Art, Liberty Bodices, Discipline and Crashes

Hi peoples, init. I know, I know, yet another week gap. But I have been hard at it in the background, bashing away at the new book. There is so much written, one year in, that that I am considering rearranging the work into two distinct volumes – for clarity of storytelling rather than for any financial advantage; I get very little out of this financially anyway. Almost everything is now written to some degree or other, except for a couple of short scenes and one major scene that will likely take me a day. I could of course simplify by leaving out some of the descriptive scene-setting stuff. But as I have said before: the whole aim, when I first set out down this path, was to try and create some form of spanking literature - incorporating discipline / submission, humiliation, petty rules, restrictions and uniforms and multiple other disparate fetishes, as long as they could be fitted within the framework sensibly – having proper scene-setting, character development, dialog and all the rest, set out within some plausible premise, just as one would expect to find within any other genre one might come across on the high-street bookshelves. Wow! What a long sentence! Better wait to get your breath back.

In the interim I came upon a site run by an illustrator with some rather out of the ordinary imagery for the genre. I particularly liked the artist’s rendition of what appears to be a good old-fashioned liberty bodice on the girl in the first drawing (above) - very imaginative if set in the modern period… and a garment you will encounter a character being put in within the new book, as luck would have it. Little details such as the puff-sleeved blouses worn by the girls in the second illustration all add to the atmosphere of restriction and discipline, while the third is just perfect for all those that like the idea of drill impositions (bottom). The artist sells his work commercially - and I don’t ordinarily promote commercial sites outside of the couple that I am an affiliate of - but I urge you too check out his stuff. You can find his work on www.spankingcharm.wordpress.com (click the pic at top left or check out the blog listing in the right hand sidebar).

One other thing that has held me back was that on Monday – a day I had planed to set aside a little time to update the blog, I suffered a major computer crash that resulted in my having to reload Windows from scratch - with all that goes with that!!!! Luckily the book stuff is spread in duplicate between two computers and occasionally backed up on to CD. Also luckily I had backed up a lot of other stuff on to an independent drive on the same computer back in July – but I lost anything I had downloaded to my various illustration and inspirational collections throughout August. The worst hit potentially was the voice recognition software I use, as one has to train it to one’s voice – not too bad, as it only takes around 15 – 20 minutes – and it learns through experience and correction, improving in accuracy as one uses it. This latter aspect at first seemed disastrous, as I had been using it practically none-stop for two years and it had gone from being quite unreliable to being pretty good at interpreting my voice over that time… Then I discovered that I had backed-up its ‘user files’ a few months back and so was able to reinstate its vocabulary to a point when it had already become quite competent. In short I lost around a day and a half in total but am now up and running again – touch wood!!!