Homecoming… But to Nothing Pleasant!

Well that's a little bit of an untruth, if I am be honest - I have actually been back from Eastbourne / Brighton and other stops along the south coast for a couple of days now but the writing has been going so well and I have been so overflowing with ideas of late, thanks at least in part to my collaboration with 'Snooze' my digital artist chum in the States, that I just wanted to keep my head down and keep going. Consequently I've been writing practically non-stop since my return and still have barely scratched the surface of the fresh ideas and inspirations that have manifested, partly through swapping ideas and playing with images etc. Words lead to images and images lead to words - that's how it has been working. Which brings me to the little illustration top left, knocked out recently by my digital chum not for the upcoming book - I can't really see where it would fit at the moment - but just for the fun of it and to see where it might lead in terms of plot ideas, not necessarily for the present work but perhaps for some future collaboration. Indeed, one hopeful possibility is that it might stimulate one or two of you out there that I know are raring to get on with a little creative writing themselves to put pen to paper.

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The basic premise behind the illustration is that one girl is fitting handcuffs on the wrists of the other - the question you have to think about it is; what is going on... I mean, what really is going on? Does the girl who is being placed in restraints actually want to be in handcuffs or is it some sort of non-consensual bondage? if non-consensual, then the question is; has the girl fitting handcuffs in some way managed to manufacture the situation - ie is she the instigator? If so, bearing in mind that the girl being restrained does not appear to be struggling, how has she developed such control over her. On the other hand, if some third-party has instigated the scenario, then is either girl a willing participant? If this latter case the question becomes how has this come about, is the girl locking the cuffs doing so in fear of some punishment herself or has she been manipulated psychologically in some manner? A similar consideration can be given to the question of the apparent passivity of the victim (or are they both victim's?). If this latter series of scenarios are true and neither is a willing participant, then what is the rationale behind it, what is the instigator trying to achieve, what is his or her final agenda or motive? So many questions to base the framework of a story around - and we haven't even considered the location yet, a factor having a massive bearing on the storyline. The background is, I believe, left deliberately blank, partly to focus the eye on the action but also to give the imagination free rein - sometimes an incomplete framework can say much more than a fully fleshed-out picture!

By the way, while I was away I did a hell of a lot of work on the little netbook computer I carry with me. It was blazing sunshine all the way through from beginning to end (wonderful!) and the only thing better than working outside the bar at the far end of the pier (right) was setting up a little portable office for a spot of breakfast time writing on the veranda at the back of the Eastbourne branch of my favourite pub chain, Wetherspoon's (left - spot the work desk! LOL). Yes indeed! Your eyes do not deceive: It's built in an old recycled garage (bottom, right - click for a closer view)!!!

Now for a little bit of shittier news - someone, somewhere has become a little disillusioned with my Picasa Web albums it seems. Imagine my horror at returning home to be greeted by this jolly little missive:

"Please be advised that we have recently received reports that inappropriate content has been posted to your Picasa Web Albums account. One or more photos displayed in your gallery violates our Program Policies and has been removed.

Our Policies state that images displayed on picasaweb.google.com cannot contain obscenity, pornography, promotions of hate, incitement of violence, or spam, malicious code, or viruses. Please note that if you continue to violate these Program Policies, we may suspend your Picasa Web Albums account."

It would have helped no end if they had been kind enough to specify which particular pictures had been objected to and had been removed, because at this point in time I have no idea - I certainly can't see anything obvious missing and without knowing precisely the problem it is difficult to be sure to avoid it entirely in the future. I guess one thing I may have to do is to flag up this blog as adults only as many others have done - does anyone out there know how to achieve this, only I am worried about fiddling with it myself in case I inadvertently end up deleting the entire blog or something and it has a hell of a archive built up that I have yet to work out how to back up properly, by which I mean as they complete working blog or website.

By for now, but I have to get on with some writing, of which I will tell you more next time. Safe to say, though, that barring certain working obligations, now that I am back I will be updating the blog more frequently; perhaps every couple of days or so.

Institutional and Domestic Discipline: An Illustrated Collaboration 3 – Further Evolution

I have to rush out today – I am off to Eastbourne on the sunny Sussex coast where my mother is enjoying a few days in a guest house. I am going to be there later today and will probably (hopefully) spend the afternoon outside a bar at the end of Eastbourne pier writing in the sun - and it is blazingly sunny here in London at the moment, so I’m quite optimistic. This evening, I hope, will find me ensconced in the Eastbourne Wetherspoons pub; come and say hello if you are an Eastbourne type, appreciate a good ale and happen to be in the vicinity. Tomorrow I may visit Brighton or Hastings. I am taking my trusty bike and hope to tour around a bit up and down the south coast, visiting Wetherspoons branches and of course writing if and when inspired – I am taking my netbook computer with me. I next expect to be back home at my desk on Tuesday 8th June (next Tuesday) but WiFi internet connections willing, I may update the blog while on the move and hopefully I will still be able to view my emails – so don’t be shy, write today.

Talking off inspiration: if you remember the piece I posted recently regarding my collaboration with the Stateside computer artist, ‘Snooze’ and the evolution of a particular illustration I demonstrated as an example of the sort of thing we have been developing you will probably be interested with this, the latest incarnation of that art work - compare and contrast with the earlier renditions posted elsewhere. There are many more scenes we are working on – some far more complex and detailed - but it would spoil the fun to give any further inkling of these – you’ll just have to wait until the new book gets finished, or more specifically, the illustrated version of it.

In the present illustration the girl has just failed a written imposition set by the section psychiatrist – a most formidable, yet exceedingly clever - woman and has had her institutional pyjama bottoms taken of her in preparation for correction. The view through the door tells the viewer that this private little prison is in fact a tiny secure anteroom leading directly off of a more conventionally furnished consultation room - the regulation hospital bed provided for the inmate with its integral restraints is behind the view and so not in evidence. The white outer door beyond the bars both provides the psychiatrist’s office with the appearance one might expect, when closed, while also increasing the hapless girl’s isolation by removing from her the stimulation of the external view and providing for a high degree of soundproofing. The thick but supple leather belt carried, doubled-over, in the hospital sister’s hand, has a special relevance to the poor girl – it is something destined to make the up-coming correction all the more intolerable for the girl once the realisation sinks in! As always - all comments, ideas and what have you, will be gratefully received - bye for now!

Institutionalised Volume 1 Now on iTunes and Other News

Hi folks; I am proud to say that INSTITUTIONALISED Volume 1 is now on iTunes - click the pic on the right to see, or check out the sidebar. I hope to see INSTITUTIONALISED volume 2 follow suit in the fullness of time; I sent off the necessary files and posted the contract off to the publishers yesterday. In another bit of new, I thought you might like to know that “Behind the Barred Window” has been selected as a “Best Spanking Blog” at www.allspankingblogs.com, the directory of hand-picked, quality spanking sites - click on their button-pic, above left, or look for it in the good ol' right-hand sidebar (I don't know why I say that - I haven't got a left-hand one. I tried to add one once by fiddling with the HTML code but couldn't get it to work). The new volume is still coming along nicely with some very interesting artwork being developed by my States-side collaborator. The last piece he sent me - which I got to see only half an hour ago - fair made my hands shake; I've got callouses and hair growing on the palms now and I'm sure my eyesight is fading. LOL, M8s - as the youngsters say. Finally, I have just this minute added two blogs to the sidebar blog list; Dublin Paolo Spanking and Imagine The Stories - click on either site name to visit. Oh, and a an interesting, if short, piece has just been contributed as a comment to my last posting, if you'd like to check it out - or maybe contribute something of your own...come on, why not?

Victorian Straitjacketed Cruelty: You Couldn’t Make It Up - Well I could...

Coming firmly under the general category of ‘you couldn't make it up’ I came across this (slightly edited) newspaper article while pondering the thorny subject of how one might have ‘put away’ a troublesome young ward or heiress. Of course one might, as Elizabeth Jane Cochran wrote way back in 1887 “…take a perfectly sane and healthy woman, shut her up and make her sit from 6 a.m. until 8 p.m. on straight-back benches, do not allow her to talk or move during these hours, give her no reading [matter] and let her know nothing of the world or its doings, give her bad food and harsh treatment, and see how long it will take to make her insane. Two months would make her a mental and physical wreck”. But how to get her there in the first place? Hmmm… But then way back, there were all those possibilities embodied in the marvelous Magdalene Laundries (left) and as has been said, once even young girls who were considered too promiscuous and flirtatious were sometimes sent to such an asylum. And they knew a thing or two about dealing with the recalcitrant young miss in those places.

"A sullen temper, often shown by refusing food, is best dealt with by silence. When a girl wakes up to the fact that no one takes any notice, nor is troubled (apparently at least) by her self-starvation, she gets weary of her self-imposed martyrdom and learns sense." [Arthur J. S. Maddison, Hints on Rescue Work, A Handbook for Missionaries and Superintendents of Homes (1898).

Talking of asylums and straitjacketed bondage: I have just signed up to the affiliate program run by ‘The Girl Asylum', another site filled with content I would think eminently suitable for my readership and of course relevant (which I consider important) to at least part of the story arc of the INSTITUTIONALISED series – click the banner pic (top) to visit or check out the sidebar and the foot of the page.

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PS: I have also added a brand spanking (Ho, Ho, Ha, Ha!) new search facility which you can find at the top of the right-hand sidebar and that you can use to search the blog content, blog links etc. I have just tried it and it works a treat!

Institutional Enema Punishment and a Bit of New - Institutionalised Volume 1 goes Live on Amazon's Kindle

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Institutional and Domestic Discipline: An Illustrative Collaboration 2 - Evolution of an Image

Those of you who have been following this blog over the last few weeks will now that I'm now involved in a collaboration with a digital artist or illustrator the aim being to provide an illustrated version of the new volume (see Institutional and Domestic Discipline: An Illustrative Collaboration, Wednesday, 28 April 2010 - just click to view). I was just thinking the other day that some of you may be interested as to how things were progressing on the illustration front so I thought I would put together an example of the evolution of such an illustration. Of course you will understand that this particular piece of art work is presently very much a work in progress but it should be sufficient for you to get the idea without giving too much away as regards the storyline. In the context of the latter, one thing I can tell you - so as to set the scene without providing too much of a spoiler (I hope) is that one of our three hapless heroines, having now come under the personal care of an institution’s somewhat domineering section psychiatrist - a rather overbearing woman with questionable ethics and even more questionable aims - finds herself incarcerated in a claustrophobic, secure and isolated little cell-like anteroom leading directly off from the good doctor’s consultation room, dressed 24/7 in institutional green striped pyjamas, denied any human contact other than with the doctor herself and subject to stringent discipline and corporal punishment for the slightest fault.

Generally speaking I have been restricting myself to writing the text and generating ideas (although of course ideas flow both ways thus nurturing yet more branches and avenues to explore). In the development of this particular image, my collaborator has sent me the three-dimensional artwork shown in the first couple of examples but then I've taken the liberty of attempting to change the background colour to better fit the narrative - which to be honest I cocked up to some extent, obliging me to digitally repair the kneeling nurses hairdo (badly) - and added in the girl’s room’s barred security door and her nemesis, Matron, approaching outside in the doctor's consultation room, purely as an experiment to see how it might add atmosphere. In the first image the girl is of course naked and unblemished, free from any evidence of prior correction. In the second and third images she has on her institutional shapeless and baggy pyjama jacket and a healthy red blush is apparent colouring her behind.

The nurse came from an old scanned catalogue illustration and is supposed to represent the stern hospital matron placed in charge of the hapless young subject. Although in this version she is carrying a cane, in the storyline it is a folded leather belt that is put to use; but I didn't have a suitable strap / belt picture to hand and has always being full of enthusiasm and having little patience I was in a hurry to try the idea out. The final version, if it indeed it is decided to go ahead and include the bars and Matron approaching from outside, will have her carrying the leather belt or strap. The idea is that the nurses outside the girl's cell in the doctors consultation room (obviously) and as she is more distant she does not have to have such a high degree of 3D-ism. In the storyline the bars of course painted white but are not too sure how well this will appear in the final image and is something I have yet to experiment with.

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The image of the nurse is actually a horizontally-mirrored version of the original photograph for reasons of perspective and so I first of all shifted the nurses’ fob watch in the original to her right hand side so that it would actually appear on her left in the final shot, as it should. I was especially keen to allow her belt buckle, trim around the collar and fob watch to be seen as I think these details all add to the sense of authority I intended her image to engender. In the final version, if used as a concept a freshly constructed nurse image will be used

The bars themselves came from the original version of those that I used on the book covers of INSTITUTIONALISED volume 1 and INSTITUTIONALISED volume 2 and I used an image shearing facility on a Linux-based image processing application called ‘The Gimp’ called to simply pull them into shape to fit the perspective of the 3-D image as judged by eye (there is also a 'perspective' tool available on ‘The Gimp’ but that doesn't seem to work so well - at least not in my hands, LOL).

I have since fed back the results of my manipulation to my collaborator who has now sent me a version re-coloured to suit the narrative but minus the mess that I made of it. This latter modification is of course based on the original art work, so next one or the other of us will add in the extra detail as in my experimental changes, such as the external view and matron outside (always assuming of course that we decide to continue down that route). Any opinions / comments will as always be gratefully received. With external nurse / bars or without? Which should it be - that sort of thing. One thing that I should point out - and that I have pointed out before - is that the institutional aspect is balanced by the domestic discipline aspect in the final work and even a little ecclesiastical discipline: It turns out that one of my characters may - or may not (depending on who you believe - and even the subject herself is uncertain as to how much is memory how much is delusion) have suffered expiation (both sexual and otherwise )and physical chastisement under the guise of ecclesiastical care in a church-run home for wayward young women. This of course came to light during the events unfolding in INSTITUTIONALISED volume 2 but in the new volume we learn more of her trials and tribulations and perhaps discover the truth.

Is it Me, is it Nanny’s World - Or Just a Spot of Sanitary Protection?

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