Yes, you've guessed it! I finally have the new book at the point where it is
nearly ready to be published. It
requires only a few more corrections - and of course the all-important (to me
at least) cover art / marketing imagery.
The title I have come up with in truth relates to only part of the tale
but is unashamedly designed to ride on the renewed wave of interest here in the
UK in the press and on the radio over the notoriety of the Magdalene
laundries. Of course the institution I
describe is entirely fictional - but it is also all too plausible; especially
when one considers the fact that the last of those deplorable institutions was
only closed down in 1996! I may elect to place it on LULU sans cover art to begin with, as I did the last title I produced (which is now out on Amazon et al courtesy of Andrews UK LTD by the way) so it may be worth a search through LULU to check from time to time.
Alice Under Discipline - Book Two
Alice and the New Magdalene Laundries
Now that I have that off my chest I can be
off out to the pub. You see the cat's
away (the wife - and she 's taken the kids!) for the week and as I haven't been
near a pub since the 3rd of January (and it's sunny here in North London) so I have decided
to award myself a few days imbibing the local Ales. At the same time I'll be taking the netbook
computer I have and God-willing I'll be putting together some introductory articles
and such for the website. The latter I
shall be updating next either tomorrow or Thursday, most probably with a few
pages spotlighting the work of a guest author.
And on that subject; I plan to host a series of pages on the website
(link in the right hand sidebar) devoted to publicising the work of other
authors, so if any of you are interested in giving your work the light of day
let me know, either here or by email, Twitter, Facebook or whatever.
Talking
of other authors: Ages ago (many years actually)
I came upon something which later went a long way in influencing the kind of
thing I tend to write about. If you look
you'll doubtless recognise many themes I have used or touched upon in my novels
or on this blog over the years.
........
"...suffice it to say that after five years both
signatures were dully obtained – and then both names fade from history, just
rumours of institutional care remaining.
Others, though, have pointed out the startling resemblance of two of a
certain titled lady's maids to the twins she once had in her care, not to
mention marvelling at the exacting level of obedience she managed to extract
from the girls. One visitor describes
the pair of them as obliging and sweet, but “little more than pretty automata,
seemingly without a thought of their own in their heads”.
The regime which may or may not have produced
such “exacting obedience” we know more of, though – our lady disciplinarian was
something of an obsessive journal keeper, it turns out. For instance every detail of the two girls'
'finestred' - or windowed, as she
describes them – dresses is outlined, detailing how she based the dress design
around the summer uniform of a particularly strict girl's boarding school,
before adapting it to her own specification, complete with underwired cut-outs
to expose the breasts and a mid-thigh widely-flared skirt (her description) –
and all this in an era when to show the ankle was deemed outrageous, if not
downright obscene. Then she plaits and
coils each girl's long hair, tying each plait with a blue gingham ribbon -
chosen to match the schoolgirl dress - at its end before coiling it up either
side of the girl's head and pinning it in place like a straw tea mat, before
then plonking a straw boater on each girl's' head.
Actually, it is only when one of the girls
throws something of a tantrum over having to wear what the girl herself calls
“that stupidly childish hat” that this disturbingly clever woman's imagination
really goes to town. She deals with that
little disturbance by taking a pair of barber's clippers (manual in those days)
to the tops of both girls' heads, cutting bald a pink-hued path the width of
the clippers (around an inch and a half to two inches in width I imagine) down
the centre of each girl's head before plaiting the remainder. From that point on she takes a cutthroat
razor to that furrow on a weekly basis to keep it clear, ensuring that neither
girl has much desire to remove her school uniform hat, even in private. At one point, at least in her journal, she
considers shaving them both bald, but then considers that she prefers the
manner in which the residual plaits coiled to both sides of the head makes them
look ridiculous – she doesn't tell the girls that, though, always holding over
their heads (forgive me) the threat of taking the clippers and the razor to
their remaining 'crowning glory'.
But she does eventually take the razor to their
eyebrows – you couldn't make it up – and I haven't, then even takes a small
pair of scissors to their eyelashes. It
almost goes without saying that intimate shaving is the next step - backed up
by the not-so-judicious application of the school cane she quickly
introduces. The latter is treated to a
long, drawn-out, blow-by-blow or cane-stroke-by-cane-stroke description of how
she wears down both – interspersed with ice-cold showers, day on day – before
they finally submit to her intimate attentions.
Then we have listed is a step by step series of
measurements detailing the drawing out and distension of the girl's nipples,
ending when both girl's nipples had been stretched to very nearly two inches in
length. And their breasts seamed to have
been elongated to some extent too. And
not satisfied with that, she then starts adding thicker and thicker – and
therefore heavier, one would think - nipple rings, with the expressed intention
of widening the holes “so that they never can be hidden” as she says. The very next thing – well it's not the very
next in that the nipple stretching exercise is in the early stages, though well
on the way and both girls are becoming well familiar with the breast-whip, both
around the nipples and on the undersides of the bosom, but the next thing is
the nose ring. Now in today's world that
is possibly not that astounding, but in the Victorian world? I for one didn't even know that sort of thing
went on. And did they even have anaesthesia
back then? Well, I'm not sure of that
last part, nor where the Victorians would have obtained ice from in the middle
of summer. What I do know is that
there is a very detailed, wholly realistic and believable account of how a
female specialist, some colleague member of some discrete Sapphic organisation
or club judging by the impression I get, is called in and how she applies ice
to the septum of each girl's nose before carrying out the act itself. Needless to say a very long-drawn-out caning
precedes the treatment, neither girl being what one might call exactly keen.
But nonetheless, the treatment goes ahead and
both girls are soon sporting what sounds to have been quite a large and
cumbersome nose ring. And as with their
nipples it isn't long before a larger and heavier ring is substituted for the original - and then
another and another, each designed to stretch the original piercing
larger. And when one of the duo goes
running, crying to her guardian, instead of castigating the girl's governess
the guardian actually suggests to the woman that she adds a bell to each girl's
nose ring as a form of discipline, even going so far as to suggest it too, like
the ring itself, be made progressively larger and heavier. It is only a short step from there - once the
idea had taken hold and the two girls' refusal to speak with the lisp their
governess had decided she liked had grown to irritating proportions - to
piercing the tip of the tongue and the lower lip of each girl and conjoining
the two body parts with a ring. I
imagine that latter operation dealt with the refusal to develop a lisp alright!
Then we come to another apparently anachronistic
development. We come to the question of
our duo’s knickers. Don't forget we are
talking about the Victorian era here, when skirts brushed the floor except for
those of little children, and drawers or bloomers were knee length or even
ankle length. We have already mentioned
the fact that our duo's frocks were mid thigh, if full-skirted, and based on
strict long-sleeved and high-collared school summer dresses, albeit cut away
where it mattered to expose and 'present' their breasts. The styling, as I understand it, was some
sort of variation on the favoured 'sailor suit' dress usually reserved at the
time for children, but in a gingham check pattern with contrasting stiffened
white collar and cuffs and 'cut' and 'boned' to not only allow for the maturing
figure, but to actually augment and exaggerate it. So what about their knickers or bloomers –
well, what would you have come up with, given the limitations (perhaps
advantages - just think about that for a
moment) of the Victorian era? I
wonder? I wouldn't mind betting it
wouldn't involve rubber.
Vulcanised rubber was a fairly new material back
then. And who would have thought then of
employing this new material in young women's underwear – very few, I'd
wager. But this singularly brilliant
woman did – and who other than another woman would have appreciated the torment
this new fabric could potentially cause the female person? She describes her design work as trunk-style. She goes on to detail “a close-fitting
garment” having deep-sectioned ribbed cuffs around the thighs and possessing a
high waistband, the latter consisting of the rubber wrapped around and over a
girdle of spring steel and arranged to come together at the rear with a tongue
and clasp arrangement designed to take a small padlock (to deter tampering – as
she says). A “virginal slit” occupied
the gusset position, this being in reality a double slit separated by a thin
tubular centre seam, the latter clearly intended to separate the outer labia
and encourage the inner labia to protrude through the thin slits either
side. Going further to the rear, and
this centre seam split in two to form a 'y' shape, the two halves being studded
with reinforced brass eyes that were, in wear, laced together with a tough cotton
cord, of which the latter could be rapidly drawn out to allow for natural
functions – or the attention of the cane or strap – if of course one had
the key to the second padlock that secured the eyed ends of the laces. Which of course neither girl had.
It was all about control - but also about exposure;
one can only imagine the obscene view presented by a girl bent over her desk,
so dressed, her inner lips hanging like coral-pink curtains pressed out either
side of that tight latex bar stand-in for a gusset, pulled up inhumanly tight
between her legs. And then you have the skirt, a nest of heavyweight gingham
check satin puffed out over layers of sky-blue petticoats like an inverted
carnation, irresistibly drawing the eye to the glistening centre. And why a glistening centre? Possibly
not totally unconnected with the fact that the front of the gusset - the
precise point upon which the two split haves converged on the centre seam – was
occupied by a little circular beard of bristled rubbery filaments purposely
aligned to impinge directly on the most sensitive part pf a girl's
anatomy. How could that part not
glisten, teased, massaged and stimulated as it was with the girl's every
step? So each was kept, aroused,
punished and humiliated in equal measure - and all at once - each girl's mind a
permanent swirling turmoil of conflicting emotions. And masturbation was out of the
question: Handcuffs had been invented
and a single slim, short but strong slither of leather twixt the centre point
of the linking chain and the girl's nose ring was all it took to keep that
particular temptation at bay. A ribbon
sewn in to the high-throated collar of her long, chaste, woven woollen
nightdress would take care of keeping her nipples and breasts under the tension
required in order to stretch the flesh of those parts, the unrelenting tension
being increased week on week, if not night on night!
And then started the process of fattening them
both up... Another facet one might
consider modern. Our strict governess
priestess apparently considered her bended-knee worshipers insufficiently
worthy if not what she would have described as pleasantly “plumped-up”. This implied, apparently, the result of
prolonged overfeeding whilst the waist and tummy were simultaneously
constricted by tight and strict corsetry, the idea being that “the fat should
be laid down where it will be of most delight to the eye”. By this statement she clearly inferred that
the excess pounds should be deposited around the thighs, bottom and bosom.
The result of all this - once squeezed into a
fitted, boned, wide-skirted frock - was a startlingly wasp-waisted,
broad-beamed figure, especially when augmented by the breath-stealing corsetry
of the age. And perhaps surprisingly the
process apparently did indeed result in the weight going on around the bottom,
hips, thighs and breasts as intended!
“Plump in all the right places” – as they used to say back then. And that was exactly how she had the twins
look– plump in all the right places – only perhaps a little too much plumpness
for some tastes. Not that the girls
themselves had too much choice in the
matter, being weighed each day with the penalty of a good hard caning to be
paid for insufficient weight gain. A
similar tariff was payable for insufficient nipple elongation. The only way out of suffering for the
latter was through the girl tugging and pulling on her teats herself of
course, Avoiding punishment for the
former just required working on the appetite and stacking away the calories -
and perhaps avoiding the mirror as the double chin became apparent. The constantly varied diet helped,
encouraging overeating at a most basic level - another anachronistic innovation
worthy of a modern viewpoint.
Avoiding the mirror was near-on impossible since the tiniest pleat out of place on what was termed their 'home uniform' was
cause to be upended over their governess's knee and self inspection was made a de
rigour part of the daily régime. The
flared-skirted childish sailor suit dress had to hang just so, with exactly a
certain amount of bare flesh visible between the hem and the white cotton stockings, the latter to reach to just above
the knee where they were each tied with a blue gingham ribbon bow garter to
match the dress. And that bow had to be
on the outside of the knee and dead horizontal – god forbid it was ever
crooked! And then the light blue patent
leather lace-up ankle boots had to be tied just so. High-heeled and with an acutely curving and
potentially crippling 'S' shape sole they were all but impossible to walk in,
enforcing a tiny, dainty step and teetering gait, but that was the intention –
and they gave a pleasant uplift to a girl's bottom, which was a pleasant plus
to their governess's eye. And the straw
hat was a fussy affair, it tied with a gingham ribbon bow beneath the chin but
that ribbon had first to pass around the rear of both ears and then had to be
tied so tight as to result in the ears sticking out – and that bow, large and
ungainly as it was, had to tied just so, perfectly horizontal...."
Hi ya! I'm all cheery today because the sun is out... Wait a minute - it's just gone in again... Damn - here comes a nosedive! Right, before I suffer one of my famed mental collapses I'm going to share with you what I have been up to of late. It is probably easier if I show you, but what it comes down to is manipulating, modifying and utilising a series of images my graphics-orientated collaborator Angela Fox (link over in the right hand sidebar) came up with quite some time ago inspired by my third book in the INSTITUTIONALISED series: A Continuum of Discipline. The idea had originally been for an illustrated version or even graphic novel, though that was before it bloomed into 250,000 words of course! But in some ways I can blame (if blame is the right word) the artwork for the expansion of the storyline, since each and every picture - though not necessarily perfect in terms of the idea I was trying to put over at the time (especially if not perfect )- more often than not triggered a whole cascade of new ideas, which in turn at times spawned yet more images. And the series I have been working on this week is a case in point. 
The series starts with all those familiar elements, the straitjacket, the uniformed nurse and the nurse, governess or wardress's thin, whippy punishment cane close to hand. But in its modest little way the series seeks to go further - and in attempting that I think it well illustrates something of my approach and
the different elements I seek to incorporate within my writing. In this case the story is caught in the act of developing beyond the
usual accepted concept of straitjacket bondage within the context of
institutionalised corporal punishment and discipline. For example, as the scene develops it gradually
becomes clear that it is actually the humble window (which has taken me the
best part of a day to get right, in its various incarnations incidentally) which is destined to take
centre stage, upstaging the straitjacket, the uniformed nurse with
her cane, the padded cell per se and the rest. But, you see, this was not necessarily the
case at the outset when the original image was conceived (based on a moment in
one of my books) but it is nevertheless the direction towards which the imagery has since propelled
me; that was the way it worked, and still works. I am absolutely knackered and even these few images still need a lot of work - especially when it comes to the speech balloons, which have proved cumbersome, ugly and difficult to work with.
One glaring error can be seen in the very first frame. In subsequent frames I have adopted a convention of rendering the nurse's speech in white to help differentiate it, but have neglected to make the appropriate changes in that first frame - damn!
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