SpanishRed

Subs Receive As Much As We Give

I’ve been in the scene for years, but I still can’t wield a flogger. Mostly, I just rush at kink with my brain in my vagina. I’m not one of those subs who can handle a bullwhip. I’ve never picked up a hitty thing unless it was to pack it away. I have no idea how to tie a futo, let alone a fisherman’s knot. This is not the recommended a...

Memoir Week Day Two: I Don't Want To Read Your Story

The trouble with the memoir genre is that writers frequently tell stories that have already been told. Perhaps you were abused or assaulted. Maybe you spent years recovering from addiction or depression. You might think these stories are worth telling because they are painful and your recovery was unique. Pain, however, isn’t enough. Everyone�...

Memoir Week Day Two: Things To Think About Before You Write a Memoir

Storytelling requires distance and objectivity. Memoir writing offers neither. When you’re telling your own story, you’re at a disadvantage every time you recall what happened in your brain during the experiences you’re describing. You can achieve objectivity, but it will require a lot of extra work. Ask me. I’ve been there...

Someone Was Stabbed On the Way Back Home

In early 2019, someone was stabbed on my train back home. We were scared of missing the train when it set off again, so we stayed in our carriage while the security team tried to find the muggers. We had a schedule, dammit, and it involved arriving home in time for lunch, even if there was someone with a knife a few carriages away. We stood. We ...

Black Hippy Chick Day: Writing in God-Mode

The average fiction novice knows everything there is to know about their book—what Sara thinks about when she’s not murdering people, what Greg does when he gets home at night, who the victim was, and what their city was like before their protagonist was even born.

This, we call “The All-Knowing Narrator” and he can bounce from bra...

Shame and Suicide Are Intricately Linked

Every now and then, I receive messages from suicidal readers. When I try to point them to a doctor or friend who’s made out of cells instead of pixels, the person who was desperate for help just a second ago dials it back to, “No. I’ll be fine.” Wild horses couldn’t drag them out of their isolation even in a crisis.

I’ve been t...

Word Choices Week Day Three: The Sounds Matter

The best lecture I ever attended was run by South African writers, Antjie Krog and Ingrid de Kok—both celebrated poets in their own rights. For this lecture, though, they were discussing translation. Both had translated the work of one of our greatest poets, Ingrid Jonker. Krog and de Kok had taken on the translation challenge in their own way...

Content Creation With Male Dogs

It's Word Choices Week, and I Have an Exercise For You

This is probably the biggest Swiss Army Knife ever built. You’re only as useful as your tools, and that baby has everything from nail files and recessed bit holders (whateve...

Blowjobs Are Objectively Important

If you’ve known me a while, you might have noticed that I’m slightly enthusiastic about blowjobs (and cupcakes). I know that’s more vanilla than ice cream (and cupcakes). It’s not going to win me any kink cred, but hear me out.

Have you ever met one of those men who prides himself on his sexual technique? Me too. After 60 mi...

The Double Standards Booty Call

I once dated one of my country’s shadow ministers. He might have been a touch too boring, but he taught me a lesson I apply to every single relationship: If a dude who’s helping run the fucking

country (!!!)

manages to find a decent amount of time to spend with me, sorry, guy, but you’re not too...

Editing Week Day Two: You're a Terrible Editor, and This Is Why

Writers and proofreaders are rarely the same people. There’s a reason for that. Just because we can edit other people’s work, doesn’t mean we can edit our own. Ask me. I proofread my own work all the time, and when it’s passed onto an editor, I still receive a veritable bloodbath of red marks. The size of your own objectivity is at its l...

It's Self-Self-Editing Week

I promised we’d talk about worldbuilding this week, but another theme keeps popping up in the workshop: How to self-edit. This week, we’re going to look at how to process your own work, and part of that has to do with when. The moment you open your work up to other people’s criticism, their feedback weaves its way into your revisi...

I'm the Most Unsubmissive Sub You'll Ever Meet

I’m a little shy if I’m tired, and pretty confident when I’m not. I’m submissive with some men, but not all. If you condescend to me, I'll bury you in angry pixels until you use your safe word.

Your safe word is, "I'm a mansplaining internet troll called "Sweetheart."

I'm not domineering or subservient. I constantly swing bet...

If You Want Respect, Choose the Right Face In the Womb

An internet stranger once told me that I only write because I’m too ugly to earn popularity through my photographs. Four days later, another stranger accused me of being too attractive. Back when I did have photographs up, men told me I looked too angry. If you have resting bitch face, you should have chosen a different physicality, but if you...

In the Kink Scene You Can Buy Acceptance For a Few Cents and a Can of Beer

When I created my Fetlife account, my health was in tatters. I’d spent two lonely months figuratively chained to my living room. I was too sick to leave my home and too ashamed of my condition to accept visitors. My Fetlife account opened a door to a different universe. You gave me the human contact I desperately needed while I patched up my b...

Black Hippy Chick Day: Adverbs

We’ve spoken about adjectivitis in the past, but adjectives have baby brothers that can become equally problematic: Adverbs. They express the “how” in a sentence:

SpanishRed ate the cupcake greedily. She was grinning madly until Bosco mischievously stole a bite. Red baulked angrily as Bosco hungrily finished his meal.

...

2025-03-05 06:04:15 +0000 UTC View Post

I Don't Give Mental Health Advice Because You Deserve Better

After my rape, I started a relationship with a psychologist. You’d think I struck it rich: at the darkest time of my life, I stumbled on the most qualified person to support me.

I was so, so wrong.

Without the boundaries that come with therapy, he had access to my fucked up psyche 16 hours a day. He could tinker and meddle to his h...

Woody Week Day One: Imposter Syndrome

It’s Woody Week, and naturally, our first post must be about imposter syndrome. I’ve known and worked with thousands of writers in my lifetime. Very few of them would call themselves writers, even if they do this as a profession. I rarely call myself a writer either. When people ask what I do, I say, “I write.” I rarely say, “I’m a w...

Confronting the Challenges of Growth Day Three: Analysis Paralysis

Writing requires us to be two people: The creative and inspired writer, and the perfectionistic editor. You must be Writer A when you set down your first draft, and you must be Writer B when you edit your work. The more you learn about literature, the bigger Writer B will grow. He’s a bully, and he loves nothing more than to destroy everything...

Confronting the Challenges of Growth Week Day Two: When You're Getting Worse, Sometimes You're Really Getting Better

University is a terrible thing for a writer. Everyone who graduates has worse writing skills than they did when they signed up—or at least that’s what they think. There comes a time in every learner’s life when they know enough to know how many mistakes they’re making. The more you know, the more critical you are of your own work, and th...

Black Hippy Chick Day: Mixed and Extended Metaphors

> All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players.

That’s one of the most famous mixed metaphors in history, and you’ve probably never thought about it as such. It qualifies, though, because people don’t play on stages. They act or perform.

A mixed metaphor is an incongruous set of comparisons—Like cheese...

Why Mid-Scene Negotiations Matter

S was the kind of top who felt his way through power exchange one guess at a time. To him, my limits were just a guide. His instincts knew better, and so he crashed through my boundaries mid-scene as though they were just another object to dominate. I remember feeling myself screaming “no” but not finding the power to voice it. It was as tho...

Men tell you how much they value you. You just need to listen a little closer

I once had a relationship with a man who was so addicted to his technology that I would find myself repeatedly sitting at a figuratively empty table staring at a wall while he texted people who weren't there. So I left him.

I’ve never regretted that choice.

I’ve also left a man for flaking on me three times in three dates for no ...

Why I Prefer Flaws in My Inbox

I receive enough stylish, stylised, polished Fetlife messages to create my own riveting anthology. The problem is they remind me of my college economics papers. My brain might be delighted at your awe-inspiring prose (how could it not be?) but the messages I respond to tend to go more like this:

“It made made ke cry.”

We all love to break something that shatters into a hundred pieces, especially on the internet

Logging into Fetlife is like following the white rabbit down the hole into Wonderland. Not a hell of a lot makes sense there. I’ve seen some absurd scenarios play out here year upon year. Groups of people get whipped up into chaos every week, but every time it happens, I’ve seen the truth get knotted up into a tangle of mob justice.

It...

Women Are Not Your Window Dressing

A couple of weeks ago, an internet stranger kindly informed me that I should take all the “ugly” stuff out of my album because it detracted from the pictures of my face. I told him I was primarily built out of personality traits, not skin and teeth, but this proved too complex a point for him to grok. He wasn’t the first, of course. Two ye...

Writing Habits Week: Find Your Rituals

Every morning I wake up before the sun. I make coffee. I review the previous day’s work, and then I do some creative writing. My brain is primed for setting words down before anyone else is awake. Susan Sontag used to keep her mornings sacred, too. She read at night and wrote when she woke up. Everyone knew never to call her before lunch. E.B....

I'm Just a Sub With a Sense of Humour

The world of a brat is covered in unicorn colours and bedazzles. On this planet, dildos fly and the rain is made of glitter. We don’t take obedience too seriously ‘round here because we’re citizens of Irreverence, so if BDSM is your religion, you’ll have to travel outside these borders to find a church. Nobody will be treating dominance ...

A Man Like That Is Hard To Find

D went with sex the way Mentos go with coke. You could almost see his bliss rising out of his body like foam. A man like that doesn’t even need to touch you. His feelings creep out of his pores and into your skin, and no pair of hands will ever feel as sublime. E’s bliss was more grit than fog, but it was equally visceral. There was no barri...