Cheeky Spanking Stories Blog Tour!

Today my blog is on the Cheeky Spanking Stories Blog Tour! Cheeky Spankings Stories, edited by Rachel Bussel Kramer, is one of several books published by Cleis Press that my writings have appeared in.

I was amazed to realize that this year I had six short stories accepted – a prodigious amount of writing for me, besides what I write here in my blog.
Rather than do a review of the anthology – because if Rachel is editing it, you can be sure the stories within are top quality, hot, sexy, reads! – I thought I’d tell you the “story behind the story” that she accepted for this anthology.
My story, “Lessons Learned,” was a bit of a departure for me. As I have said and written about many times, I write from personal experience. Almost every one of my stories is pulled directly from episodes in my own life, sexual experiences I have had, which are then fictionalized into a narrative. You can find the actual events that became many of my short stories right here in this blog. “Lessons Learned” is no exception, although I don’t recall if I ever blogged about the event.
What makes it different is that for this story, I turned the tables on my bottom-y self, and deliberately tried to write from a Top perspective. Well, a “toppish” perspective. I don’t think I could ever fully enter into Top space in real life, as such.  I just don’t live there, and even visiting is a stretch.
But it was precisely that stretch that I sought out in writing this story.
This is one of two published stories that came out of the Erotic Authors Association Conference that I attended last year. (The other is Voyeur Eyes Only – Sex in Sin City.) I was thrilled when I heard that Rachel Kramer Bussel, the editor of one of the anthologies I had been published in, was going to be at the conference. (I admit to having a bit of a long-distance crush on her as well.) I was also excited to meet, in real life, the person that had impacted my positive feelings about being a writer – and writing about what I know and love – so significantly. So when I got the chance to talk to her for a few minutes after one of the sessions, and she mentioned needing more stories from a “Top” perspective for this anthology, my mind started churning.
Could I write something from the opposite POV? Would it come across realistically? Would it be HOT?
If ya’ll know me, you know I was not exaggerating when I recently told someone who asked about my BDSM orientation that I am “Very bottom.”  However…it just so happened that I did have an experience – albeit an itty bitty one – that I could possibly draw on. If I could use my imagination to fill in the rest.
If I could write fiction.
It was a lovely challenge, and I jumped at it with gusto. “Lessons Learned” was the result of meeting that challenge. In it, a submissive woman gets to turn the tables and Top someone, for the pleasure of her own Top. In doing so, she discovers a part of her sexuality that she had never known existed.
In the real life version, my “Topping” was only momentary, and mostly to tease W (and to maybe show him an example of how I’d like to be spanked.) W is not always a…fan…of the warm-up. His typical mode of play can be harsh at times, even brutal, right out of the gate. The rope tying is kind of my “warm-up,” and usually it serves as such fairly well, at least from an emotional standpoint.  The physical part of it though…getting my body gradually prepared for heavier and deeper impact, warming up my skin and tissues until they are ready for more intensity – well, that usually comes after the initial brutality.  He’ll pull back and ease into lighter play at some point after the first burst of energy and sadism, and then ramp it back up again just when I am getting lulled into thinking he’s gonna be nice like that for awhile. I’m not complaining, mind you: in the four+ years we have been together, we have learned this dance that we do in play quite well. We’d be the #1 pair in that Dancing with the Stars show if BDSM was the featured dance. 😉 He knows when to push and when to hold back, and he knows that the rush of physical duress right from the start is just that: a rush that throws me deeply into that bottom space that I crave.
But this is not typically what I want from a spanking. A spanking is an entirely different animal.  To my mind, spanking is about me.  Because I have to actively ask for it, it’s about what I want. It isn’t about submission. It’s a little…greedy.  For this reason I don’t ask for it often.
And it is perhaps for this reason that W always claims he isn’t good at it. Perhaps he feels if he says that, he won’t have to try to be good at it – good meaning giving me what I want the way I want it. Perhaps that is him asserting that he’s the Top, and if he doesn’t feel like learning how to give me a “pleasurable” spanking, he damn well doesn’t have to. Maybe he’d rather send me off to someone else to have them service me that way, or maybe he just doesn’t enjoy giving the kind of spanking that I like.
In any case, what happened was that I had had a friend ask for some “lessons” in Topping, and I had talked to W, who said to bring him over. Now I had always seen this person more as a Toppish type person. But when we all got to talking, it became clear that he was fairly switch. So when he asked about spanking, and W started in the way he always does – hard and fast and brutal, taking my breath away – I came up with the bright idea of showing my friend another way it could be done. (Hoping that W was taking notes. LOL)  I gave him a “lesson” in spanking by spanking him!  And that lesson was the impetus for this story.
Our lesson ended up with me in the corner on my knees sucking off my friend – learning a different kind of lesson, I think, as W put me firmly back in my place. 😉 You’ll have to read my story in the anthology to find out how our heroine learned her lesson though.