Today I have a brilliant blog for you- if you’re a fan of spanking you are going to love this! However, if you are under 18, or if you are adverse to seeing beautiful women being spanked, then this is not the blog for you! You have been warned!!
Over to you Peter…
Peter Birch on The Big, Bad Book of Spanking Positions
It took me a while to decide how to open this blog. The world of erotic writing has moved on so far and so fast in the last year or two that the chances are that nobody reading this has the faintest idea who I am. Fortunately the author page from the book I want to write about says it all, complete with a picture of me doing my favourite thing and guaranteed to pique the interest of those who might enjoy my work while, hopefully, making those who won’t depart with their noses tilted up at a suitable prim angle.
Having got that over with I can now move on to the question Kay asked me: what made me write The Big, Bad Book of Spanking Positions? The answer is that it was a wonderful way to combine my love of spanking and photography with my career as a writer, or in other words it’s a piece of unabashed self-indulgence.
I’m an eroticist who writes rather than the other way around. Writing has always been important to me and I love to fill my books with distinctive characters and compelling plots, especially for my Aishling Morgan novels. I also like to think that I can at least string a sentence together, but my background is the world of fetish parties, curious pleasures and above all, spanking. I make no excuse for this and I have never set down so much as a single word in the hope of appealing to the mass market. Rather to my surprise there seem to be enough people around who share my tastes to make my writing commercially viable.
Unfortunately, even in the heyday of Nexus books, when I was producing ten novels a year, I could never persuade a publisher to allow me to include illustrations. All that changed with the arrival of the wonderful Accent Press, who commissioned an illustrated guide to all things kinky. That included a section on spanking with a text box listing nine popular positions. Nine isn’t very many though, and I was left feeling that I hadn’t done justice to the subject.
At the time I was also writing articles for Forum Magazine and its sister publications. I suggested a light-hearted article on spanking positions, listing the top 20 as if from a music chart. They liked the idea and agreed to include my own photographs, so I was left with no choice but to set up a photo shoot. I like my spanking to be done for a reason, so I dressed two beautiful models in riding gear and took the pictures in the corner of a studio done up as an improbably clean stables. Here’s one of the pictures from that day, position No 19, the Open Bailey, so named because it was the favourite position of Lucy Bailey, queen of the British spanking scene back in the ‘90s.
When I did the Forum shoot I tried to get the different positions in their real order of popularity, judging by how often they were shown or mentioned in internet search results. To get a top 20 a lot of positions had to be left out, and by the time the article was published I had a list of over thirty different positions and the whole thing was beginning to get a bit obsessive. There’s a lot to be said for obsession, especially when it comes to kinky sex, so instead of telling myself to calm down I let the project grow. A commission to write an article on spanking aftercare allowed me to set up a second shoot featuring models Stacey and Stephanie Howitt, who tried out nearly forty different positions before so much as a dab of cold cream was applied to a smarting bottom cheek.
After that there was no turning back. The girls were lovely and had great fun on the shoot, adding their own suggestions and clever details, but we’d been unable to use our original venue and the Torquay B&B we’d hired as a substitute wasn’t the ideal background. Besides, the number of positions was creeping ever higher, to fifty, then sixty, with friends suggesting pet favourites and subtle variations. I’d also realised that some positions needed three people, one of them strong enough to hold another clear of the ground for the spanking.
I was now determined to do the book and I knew what I wanted to call it, but I didn’t want to do another shoot until I’d found a suitable studio and the perfect models. My Domina came easily, Leia-Ann Woods, whose cool, stern beauty and wealth of experience made her ideal, while we’d been friends for years and worked together on several projects. She was also well used to being on the receiving end and knew all about my obsession with spanking positions, having obliged with one of many minor test shoots. Here she is, Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter only with a tree trunk in place of a cannon.
It took a lot longer to find the right girl to be on the receiving end, but one glance at Chloe “Toy” Benson and my mind was made up. Not only was she the perfect English rose, but her petite figure and playful, innocent manner made her the ideal foil for Leia-Ann. The only question was whether she would accept a shoot that involved being spanked in several dozen different positions, many of them extremely revealing, and over a period of four hours. She accepted without hesitation and proved even better than I had hoped, not only beautiful but wonderfully expressive.
The third member of my team was Amber West, another experienced spanking model. Amber had the height and strength I needed both to be ridden by Chloe for the equestrian positions and to be able to lift her for the triples, or so I hoped. What she definitely did have was enough skill with a camera to act as assistant photographer and exactly the attitude I wanted, as I’d discovered when she agreed to pose for an article on another of my penchants, erotic clowns. She’s the one getting spanked.
With my team in place I hired Blingshot Studios in North London, allowing me the use of professional lighting and a pleasantly domestic but uncomplicated set to show the models to best advantage. I like to think we got some good results, so here are a few examples from the finished product: plates 8, 16 and 31 –
Not that everything went completely to plan. Only when we got to the triples did we discover that Amber Couldn’t lift Chloe onto her shoulders, so I was forced to hand over the camera and take her place, now with a slightly shocked Leia-Ann on the receiving end. I’m afraid I wasn’t really dressed the part.
The great project was almost complete, with only the mechanics of publication to go through before The Big, Bad Book of Spanking Positions became a reality, except that even as Amber and I drove away from the studio we were thinking of new and increasingly complicated positions. I did take her out into the woods to complete an appendix, Contortionist’s Corner, and then added a second appendix on aftercare. Once I’d finished editing the pictures I had fifty plates covering seventy different spanking positions and a few other not to be missed themes such as the removal of Chloe’s knickers, which takes an entire page and twelve pictures.
So there it is, but even as the finished product went to press I knew I hadn’t exhausted all the possibilities. For a start I’d prefer positions such as Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter and Over a Barrel to actually involve an old fashioned ship’s cannon and a barrel respectively, while I can’t help but think that the military positions should have been done with the girls in uniform, the equestrian ones in riding gear and pony-girl harness, On the Lap with me dressed up as Santa Claus etc etc etc. Not only that, but it now seems to be impossible to get together with my fellow spanking enthusiasts without some clever Dick or Daisy demonstrating some bizarre possibility that hadn’t occurred to me.
Oh well, it looks as if I might have to start considering the second edition.
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Many thanks Peter – what a great project! I confess to being a tiny bit jealous that I wasn’t research assistant on that assignment!
Links to Peter (and his varies guises) can be found here-
http://www.amazon.co.uk/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Peter-
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Alice-
You can also find Peter here– http://peterbirch.tumblr.com/
Thanks again Peter,
Happy reading everyone,
Kay xx