Thanks for reading

Thank you to all of you who have visited here more often in August than in July, more in July than in June, and more in June than in May. I am grateful for your interest and attention and hope you feel your time spent has been worthwhile.

— Frenulum

Finished (well…)

I have finished Four Bars.

Those of you who are fans enough to see this will know how far from finished — ready to publish — that is. What I mean is that I am satisfied that the whole story is in place, and that it says what I want it to say. Now remains the long and self-critical task of fretting over every word a few dozen times.

I thought you might like to know something of how this story came about, as its history differs from others.

Originally, Four Bars was a little sliver of flash fiction. I have the original still: 150 words, 13 sentences, 5 paragraphs. As is my custom, I selected one of my trusted reviewers and sent the story to her, asking for her opinion of it.

The response came back in an unprecedented format: her report of the two orgasms it had induced, or perhaps it would be fairer to say assisted with.

In a subsequent conversation, she encouraged me to develop the story more fully. Its present form is the result. The kernel of the flash fiction is there unchanged.

Anyway, it should be out soon, for some indefinite value of “soon.” Thank you in advance for your patience.

— Frenulum

That sucks

When did suck acquire a pejorative sense?

I just grabbed the nearest paper dictionary, Random House College 1972, not my favorite of the dozen dictionaries in the house but it will do for now, and under suck there is not the least notion of: my job sucks, our shortstop sucks, that movie really sucked.

But it is undeniably common now, that sense of disgust and failure. How did it arise?

Think about sucking. A baby at the nipple, exchanging nurture and nourishment, love and grateful satiation. Purely pleasurable. (Yeah, I get the teething thing, but grant me the generalities, ok?, it’s late.) An eager lady kneeling at her partner’s feet, mouth busy, active, engaged, eager, agile, trained or in training, thrilling herself with how much she delights him, thrilling him with how — spurt spurt spurt spurt — oh, my, that was good.

Where does the anger come from? The disdain? The… dismissal?

If a fellow comes back from a date, and a roommate asks: how did it go? Is the answer: “She sucked” a boast or a complaint?

This is not facetious, I really want to know what happened here. Anyone? Where did the word lose its beauty?

— Frenulum

Thanks, Plum

The day had some emotionally taxing moments, some for me and some for my belovèd, which means all of it jointly, so in the quiet of the late night I settled into the well-yclept Stressless Recliner and fired up some re-re-re-re-read P. G. Wodehouse on the Kindle.

It does not of course take long for Sir Pelham to find the playful, ironic, romantic, silly strands of his readers’ minds. A turn of phrase here or there, and we are grinning or ROFLing or LOLing or just shaking our heads in sympathy right along at the oft predictable but oh-so-brilliantly-phrased insanity.

Such talent can only inspire as it is so many miles out of reach.

— Frenulum

Beautiful

The setting looks delicious and I-want-to-be-there-on-vacation. The model is graceful and elegant and formal: a lady through-and-through. The gown is gorgeous; the implication of its form is erotic.

Can any reader please tell me:

• What this garment is called, if it has a name of its own?
• A vendor, bricks or pixels, that might carry such a thing?
• The source for a sewing pattern?

I would be thankful for any lead.
— Frenulum

Secondary effects

An incandescent light bulb is a pretty darn good heater. It consumes electricity and emanates heat and does a decent job of it. It is not quite perfectly efficient, however: some of the energy used, albeit a small fraction, is wasted as photons. [*]

Interestingly, it is the secondary effect of waste light that is used to market, package, and promote the use of the bulbs. [**]

I contend that window-mounted, floor-standing, and portable fans are similarly promoted according to secondary effects. As an afterthought, they induce air currents. But their primary function, if you ask me, is to pump tremendous amounts of white noise into the environment, at precisely those few remaining frequencies where a middle-aged man’s hearing still has, or had, a fighting chance. In other words, they are deafness engines.

There are eight currently operating in my house. Not counting the compressors in the refrigerator and dehumidifier.

It would take a supercomputer and room full of fluid-dynamics PhD’s to figure out the net effect of all of them with respect to currents and cooling.

In the mean time: What? What?

— Frenulum

[*] By the way: when the idiotic nanny-state no-incandescent federal laws take hold, I will actually start to use more energy, because my hazmat CFL lights won’t produce the heat I rely on, and I will have to crank the furnace higher. Make sense to you? No, me either.

Didn’t mean to rant here, but really.

[**] Unless you buy an Easy-Bake oven, that is.

Free country

Just ran across this. Still, and elsewhere, relevant.

After all, the great characteristic of this country is that it is a free country, and by a free country I mean a country where people are allowed, so long as they do not hurt their neighbours, to do as they like. I do not mean a country where six men may make five men do exactly as they like. That is not my notion of freedom.

—Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 1883, then Leader of the Opposition, later Prime Minister of Britain

A mystery solved

I read pretty widely, but if I just want a relaxing diversion my go-to genres are mysteries and police procedurals.

I have been puzzling over a mystery related to this blog for a few weeks. Let me give you the clues and see if you can solve it.

Now, to do this, I need to put a word in your mind without writing it down, for if I did that, it would skew any experiment you might want to try. So: many people, particularly light-skinned ones, most famously redheads, have small dots of pigment on their skin. In describing such a person one might say that he or she has... a word for a sprinkling of pigmented dots. And you might refer to one such dot as a… ok, remember that word.

The web service hosting this blog gives me tons of statistics about how people arrive here and where they come from (still trying to figure out my popularity in Egypt). If they follow a link from my story site, that gets counted. If they do a search and follow up a result, I get told what phrase they searched for.

And the most popular search term is…

that word porn

That startled me, since I don’t think of that word porn as an apt description of what I post here. But even stranger: use the site search option to search for that word, and there are no matches.

It doesn’t seem to make any sense at all. A mystery. To make matters even more perplexing: I tried a google search for the phrase, and my patience wore out on result page 25 — no link to here.

Well, just a minute ago, I figured it out — and it does make sense, ultimately.

Any detection fan out there want to try your hand at the case? I will publish the answer in a day or two.

— Frenulum

A reader?

I like to imagine people enjoying my stories.

— Frenulum

Peek inside

In commenting on a recent post, one reader used the phrase “peek inside” and, as words have the amazing power to do, sent my thoughts down an entirely divergent path.

Of course, at the time I was thinking about a physical manifestation of the phrase. If your imaginations can’t supply details I am afraid I will have to disappoint you… but then, my readers are unlikely to be so challenged. :o)

But it has a more significant meaning.

In the owner/submissive relationship as I define it (I just typoed ass instead of as — an avocational hazard?) the submissive gives her Self: body, mind, and will, to her owner.

The open, accessible, available body is easy to imagine, for most people.

The open mind is not. There are no social models for it, no mass media examples, no or precious few rôle models. We guard our minds and thoughts. We are raised and trained and conditioned to do so. Almost everyone you deal with, even loved ones, is masked and guarded for public consumption. It is the normal way to act, even in intimate, loving relationships.

But the open mind is a requirement in the owner/submissive relationship. To take responsibility for her Self, he has to have full access to her thoughts: the ability to peek inside at will. No masks, no hiding, no reservation, no restraint. He has to be able to figure out what she needs, and what is right for her, before she can necessarily articulate or even be aware of those needs.

It is hard to learn, it takes time, and it feels scary and strange at first. But then, giving one’s Self into another’s care is initially scary and strange as well.

Knowing that the result is earthly paradise can make the transition more comfortable. I assert that in my experience, this is indeed the case.

— Frenulum

Comments

Thanks to all of you who commented on the Tuesday series of posts. I appreciate your thoughtful remarks and I am grateful that you took the time to share them.

One thing I hoped for when I impulsively fired up this blog was that there would be a little bit more interaction. I reply to people who send letters about my fiction, but only a few of those email exchanges turn into conversations (though some, I am delighted to say, have turned into friendships).

I hope this recent flurry of contributions is a trend!

Thank you again.

— Frenulum

Tuesday

Afterward, there were three surprises for us.

First, the way she danced and rubbed her bottom. It was an action straight out of pretty much every spanking story she has read, and she surprised herself with how much of a natural impulse it was — even as she laughed at herself for acting out the cliché. I found it cute and endearing to watch her rub her hot pink buns, even though I knew it wasn’t going to be much help. Some of her friends are not allowed to rub, but in my book a spanking is over when the spanking is over, and I very much enjoyed the charming spectacle.

Second, after a short while, she sat without thinking on the edge of the bed. With a startled "Owwie!" she leapt back to her feet so fast it was as if propelled by one of the bedsprings. Good thing it was a nice soft mattress! I reminded her of my story Misery, in which a just-spanked girl contemplates a few hours on a wooden chair. She said, ruefully, “I get that now.”

Third, a surprise for me. It is not the first time that I have discovered something significantly arousing — something I did not know I cared about or would be excited by — because she introduced it to me.

Some girls, when spanked, turn a uniform color. Their bottoms grow from pale to pink to rosy to red, but do so evenly, the effect of each swat blending in. That is all well and good, and certainly not a phenomenon I have ever objected to.

But some girls show handprints, and she is one of them. Lasting handprints, overlapping as the spanking progresses but always with the outline of palm and fingers clear to see.

It turns out that I am unexpectedly pleased by this. Excited by it.

It is certainly not something anyone has control over: physiology is what it is; I would not have been disappointed by an even color, because I had not formed an expectation one way or the other. But now I love it that she shows handprints. And now that I have seen it, I find that it matters to me. I loved being able to fit my hand to a handprint on her heated bottom, and line up my fingers exactly as they once landed.

It was so satisfying to see my belovèd marked by my hand. Marks she wore proudly, joyful to be owned and adored by her Sir.

— Frenulum

Inviting

No matter how hard Google tries to convince you otherwise, invite is still a verb, and it has second-syllable stress (in-VITE). What you give someone when you want to invite (verb) him or her to something is an invitation (noun).

IN-vite sounds to my ears every bit as unwashed as IN-sur-ance.

I was dismayed recently to see that Target stores now label the shelves containing invitations “Invites.” Can it be that nobody in that massive corporate chain of command said: hey, wait a minute, that’s not right?

Sigh. Somebody has to care.

— Frenulum

Tuesday

I have a very small set of firm rules when it comes to spanking.

• Don’t squirm or wiggle or slip out of place.
• Don’t reach a hand back in an attempt at defense.
• Don’t say anything that could be construed as trying to take control: no “Stop!” or “No!” or even “Please!?!” — I will decide when the spanking is over, without assistance or advice.

Of course she knew the rules, since we had talked about spanking so often. That was actually her main concern: not that she would be unable to stand the pain, but that she would impulsively move a hand to save herself, or cry out inadvertently for mercy. I had faith that her behavior would continue to be flawless for me, but she was uncertain.

Panties at half-mast. That is such a powerful symbol to me that when I see a simple glamour photo with the model’s panties pulled down, I can’t help but think she is destined for a long session over the knee, even absent any other cues to suggest that. The erotic appeal of lowered panties is only heightened when a lady so adorned walks in them, her movements slightly hampered by her lacy bonds.

I watched her wait for me, feasting on the sight of her. I could never get my fill, but there came a time when further delay would have been unkind. I rose from my chair, and took a seat on the foot of the bed. I took a moment, then, to evaluate one last time my reasons, intent, and responsibility.

“Come to me,” I said, breaking the extended silence. She turned, and took her hands off her head. I watched her cross the room, sexy and beautiful in heels and lowered panties. Her expression was full of tension and apprehension, but it was also accepting, resolute, and serene.

I did not have to tell her to lie across my lap. I simply sat in the confidence that she would obey me, her submission overpowering with inexorable force all the doubt and fear that she felt.

Then, after a lifetime of it, there was no more waiting.

— Frenulum

Gift

I just have to share this breathtakingly beautiful photo with you.
The owner/submissive relationship begins when the submissive, from a position of strength, independence, self-sufficiency, and informed consent, makes a gift of her Self — body, mind, and will — to her owner.
I just never considered wrapping the present. Would it look like this?
In any case, a very pretty picture to enjoy.

— Frenulum

Twisty mind

It is a cliché of porn that if a woman is wearing a gate-net body suit, the crotch will be ripped open in the early goings. Happens 100% of the time. She never gets to wiggle out of it and save it for another occasion.

Is it wrong that I think of this every time I unwrap a Christmas tree?

— Frenulum, running on fumes in case you couldn’t tell :o)

Tuesday

We had talked about spanking often. About her fantasies, beginning early in her childhood, about youthful experimentation (by both of us), about never finding an intimate partner she could trust with that much vulnerability. Until she gave her Self to me.

We talked about spanking as a definitive symbol and act of submission and ownership, obedience and control. About how much we both desired it on those grounds. But my rule has always been: spanking is earned discipline for deliberate disobedience. To use it as anything else would be a betrayal of my self-regard as a gentle man.

She stopped telling me that she wanted me to spank her; she started to say that she needed me to. I saw truth in her eyes.

As the conversations played out over months and years of her perfect service, we both realized that she would never be disobedient. She has mature self-restraint and full understanding, and simply could not earn a spanking for misbehavior. It was an unsolvable impasse: she unable to disobey me, I unable to discipline her without just cause.

One day she said: “It is just so unfair that a good girl can’t get a spanking!”

That really hit home. It occupied my thoughts for weeks, constantly. I realized, eventually, that I had a choice: spank her despite her flawless, devoted submission, and cause a temporary pain in her lovely bottom, or refuse to, and cause the permanent, life-long pain of a desperate, hopeless, unsatisfied need. As her owner, responsible for caring for her and seeing to her joy, I knew what to choose.

And so she stood at the window, her hands on her head, her panties around her knees.

— Frenulum

Smart readers

I like to think of my readers as smart people. That is a little self-indulgent, of course: I hope my writing is good enough that clever people appreciate it. But that aside, the letters I get are by a generous majority well-written, interesting, and full of good observations or sharp questions.

Perhaps you read a couple of news stories in the past week or so. One, widely circulated, described research correlating IQ test results with web browser preference, yielding the result that people who used Internet Explorer were, well, stupid. Which is widely known (either stupid or at the mercy of a stupid IT department), but it was nice to see empirical verification. And the next — I hope it was as widely read — revealing that the first story was an excellently crafted hoax.

I will now pull the rabbit out of the hat and tie those two paragraphs together.

42% of my traffic here comes from Windows systems. Only 6% comes from IE. Ergo, my readers are smart people, QED.

:o)

— Frenulum

Vocabulary

Well, then, here is what I actually meant to write.

There are any number of slang terms for the genitalia of both sexes, and to a writer this is a boon. Were there none, then every (explicit) story would be full of vagina and penis, and the repetition would get tedious. Being able to vary the terms makes the text more interesting.

I tend to use cunt when I specifically mean vagina, and pussy when I mean the vulva generally; I am usually happy with cock but throw a prick in from time to time. Most of the first-name euphemisms — Willie, Peter, Dick and in the UK John Thomas, Percy — strike me as odd. Though I did get a grin when the movie Free Willie was released.

For ladies, there is much more variety, and I am happy to indulge in it. One word in particular strikes my fancy, and I wish that it were more securely seated in the mainstream of private conversation.

Quim.

It is such a pretty word. It is more gentle than cunt, or twat, which I find an unpleasant sound. It has much more a feminine ring to it than snatch or slit or the awful gash; it isn’t silly like cooter or beaver or pink taco. Quim sounds... I don’t know, is genteel too strong a word given the subject matter?

It sounds like a lady at the tea table could say to her friends: “Fred came home at lunch time and gave my quim a good seeing-to!”

Why not give it a try next time?

— Frenulum

Vocabulary

My public language is pristine; no friend or colleague has ever heard me use any of the common taboo words that seem to spill with increasing ease from more and more mouths. I find it terribly rude, for one thing, the verbal equivalent of spitting on the carpet every few seconds; for another, I consider it to be a sort of broadcast IQ test, the verbal tic acting as a gauge of one’s limited imagination and vocabulary.

But mostly I refrain because overuse blunts the words, and they have an exciting place in the bedroom. Words like fuck and pussy and cocksucker are spicy and interesting, playful and arousing, between intimates at intimate times. But if they have been worn to dullness — if the guy who won’t take your dare is a pussy, if the car that merges too close is driven by a cocksucker, if every fucking sentence is fucking full of fucking noise — then there is no vocabulary left for playtime. No chance of a little thrill by whispering something racy and private.

Finally, here is what perplexes me endlessly. Why do women ever date men who talk like this? Many do, you know. It absolutely mystifies me.

— Frenulum

P.S. I typed the title “Vocabulary” and then wrote a completely different post than I intended to. Mystery number two is how my mind works, if “works” is even a fair description of it.

Tuesday

I watched for a while. Waiting is something significant to both of us: the pause that clearly communicates that nothing else matters. Once she found a place for her hands, she was still; I admire that.

In time, I walked silently to her. It was not necessary to speak, because the situation was one we had discussed hundreds of times. With care and respect and a shared sense of all the action meant, I took hold of her panties and lowered them, past her bottom, down her legs.

She is an independent, capable, self-sufficient, strong, decisive, influential, powerful woman. Which gives meaning to her submission. That is the kernel. Weakness cannot submit. Helplessness cannot submit. Only a whole, strong person can give her Self with joy and pride.

She waited for me, bare, vulnerable, exposed, undefended... hopeful. For as long as I needed her to.

— Frenulum