A Writing Spasm

After coming home from vacation to find the longest, most ridiculous spam ever as a comment on my last post, I found myself wondering, "Now, why can't I sit down and write these days? Crazy people can do it. Why not me?"

I've always considered myself a writer. These past few years, however, I've begun to refer to myself in my internal dialogues as "the writer who does not write." After writing 70+ pages on fairy tales for my college thesis, I thought it would be easy to rewrite some of my favorite tales. After all, the thesis was on how the primary characters of the maiden, the prince, the mother, and the father have changed in retellings of five specific fairy tales over the centuries. How simple, I thought, to take the darker elements and create modern retellings that are true to those dark roots? I write a page, two pages, and then... nothing. It's not even writer's block. I just stop trying.

When I started blogging and the words were flowing faster than my fingers could type them, I decided I would try to add my favorite past-time to the stories. After all, who doesn't want to imagine vapid Snow White getting birched by the hunter when he takes her into the woods? Or find out just how wicked Cinderella's wicked stepmother was? I had a few great ideas. I started writing them, beginnings, bits and pieces. I got ten pages into one--ten pages! too long, but I haven't written that much in years--and had finally reached the spanking scene when, once again, I just stopped.

Am I afraid of writing a spanking scene? I never have. I've described my own in short form here, but I've never realy written a scene. I feel like I'd do it justice. I simply haven't tried. I can see the scene in my head, down to the eyelet details of the main character's cotton pantaloons. It's set in the West Indies. She's sweating, the fabric clinging to her bottom, the backs of her thighs. She's never been spanked before. The man she loves beckons her forward. "Madame Marie told me you deserve to be punished, little girl," he tells her, patting his lap, "but she didn't tell me why. We'll just have to start slow and keep going until you seem contrite." She shakes her head. This isn't what Marie asked her to do the night before. When he entered her room, she had thought she would finally be in his arms. Punished? By him? Her new legs tremble. "Come here," he demands more forcefully. She steps towards him. He smiles, his teeth gleaming like pearls from the blue of his beard. She steps again.

When she reaches him, he pulls her to his right side, pressing his hand against the small of her back to bend her forward over his lap. Her white camisole rides up. The small of her back glistens. She is so pale, so delicate. He wonders whether Marie was not being cruel in asking him to punish so fragile a girl, but once she is postitioned fully over his lap, her bottom surprisingly full and straining against her cotton pants, he silently thanks the madame for this unexpected gift. He cups one cheek, then the other, testing her bottom's resiliency. She wiggles. When he slaps her once, firmly, she freezes then looks back at him slowly, shaking her hair from her eyes. He sees shock there, and confusion, but at the core of her gaze is a hunger unlike any he's seen from any woman, nevermind a pale and silent girl. In the humid evening, he shivers. "Eyes on the floor, young lady," he demands, catching the tremble in his throat. "You know what you've done." Even if I don't, he thinks to himself before raising his hand over her. The spanking begins.

Hm. Well, that wasn't planned. There's more of a scene there, more description to come. Maybe I'm going to have to write the whole story on here, if it takes an audience to get me going. Maybe I'll even post the back-story (though perhaps not all ten pages of it). Even that little bit wore me out, though, and we still didn't get to the good part. To be continued, I suppose...