt which buzzes and sparks and burns. As often happens, I met the beginning of the spanking with some resistance: mostly whining and wailing sounds and some wiggling. At one point, when I became particularly vocal, Malignus reminded me that "it's supposed to hurt." In some contexts, that sounds trite, almost mocking. Here, it was reassuring and gave me a positive reminder of what I wanted from the spanking. I wanted it to hurt. It wouldn't be a "real" spanking if it didn't. I tried to focus on that fact, instead of on the areas of my mind which wanted to escape from the pain, which didn't want to accept the spanking.

After what felt like a long time, Malignus stopped and told me that we were 3/5ths of the way through the spanking. It felt to me as if the entire thing should have been done by then, but this information gave me a feeling of resignation. Following this, we had a conversation which made me feel significantly more vulnerable, but also very safe and submissive. He asked me if I wanted the rest of the spanking to be on my bare bottom or if I'd rather redress. He assured me that the rest of the spanking would be with the hairbrush, and reminded me of just how much that hurt. I knew what I wanted: that I really did want to be bare and vulnerable and that I wanted the spanking to hurt as much as possible. The trouble was in saying this. Malignus gave me as long as I needed to "really think about what I was saying" and gently rubbed my back as I thought. This pushed me over some sort of edge. I felt the rest of my resistance crumbling, and with it, a lot of the stress that had accumulated through regular every day life. I started to cry. There was something different about starting to cry during a part of a spanking that wasn't physically painful. It felt...pure. I felt genuine with myself, like I wasn't keeping anything back. It was at that point that I asked to be spanked on the bare, so he began to spank me again.

I perceived the next "set" as being much harder than those that had come before, but this was probably because of my mental and emotional state. I tried hard to represent the submission that I was feeling internally in the way that I was responding, but I'm not sure if I did this ideally or not. I know that I cried, and I cried away all the things that were feeling wrong in me. When the fourth set was finished, Malignus told me that he'd be finishing up with his hand. Hand spanking is the most intimate thing for me. I obviously don't mean this in a sexual way, but I feel the strongest connection, the most closeness and the strongest form of physical communication from an OTK spanking with just a hand. This was perfect then. When he finished the final set, we exchanged our final "Happy New Years!" statements, although I hardly remember this. He then went on to spank me more, just because he felt like it.

When it was finished, I felt positively edified. It's the only word I have for it. I felt like I'd not just spewed out all the stress that was in me in the form of tears on my pillow, but I'd instead replaced it with some sort of tranquility and a renewal of strength. I know that this might sound almost silly, but it was a profound experience for me.

It's really wonderful to be loved.

Curious About: Revisted

Over a year ago, I made a post detailing my spanking related bucket list. I've had an incredible variety of experiences since then, and I think it's a good time to look back on the things that I was previously curious about. I haven't done everything on this list yet, but I've been able to cross of a large number of the items. :D

Getting spanked with a bath brush
Check.

Not the best photo in terms of capturing the color, but still nice, right?

"Bath brushes are a nice thing to get spanked with," said no one, ever. 
Still, I'm glad to have added them to my repertoire of things that I get hit with. There's a certain comfort that comes from being hit with something you really don't like by someone that you trust. It's also a great implement for the times when I want to feel overwhelmed by a spanking. It certainly gets that job done. Scale is important to me: it's good to have implements in our collection that are somewhat comfortable on either an emotional level or which just aren't that physically awful and to have things on the other end of that spectrum. Still, it's not something I'm going to let just anyone hit me with. :)

Being co-topped
Semi-check

I've certainly had a few experiences with cotopping, but it's still something I'd like to explore more. One method of this which I've done quite a few times is a round-robin style spanking, where I moved from one Top to another getting spanked by each one. Another that I tried a few times, especially at the Cabin Party is the method where I was positioned across both Tops' laps and shifted forward so that the second one could spank me after the first finished (see photo above). Cotopping is something that I'd like to do more with, though. I'd ideally like to have two Tops, particularly people who I already felt close to, take turns between strokes, especially with one Top standing on either side of me. I've seen people do scenes like this at parties, and it's something I remain curious about. 

Getting spanked on a wet bottom
Check!

Swimsuit spanking!

This is another thing which I'm glad I've tried, but which certainly isn't high on my list of preferences. I experienced this for the first time during a video with Lily Starr where she dragged me out of the shower in order to put me over the bed and spank me with a bathbrush. Later, at TASSP, Malignus spanked me directly after we'd gotten out of the pool. I was a bit more dry then, but it still was extra stingy. At the Cabin Party, YS spanked me while we were in the hot tub outdoors, which was an assortment of interesting sensations: cold air, warm body, wet bottom. Later at that same party, the Tops all assembled to gang up on girls who were coming in from the hot tub and I got spanked by about six people in a row on my wet bottom. Lots and lots of adventures in wet bottom spanking!

Attending spanking parties
Huge check. 
In the past year, I went from having never been to any kind of spanking party to having attended two cabin parties, one local party in Denver, TASSP, two Crimson Moons and Shadowlane. I'm now basically addicted to them, and plan to go to all the parties, ever. :D

Sitting down in the snow after a hard spanking
Still curious.
There was no snow when we were in Colorado and that was the only time when I really got spanked outside very much. I did a little bit of it during my first Cabin Party, but there was very limited snow available at the time. I still think it's a good idea. :)

Getting spanked on the beach
Still curious.
I don't know where exactly I'd find a beach where I felt comfortable enough to do this, but the idea continues to tickle me. I think it could either be lots of fun or extremely relaxing, depending on how it was done. 

Getting spanked in my car
Semi-check.

Taken after Amoni spanked me in her car.

I've actually never been spanked in my personal car, although Amoni spanked me in the back of her car once. It was actually fairly comfortable, although obviously not the ideal set up. This scene was pretty light hearded, considering the fact that she's my friend and we were in the backseat of her car in front of her house in the middle of the woods at night. She handed me a hairbrush and said "think about what a naughty person you are." 
I've also been hit on my thigh while Malignus was driving basically every day that we've ever ridden in the same car, although that's not exactly the same thing. I plan on buying an actually new car (instead of just a "new to me" car) in the next year or so, and I'm sure that I'd be able to convince Malignus to spank me in it to celebrate its procurement. :D

Getting an extremely long spanking
Check!

Danny Creighton spanking me for a really long time at a Scarlet Moons party.

I've had two experiences which I think fall into this category, although there's certainly a lot more to explore here. I'll start by saying that I had received a couple of fairly long spankings before I made this post. One of these was probably my favorite spanking ever, where I fell into subspace for the first time and I really have no idea how long it lasted. Because of the spacing out, it never seemed extremely long, but in retrospect (and after talking to Malignus about it) I realize that it was somewhat epic. Another very long spanking was a hand spanking which YS gave me during the Cabin Party (a lot of noteworthy things happened during that party). That was really lovely indeed: he spanked me with his hand for at least 45 minutes, varying speed and intensity so that it was never "easy" but never overwhelming either. I just snuggled against him and felt very safe and cozy.

The most recent of my spankings of epic proportions took place at the Scarlet Moons party which I attended with Amoni in Denver. This was the first time I actually got to meet Danny Creighton (who, by the way, I am seeing and getting spanked by in less than 12 hours) and after Amoni and I hung out with him and Sophie for a while, we decided that the only right thing in the world would be for him to spank me. :) He did so quite thoroughly and for quite an extended period of time, making me positively blissed out despite the constant group of people coming and going. He mostly used his hand, but occasionally threw in swats with a wooden paddle, which really confused my brain because I was not paying very careful attention to what, exactly was going on behind me, just the fact that I felt lovely and relaxed. He finished the whole thing up quite a bit later with some belting, which was much more energizing than relaxing, but was done with a presence and tone that made me turn to putty inside. (Oh hey, I can't wait for tomorrow! This is like, Christmas Eve or something!)

Purchasing leather implements
Still curious.

Leather remains an area which I need to keep exploring. I've had scenes with leather implements which I've really enjoyed, and I know that if I had more leather choices in the implement bag I'd probably do more of it at home which would make me even more accustomed to the sensation. 

Cutting a switch
Mostly check.

I've been switched a couple of times, most notably in a treehouse with ellee by Robert Wolf. Switches are stingy and kind of mean, but there continues to be something interesting about them to me. I've never done the sort of scene where a girl is sent out to select and cut her own switch and bring it back to be spanked with, though, and I think that's something that I'd like to do. I like the idea of the ritualized experience there, and there's something sort of intriguingly uncomfortable about selecting it on my own.

That covers my original list. I've been thinking about adding some new items to this, although those would mostly be focused around people I'd like to be spanked by or particular fantasy scenes that I have kicking around in my head and the idea of sharing those is always a little embarrassing. 
Now goodnight, I need my beauty sleep so that I can get spanked tomorrow. :D

2012, Continued

I left off from my year-in-review after describing June and the excitement it contained. I shall now pick back up with:

July

While I didn't blog about it, I had an amazing 25th birthday on July 6th, during which I visited with friends, got to go to Bear Country (my favorite of places!) got lovely birthday spankings and received my most beloved pets, Telsa and Newton the guinea piggies, from Malignus. It was seriously great.

Later that month, I started out on a series of adventures which would keep me away from home for most of the rest of the summer. This began with Chicago Crimson Moon. I had lots of fun and met many cool people for the first time, and I got to spend more quality time with some people I really care for. From Chicago, I flew to LA for another visit, which was fun and exciting.

August

August started out in Los Angeles, where I got to visit with friends and eat lots of delicious ethnic treats. Especially noteworthy was the time that I spent visiting with Erica Scott and the adventures that Lily Starr and I shared. While there, I celebrated my seventh "Spankoversary" which I discovered takes place on Consensual Spanking Day.  From Los Angeles, I traveled to Texas to do more shooting and have more adventures. I stayed with WYO and LLB and got to get really close with them. They've become some of my favorite people, and I'm really thankful to have them in my life! Near the end of my visit with them, Heather joined us there for a night and then the next morning, the two of us took off on a road trip of epic proportions which would eventually land us at the Mother of All Spanking Parties: Shadow Lane. It was an epic party where I got to meet and hang out with lots of awesome people, and, because of the company I got to keep, was probably the best party I've been to at present.

My regret for the month of August is that Richard Windsor didn't spank me when we met, but I've set things in motion to make my future spanking from him inevitable. :)

September

September started out as a recovery month for me. I landed back in Sioux Falls after having been gone for six weeks straight and was very glad to see Malignus again. I celebrated the completion of my first year as a spanking model and my 100th blog post.  I did lots and lots of sleeping to make up for time lost while on the road. After I was caught up, I had a big event. I had organized my first spanking get together, a private cabin party in Colorado. It was amazing. Things came together extremely well, and everyone had a great time. I got to see a ton of people I care about and spent lots of quality time with them. There were lots of outdoor spankings, including outdoor switchings:

We traveled on and came across a series of small, young birch trees. The area that I chose to get a cabin in happened to, entirely by chance, be largely without deciduous trees, so this was a bit of a rarity. As we viewed them, the Tops pointed out that they were very supple and swishy looking and would make excellent switches.

"Oh darn!" I exclaimed. "No one has a knife with them. What a shame. I guess we can't have any switches."

Robert pulled a knife out of his pocket. If life was a comic book, there would have been a "SNIKT" sound effect. My face looked like this: -_-.

Shortly after a large number of switches had been cut, we climbed up to a small tree house. We got inside and ellee and I received treehouse switchings. The joy of being in a treehouse and being spanked while viewing an incredible landscape almost took away the sting. Key word: almost.


October

Photo copyright Amoni Jones

October was the month where I SUCKED at blogging. I did basically none of it, only banking two entires. I did, however, have lots of important things happen. For one, after returning home from the cabin party, I realized that not only did I feel naturally submissive towards YS, I really liked feeling submissive towards him. There were little moments during the party where I knew that things just felt right. After consulting with ellee to make sure she was alright with it (as she is my best friend, after all) I asked YS to take me under consideration and he agreed. I think that same day, or maybe the next, ellee asked Malignus to do the same thing for her. I really like the system that was created: ellee and I have always been sisterly and there's something that makes the world feel like it is in its proper order that we both answer to the same pair of people. It was also in October that I went to Los Angeles for more epic adventures in modeling, visited Disneyland with Lily Starr and Robert Wolf, shot Sternwood Academy, Volume 2, went to Denver and shot a billion amazing pictures with Amoni, filmed with Real Spankings AND went to Crimson Moon's Halloween party, where my Bad Counterpart (theBadAlex) and I discovered the horrors of eyebrow threading and were probably both traumatized for life. Busy. Month.


November

November was another resting month, and the beginning of some winter time off. There was a drastic increase in my posting frequency during this month, due to YS' new leadership: he implemented rules ensuring that I post frequently enough to keep everyone happy.
For Thanksgiving, Malignus and I traveled to Texas where we spent it with WYO, LLB and an assortment of other awesome spankos. It was a great time. I love being at their place: wonderful friendship, delicious food, nightly hot tubbing, hard spankings, cute puppy. What more could a girl ask for in life, really? I also spent lots of time working on plans for Malignus' (then) upcoming birthday surprises. Near the end of the month, I got grounded from using the light on the stove for leaving it on too often. I'm including this because it still seems rather ridiculous to me, both that I would get such a simple thing wrong and that I'd end up getting so much grief for it.

December

December was, by leaps and bounds, the highest traffic month that my blog ever saw. This is probably largely owed to YS' encouragement, an attempt that I started making to put more of my narrative writing skills into some of my posts and the fact that a couple of my posts ended up on Chross' list. Certainly not without effect on this is the fact that I was nominated for Creative Spanking Blog of the Year over at The Spanking Spot, an honor which made me extremely proud. Early in the month I had kind of a break through scene with Malignus, which was also noteworthy because I feel it was one of the only times I've actually been able to successfully write up a scene-story in a way that could be meaningful to anyone other than myself.

The holidays descended on us! At first, our festivities began slowly, but as friends got involved, things picked up pace. We started out with one Christmas ornament: a tiny ornament of a wooden spoon with a red handle (like some awful thing that a lot of girls are familiar with). By the time New Years rolled around, we had lights, a small but beautiful tree with a bunch of great decorations on it, Christmas cookies, Christmas stockings, wrapped presents, candy and I even got Christmas pajamas. Malignus got me a Kitchenaid mixer, something I'd always dreamed about. I was a really freaking happy girl, and I had a very Merry Christmas indeed.

The highlight of the month, and possibly of the year, was Malignus' birthday, though. I secretly planned a series of five surprises for him: first, ellee arrived at the house for a surprise visit. Then, I left the two of them alone to enjoy some time together while I snuck off and retrieved Heather Green. After their weekend ended, Malignus was pretty sure that was that was the end of his festivities. It was not. The next weekend, PTL ALSO arrived for ANOTHER secret visit! This also included his fourth surprise, a birthday cake with the words "It's your birthday again" on it.

Malignus' cakes from last year (left) and this year. 

Needless to say, he loved it. His final surprise arrived a few days after his actual birthday: it was a book that I'd made for him. I asked as many people as I could think of who I knew were close to Malignus in some capacity to make a page for this book, expressing whatever sentiment they wanted to share. Because of time constraints and other situations, not everyone was able to participate, but I still got 20+ awesome pages, all of which brought a huge smile to Malignus' face. Heather and I even designed a page from her dog, Lucy. Malignus likes Lucy so much he did not even think this was stupid.


Future

By the time that New Year's Eve rolled around, I was supposed to be finishing this post, but I instead got goofy on the one glass of champagne that I had and didn't get around to it, preferring NOT to write when tipsy and stupid. The first day of 2013 was great, the next two, not as much, but I know things will pick up. I'm looking forward to having a wonderful year!

Thanks to everyone who made 2012 one of the best years ever. Love you guys. ♥