Please Vote For Deathless Love

Will you do me a favour? Just click on this link and then vote for Deathless Love by Renee Rose as November's favourite story. You only have until the early hours of Saturday morning British time to cast your vote so please get a-clicking.

What's it about? It's a spanking vampire story, what more do you want to know? OK, go on then, if you insist I'll tell you that it is the story of Kate, who sings at a club owned by Dom the vampire. When not nibbling her neck he has her across his knee with skirts up and panties down to teach her that even the undead have feelings that a thoughtless female can insult.

It's a great tale so vote for Renee Rose and Deathless Love! 

Amazon UK          Amazon USA

EL James 50 Shades Interview

 

An interesting interview with EL James. authoress of the Fifty Shades trilogy. She leaves open the possibility of more books in the series, and if that was not enough to get the eyes rolling, she then wants us to believe that she is embarrassed by men reading her fantasies. Given that those fantasies started out as Twilight fan fiction I am dubious that this lady can be embarrassed about anything, but never mind.

Vampires and Spanking!

Edgar, Laird MacReiver, had never regretted his decision to wed Isobel, daughter of Clan Kilburn’s laird…until she bit his tongue and drank his blood. Will tying her hands, spanking her rump and making her come tame the wild child of the infamous vampire clan?

Or are some women too dangerous to tame?

I nearly fell out of my chair when the above news release arrived in my in-box. A spanking vampire story had to happen sooner or later, folks, and this one looks like its a gem. 

If you want to read it then Amazon UK have the e-copies, at a very reasonable 77p and in the USA it's available from the company's American base.

Classic 1980s spanking clips here!

Is This The End Of Men?

You cannot open a newspaper this week without reading about Hanna Rosin's new book, The End of Men: And the Rise of Women. Before we go any further, here's a money saving tip: whenever you hear of a new academic thesis being touted in hardback, always look for the original journal article that started it all off. That way you save a shitload of brass and get the full thesis delivered up in its purest form, without all the padding that gets added to fill a book. Who in their right minds ever invested in Francis Fukuyama's The End of History when The End of History? - note the question mark - is available all over the web? 

The Rosin Thesis has it that the economy has changed fundamentally and that women are better adapted to those changes. Thus they are taking over in the workplace and leaving men with their dicks in their hands, unable to cope. It is a lovely, all-encompassing idea, which shares one thing in common with that of Fukuyama at the end of the Cold war: it is total, complete and utter bollocks.

Fukuyama had it that history as a process leading towards something in the Hegelian sense was ending with the triumph of liberal, global capitalism. He argued that no competing world system would emerge, an idea which the rise of political Islam makes untenable. Fukuyama thought that he was putting forward a pan-cultural idea, but in reality it turned out to be a thesis that was only valid in the West, and perhaps only for a limited period as Western influence declines in the South of our planet.

Hanna Rosin has the same problem. She thinks that because the western economy  now has more use for compliant women instead of argumentative men that this makes for sea change in the way that the rest of the world will behave. That they will suddenly become just like us in other words, which is the trap that Fukuyama fell into.

The rest of the world will continue to treat us as effete losers, to be ignored as western military power declines with our economies. In Russia when a chap wants a secretary he might decide to invite applicants to flash their tits for the camera, with the girl who has the nicest pair getting the job. Eastern Europe believes firmly in the old notion that promotion comes via nepotism, cronyism and corruption, with the devil take anyone who is fool enough to be honest. Women will quite cheerfully take the horizontal road to success, as they do in Latin-America, a region that has a lot in common with Eastern Europe in terms of its social mores.

The military and economic declines of the west go hand in hand, and as first Greece and now Spain fall into an economic abyss, the notion that the western way offers anything useful to the lusty barbarians who live just over the borders must seem foolish to them. Given that they breed and the western middle class does not, the notion that tomorrow will belong to today's girls strikes me as risible. As risible as the notion that the working class men who are now dismissed as Chavs will lift a finger to help, come to think about it.

Tomorrow will not be like today, but it will be uncommonly like yesterday. Now then, let me look for a new secretary...

Amazon UK     Amazon USA     Feedaread     Clips

Book Review: Diary of a Submissive

I went to WH Smith's in Manchester the other day to buy a Kobo e-book reader, and I saw that the entrance to the shop was pretty much stuffed with erotica. Sophie Morgan's Diary of a Submissive caught my eye and I began to flip through it. The rather sweet blonde girl who was selling me the Kobo offered to let me have The Diary of a Submissive for £3.00 or so, and on impulse I let her load it onto my new toy.

Sophie Morgan's book is advertised as the words of a genuine submissive, but I have my doubts about that. In fact, I have my doubts that the writer is even a woman, and for two reasons:

Firstly, she fills the book with references to her "arse" and her "slit." Those are very masculine nouns and women tend to avoid using such vulgarities. It is not proof positive that the writer is a man, but as I read through the book, the heavy emphasis on vulgar euphemisms made me suspect that it might be.

Secondly, women are good at describing emotions, and men shine when it comes to descriptions of actions. This book is excellent in the descriptive category, but lacks an awful lot of the emotion that women just excel at writing. Speaking as a writer of erotica myself, I could have written this book, but there is no way on earth that I could ever have turned out Fifty Shades of Grey. It is the difference between a female writing style and a male.

Being of a curious bent, I began to investigate this authoress and her work further. It turns out that the book was first issued by Xcite Books in 2010 as Subtext: A Modern Day Tale Of Female Submission, by Kate Marley. By all accounts the earlier version was marketed as a new Story of O, with no claims being made that it was a memoir.

Aside from the change of title and name of the authoress, there are some other changes to the two versions. The main dominant in Subtext is called Josh and for some reason he becomes James in the Diary of a Submissive. He also becomes very rich and Sophie Morgan starts to blush a lot as well as roll her eyes, thus earning more discipline. A cynic would argue that Penguin bought the rights to this work of fiction and the writer added those Fifty Shades of Grey details, before the whole thing was then punted out as a memoir, rather than a novel.

It could very well be that my fears are groundless and what we have here is a genuine submissive who writes like a man, chose to change her pen name and add some details to her manuscript that seem to have been lifted from Fifty Shades.

On the other hand this book could just be a novel...

Janus Reviews A Spanking Good Life

The new Janus website reviewed A Spanking Good Life in April this year and here is their opinion:


We were delighted at Janus to receive a copy of ‘A Spanking Good Life’ by Nick Urzdown to review. Those with knowledge of the history of Janus will know that long-time Janus editor AG Van Okker also published his memoirs under the same title more than 30 years ago.

Nick’s book succeeds on a number of different levels. The real life descriptions of the many spankings he has administered are rich in detail. You genuinely feel as though you are on a journey with him through all the naughty girls he has known and corrected over the years. There’s also plenty to enjoy about the history of spanking magazines, the industry in general and Janus in particular (although we don’t recognise some of the events Nick describes!).

Nick is refreshingly honest about the emotionally difficult events in his life which provides the reader with a real insight into how he became the man he is today. Like him or not you have to respect him for choosing to live a life completely true to himself.

‘A Spanking Good Life’ is a great read – we think Van would have approved. You can buy a copy of Nick’s book on Amazon and read his blog here.

The 50 Shades of Grey Review

Raven started singing the praises of Fifty Shades of Grey almost two years ago before its phenomenal sales  hit the stratosphere. She said that the first book was amazing, but that books two and three were a disappointment. I have just managed to get through Fifty Shades of Grey and have no intention of even opening the next two volumes of the trilogy.

Don't get me wrong, I am glad that these books have been written as their success should have a knock on effect for the rest of us who write BDSM/CP works. Given the amazing success that C.L. James has had with her books compared to my fairly humble sales up to now, this review could come over as sour grapes, but that is not its aim. Anything that increases our profile is good for all of us, but I just wish that James had written something that was less like a Mills and Boon novel with some spanking thrown in.

That Fifty Shades of Grey owes more to romantic fiction than it ever will to la cosa nostra will be obvious to even the casual reader. Anastasia is our heroine, a 21 year old virgin who meets Christian, the 28 year old mega rich owner of a company based in Seattle. This is where the first doubt kicks in because the hero is just too young to play the role of a dominant, controlling man. He should have been made at least a decade older to be credible, but as a hero in romantic fiction where the age gap between the two main characters is usually about five years then he is perfect. 

This creates the second problem with Fifty Shades of Grey in that this reader was unclear if the book is primarily a BDSM work with the romantic stuff tossed in to appeal to a wider readership, or if it was intended as romantic fiction all along? It looks as if the latter is the case, and if that is so then it opens up a whole new window on Fifty Shades which emerges as little more than a book for the Mills and Boon ladies. Before anybody criticises that approach then it should be remembered that many a Mills and Boon novel contains a spanking scene where the wilful heroine is put over the hero's knee, so why not look at Fifty Shades in the same light?

Thirdly, Christian is obviously damaged goods who needs the love of a good woman to restore him to an emotional even keel. It is obvious that parts two and three of this trilogy will go into vanilla waters as the girl rescues her man, and that is not something that sends out a good image about either us or the world that we live in. The fact that men like me enjoy taking a naughty girl in hand does not mean that the girls we meet do not want to be so taken. We are people who seek each other out and do not seek to become sad vanilla losers. That is why we call them vanillas, because they are bland and boring to anyone who prefers the spicier flavours.

Finally, the prose drags on and on with seemingly no end in site as the girl spends long periods of time anguishing over whether he loves her or not. Please, the reader just wants to reach out and grab her by the neck. The guy is spending time and money on her, what more proof does the silly bitch want?

This is where Fifty Shades loses all touch with the BDSM world. The aim with out works is to create a volume where each chapter flows into the next, so that there is a complete wholeness to the book, but where each chapter can be read individually as a complete unit in itself. The rule is that providing the punter has read the introduction, then he can slip into any chapter and will know immediately what is going on. He can read the chapter, stroke one off, and get on with doing something more important with his life. That is not the case with Fifty Shades where we have to dig through acres of prose to get to the interesting bits. I must be honest and say that I began to skim read after a while and I suspect that I am not the only one.

So, Fifty Shades is a good conversation opener about our world, but it is not a good reflection of it. The prose is turgid in parts and mounds of it have to be covered to find the odd BDSM nugget. That said, you should buy it to have on your bookshelf as it will get the conversation going, especially if you have A Spanking Good Life on the shelf as well!

50 Shades of Controversy

I was planning to write a review of Fifty Shades of Grey, but that is going to have to wait a few days as I was distracted by the very entertaining controversy that is swirling around the story of its creation. Put simply, some very sad people are terribly upset because they feel hard done to by Erika Leonard, the authoress of the trilogy, who writes as SnowQueens-IceDragon and E.L. James.

Those sad people are based around the world of fan fiction, a genre that I did not even know existed until I began to look into the origins of 50 Shades. In a nutshell Erika Leonard wrote the whole 50 Shades trilogy in chapters which was then uploaded as a work called Master of the Universe to a fan fiction site, that was dedicated to the Twilight novels. The Twilight fans - and there are thousands of these people - then helped her edit each chapter until it became a far more readable commodity. For instance, the authoress is British and needed help to turn her English terminology into the curious colonial dialect spoken in the United States. The readership did that for her and generally acted as editors should with the evolving manuscript, the difference being that in this case they did it for free. That is the root of the controversy because these fans claim that they only dedicated long hours to the work because they thought that Erika Leonard, or SnowQueens-IceDragon which was the nickname she used, was as much a fan of Twilight as they were, and it is obvious that she is nothing of the kind.

What is fan fiction? As the name suggests it is the fiction written by fans of a particular book or series, using the same names as the original characters, but either putting  them in different scenarios or creating a whole new reality for them. Erika Leonard took the second path which is why her work is a homage to Twilight, and cannot be seen as plagiarism of it. She kept the names from Twilight, but her Edward is a fabulous wealthy businessman and not a vampire, and the BDSM element which is central to 50 Shades is missing from Twilight. Nevertheless, she kept enough of the Twilight personalities in her fiction to please the fans and they raved over her work as it was uploaded chapter by chapter.

What this authoress had done was upload a completely new novel to an existing consumer base. To attract attention from that base she used the names from the main characters in Twilight and some of their personality traits. What she got was a fan base of her own and Master of the Universe began to attract attention from some of the publishing houses who keep an eye on these fan fiction sites. One such outfit is The Writers' Coffee Shop who eventually bought out the work as the 50 Shades trilogy. Obviously the names had to be changed, but aside from that the two works are almost identical.

That was when Erika's chums became her enemies as they started to scream that she was betraying the fan fiction ethos, that she had used them shamelessly, and so on and so forth. To be candid it looks to me as if Erika did play these people as suckers, but as W.C. Fields used to say, we never give a sucker an even break, so they deserved all they got in my view. If they were stupid enough to work hard for nothing more than a pat on the head then that serves them right.

As 50 Shades till sits on top of the best seller lists the rest is history. If you want to read the pathetic whining of some of Erika's former friends, then you might want to start with this site, if you can stomach it, as the writer behind it is one of the major whiners in all of this. One writer who has criticised Erika without whining is Jami Gold and you can read her piece at this link.

There the matter rests. Obviously Erika Leonard has not crossed any legal lines as no writs have been issued, so the claim is that she engaged in ethical misbehaviour. I do not accept that, but I would be interested in hearing your views.

Fifty Shades of Grey

Universal has paid a reported $5,000,000 for the rights to E.L. James' Fifty Shades of Grey and she has managed to negotiate some pretty extraordinary controls over the forthcoming production. Obviously the studio would not have agreed to those demands had they not been convinced that they had a winner on their hands, so is this the start of a renaissance for BDSM and CP works? Can your average friendly sleezebag porno writer now expect to be feted in quite the same way? This one waits in hope...

Spanking Books Review

Chatting to the lovely Katerina, she of the Spanking Books Review site, and I am told that her quite wonderful bit of the web does not get all that many hits. This is a terrible situation, and one that must be rectified as soon as possible. Come on your spankers, Katerina reviews all the latest and best CP works and gives you her honest opinion of the book. The site is a gem so please point your browser to the Spanking Books Review and give her the hits that all her hard work deserves.

A Spanking Good Book Review

Katerina over at the Bottoms Up Book Review page has given A Spanking Good Life the once-over, so let's start by thanking her for that. I suppose all authors are supposed to hate reviewers, but I take the view that there is no such thing as bad publicity and since Katerina's site is the must-go place for reviews of the latest spanking books, the publicity that she has given me is pure gold.

Needless to say I am going to take issue with two of her points. The first is that my book deals with "a handful of encounters" that I have had over the years. I think that twenty-three is rather more than a handful, but never mind, as that comes down to opinion.

More importantly, Katerina argues that I have "a contempt and obvious disdain for the fairer sex," and that is something which I am dubious about to put it mildly. Looking at the accounts in the book, Paloma and Caroline both emerged as clear winners in our encounters, and that is acknowledged in the text. The fact that I ended some other encounters as master of the battlefield only proves that you win some and you lose some.

Let me not quibble about minor matters. Katerina makes the point that men either like my book or they don't, but that women will probably hate it, but will want to carry on reading it to the end. Actually, women seem to either love the book to bits or hate it with a passion, but so long as everyone buys the thing I am not going to complain about their motives.

The fact that sales have increased is due in no small measure to Katerina, so my thanks go, once again, to her.

Book Review: The Romance of Chastisement

The Romance of Chastisement; or, Revelations of School and Bedroom, by An Expert.

Delectus Classics of Erotic Literature, £19.95

This is one of the great underground classics, so it is to my eternal shame that I have to admit that I have only just read it. And I call myself a libertine...

As the scholarly introduction to the facsimile reprint of the 1888 edition makes clear, this work was originally published by John Camden Hotten in 1871. Hotten was famous for both his pornography and his thievery, being a man who would cheerfully pirate someone else's work, give it a new title and then publish it himself. Thus the version of how this work came into his grasping paws must be treated with some caution. A Nineteenth Century bibliographer, quoted in the introduction, claimed that a thousand copies were printed in Dublin and that Hotton bought 200 to sell in London. I am dubious about that claim since the work appears to be a compilation of short stories which may have circulated in pamphlet form in the London porno circuit of the day. The notion of Hotton paying for 200 copies is also highly unlikely - more probable would be him buying once copy and then pirating the rest. Since no complaints have come down to us of Irish publishers seeking redress, and since there is no record of the other 800 copies, the most likely explanation is that Hotton cobbled the work together himself from some already existing pamphlets.

To be fair to him, if that is what happened then he chose some rather nice works to print up in hardback form. The Romance of Chastisement is full of sweet young ladies who find themselves upended to feel the kiss of the cane or the birch rod's tickle across their bare bottoms. Victorian Pornography was expensive and was written for an upper class readership, so the work is literate and filled with Latin bon mots and French sentences.The modern reader is not going to get turned on with any Victorian work because tastes have changed so much over the last century, but The Romance of Chastisement is an amusing and well written excursion into the mind of the Victorian male.

Is it a must have for your collection? Yes, I would say that it is. The fact that it is so well written means that you can have it in your book case as a conversation piece if nothing else.