2014: Thank you and F**k you

I hate New Year. Stupid, made-up, melancholy festival that it is. I have recently decided to ignore the bloody thing altogether but that gets tricky when you spend the evening browsing Facebook and everything’s all “End of 2014! Beginning of 2015!”

Oh fuck the fuck off.

Maybe it’s my inner Pagan but I think that the New Year should start in Spring. It used to, you know. That’s why Aries is the first horoscope sign. Late-ish March (coincidentally around my birthday) is the proper time to celebrate New Year as far as I am concerned and you can take your Gregorian Calendar and your de facto international standards for dates  and shove them up your arse.

Aries.
So little of this picture makes sense

If I have resolutions to make, I’m doing it in Spring. Or possibly Autumn. That  always feels like a good time of year to make changes – presumably because the school year starts then and that “New Term! New Start!” mentality gets seared into your brain at an impressionable age.

You know when the worst time to make resolutions is? A week after fucking Christmas when we still have the worst of winter to get through. That’s when.

Always Winter and never Christmas, you say, CS Lewis?
We have a word for that: January!

And I hate the idea of taking stock of the previous year. “What did you achieve in the last twelve months?” Fuck off. Admittedly, while I may have in previous years had every reason to be angry about this question, my anger this year may be somewhat misplaced. Because, by any possible measure, this has been a corkingly good year for me.

This is my favourite book. Don't tell the others, though. I don't want them to fight.

• I published my first (and second, third and fourth) spanky romance books.  

• I finally got onto the property ladder (which is no mean feat for a single parent living in the most insanely expensive area of the UK outside London).

• I got my bloody degree! And a 2:1 at that! I can still scarcely believe it. Seriously, no-one gets a first. It’s literally a myth. A 2:1 is everything I ever dreamed of degree-wise. I have booked  all my graduation gubbins for next March. Tickets for my daughter and my parents? Check. Hire stupid-looking gown and hood? Check. Book photographer to do both individual and family shots of me looking stupid in my gown and holding a rolled-up bit of paper pretending to be my degree? Checkity-check. I can't wait.

And there was another thing that was rather marvellous at the time but now that it’s over, is probably contributing significantly to my melancholic mood. I thought I was going to talk about it when I started this post. On reflection, I realise I won’t be.

I'll acknowledge it was a good year. But you know, I’m still not happy with where my life’s at, right now. There’s some significant stuff I want to achieve in 2015. Luckily, I made a wish when I was stirring my Christmas Pudding so the main life-changing thing will definitely happen.

Honestly, Christmas-pudding-stirring wishes are the most reliable wishes ever. They’re even better than Birthday Cake wishes. This is based on at least ten years of research where I think all of my wishes have come true. Christmas Pudding wishes are  totally cast iron. So much so that next year, I’m going to wish for a glow in the dark unicorn that shits gold doubloons instead of wishing for stuff that will inevitably happen in the next 12 months anyway as I have previously been doing.

The flame mostly burns on MAGIC

So yeah, 2014, you were probably a brilliant year for me but right now I feel too bloody grumpy to acknowledge it.

Raises virtual glass. “To 2014. Thank you and fuck you.”

Book Review - Chasing Delia by Aubrey Cara

Want to know more about the book review star rating system? Or find out what other books I've reviewed? Check out this page here.

Chasing Delia

The story begins with Delia Myers Schmidt driving god-knows-where in a state of desperation having just received divorce papers and the worst possible Dear John letter from her army husband.
She has no luggage, no money, no plan. She is driving away from the home that she and her husband shared as quickly and comprehensively as she can manage.

It wasn't going to end well, that lack-of-plan. And when she gets hit by a drunk-driven truck, it looks like her already as-bad-as-it-can-get day is about to get even worse. Still, you know what they say - every cloud has a silver lining. I have no idea why they say that, mind. It's neither literally nor metaphorically true.

At least in Delia's case, her traffic accident doesn't leave her with any lasting injuries and allows her to meet the very sexy and very charming police captain Jake Forrester. Not that things get off to a smooth start. Hurt and angry by her husband's betrayal, Delia decides that Jake needs to take responsibility for all failings of all men ever and screams abuse at him while half-dressed in her hospital room.

Rather than being insulted, Jake rather sweetly realises that Delia's anger isn't really directed at him and shows good humour throughout. It does kind of help that he fancies the (non-sexy flowery old lady) pants off her, of course.

But things are never going to be that straightforward and Delia makes a run for it before she and Jake can become properly acquainted. She runs away a lot, does Delia.

Flash forward three months and Delia has moved to a new town and found herself a job with possibly the world's coolest Small Town Lesbian Bakers. She is totally getting her life back together post Shitty Emotionally Abusive Unfaithful Husband. But she's not totally over things yet. So when sexy Jake Forrester and his very cool eleven-year-old son serendipitously stroll into the bakery one day, Delia once again, freaks the fuck out and runs. Only as far as the back room, this time, mind.

Jake is charming and patient and utterly smitten with Delia and over time a very wonderful and believable romance blossoms between the two. Every time she runs from him after that, he fetches her right back again. (Luckily we know that (a) that's what she wants and (b) Jake isn't a serial killer from the narration. I wouldn't advocate that all men chase after women who literally run away from them.

Plenty of erotic romances are entirely based in fantasy. Not just the ones based in the Mystical Planet of Zpan-Koh or in the futuristic-spanking-based political system of the twenty-ninth century. Even contemporary spanking romances can have very little in common with the real world.

Chasing Delia, however, is all about real world issues. Not only does Delia have eleven years of a sham marriage to recover from, she also has an alcoholic single mother with whom communication has completely broken down. Jake has demons of his own including a complicated romantic history which has left him raising a son who is not biologically his. There's a lot of baggage all round.

It's beautifully handled.Aubrey Cara makes you care for the characters so much that it makes your heart ache. But be warned, things certainly get a bit grim at times. There's all kinds of emotional abuse and parental neglect and possible infertility and betrayal and heartbreak and addiction to get through. It's counterbalanced by an engagingly romantic plot and some delightful spankings, but you need to be able to handle the grimness.

Overall, it's a wonderful, wonderful story. As much about family as it about spanky romance. It's heartwarming to see Delia - the girl who though she'd never belong - find herself through the love of not just her soul mate, Jake, but also the love of her various friends and her step-son, Steven.

There is a confrontation with her ex-husband towards the end of the book which feels a bit contrived. I guess it's necessary though. Having spent so much of her life just following the path of least resistance, this is our chance to see Delia as a strong, independent woman with a clear vision of her own future,

She takes an amazing journey to get there.I felt privileged to share in her happy ever after. God knows, given the emotional wringer that Aubrey Cara put me through, I feel I deserve it,

Bunty Comics made me a Spanko!

If I were the sort of person to spend time analysing why I am quite so obsessed with all things spanking, then I think DC Thomson & Co, the publishers of girls’ comics such Bunty and Nikki,  would have a lot to answer for.

As it happens, I am not that sort of person. Spanking is just awesome. I may as well waste time trying to work out why I like kissing. Or orgasms.

But if girls’ comics of the 1980s didn’t make me into a spanko, they certainly tapped into that part of my psyche at quite an early age. I don’t know if other countries had comics like Bunty. That and Nikki were the two that I used to read regularly but there were a whole slew of them back then – Judy, Mandy, Tammy, Jinty, Misty (ending in –y was essential for some reason).

I totally failed to win one of those Swingballs. I'm not bitter.

Each issue would contain seven or eight serial stories spreading over several weeks. There was usually something pony related, something about a girl with dreams of becoming a ballerina, something set in the future with comical robots as well as an impressive number of stories of young girls doing jobs – dog trainer, fashion designer, secret agent, brain surgeon – that you’d think would be difficult to break into when you’re twelve years old. And there was always, always a story about Victorian orphans having a terrible time of it.

Not surprisingly, the Victorian miserylit stories were my favourite. Stories I remember include

• Callous Cassie in which a young woman pretends to be as cruel as the other teachers in the school in which she works in order not to be discovered secretly helping the girls under her care. 
• Workhouse Wendy where the protagonist’s plans to go undercover at a workhouse in order to expose its cruel practises goes horribly awry.
• School for the Forgotten which was all about, oh I can’t remember, relentless misery and beatings probably. They all were.

·        Chief amongst these stories was Bunty’s School for the Unwanted Ones. Following the death of her father, our hero, Valerie Matthews was packed off to an academy run by the cruel Dr Croome and his bevy of equally sadistic staff. If you were looking for a story in which girls were frequently physically punished with a variety of different implements (and it turns out eleven-year-old-me kind of was) then this was the story for you.

I certainly remembered a panel in which Val was bent over a stool in the headmaster’s study and struck with a tawse. Although Google image isn’t helping me out with that particular one,  I found a few other punishments from School for the Unwanted Ones because, happily, that sort of thing just kept happening to the characters. Every single week. Like I said, they were having a terrible time of it.

I’m not saying that the frequent depictions of girls getting spanked or caned in girls comics was necessarily an indication of any particular perviness on the part of the writers. Little girls do just love reading about other little girls suffering horribly. And the writers were happy to lay the misery and suffering on with a trowel. Tammy had a story called The Slaves of War Orphan Farm which ought to win some kind of award for the most gleefully appalling title ever given to something aimed at children.

You didn’t even need to be stuck in the Victorian times for awful things to happen to you in Buntyworld. One story, The Courage of Crippled Clara subjected its protagonist to a level of physical chastisement that I remember finding somewhat startling at the time. And intriguing, obviously. She gets spanked with a belt by her father and then caned at school by the headmistress for relatively minor offences just because the local Lord of the Manor has taken against her and apparently that’s enough to get you punished by all and sundry. Not that I had any great love for The Courage of Crippled Clara. Maybe I preferred my punished heroines to be living in the previous century. Or maybe it was because it was basically another variant of a pony story and I was definitely not the kind of girl who spent her weekends mucking out stables.

Not that kind of pony story. Get your mind out of the gutter.

Mostly, I think my indifference came from the fact that the artwork was a bit shit. It certainly stuck in my mind, though. In fact, in the almost thirty years since I was a regular subscriber to Bunty and Nikki, the stories have stayed with me. It might not have been great literature but it was absorbing and entertaining. And sometimes it involved girls my own age being bent over and beaten. Much like the stories I made up in my head at the time.

Those kinds of comics are gone now. Bunty, one of the first, was the last to bow out in 2001. And by then the format had changed out of all recognition as it aped the glossy magazine style of women’s magazines.

I want to believe there would still be a market for those kinds of serial stories amongst nine to twelve year olds now. Back then the comics were produced on the cheapest possible paper with only a couple of the pages boasting full colour. You only got a free gift once a year in order to soften to the 2p price hike.

And those gifts were fucking terrible.

Comics cost about 16p when I was a regular reader which barely made a dent in my £1.50 pocket money. In fact, a copy of Bunty cost about the same as a Cadbury’s Flake.  You’d be hard pressed to buy a kid’s magazine for less than three quid these days. So unless youngsters are regularly getting £30 a week pocket money, comic buying has become a fuck of a lot more expensive. They’ve become glossier and now give you a free gift every single week, sure, but they’ve rather overtaken the Cadbury’s Flake in terms of retail price.

All of which makes me sound like the most tedious sort of “It were better in my day”-spouting old person. “You young people, with your  overpriced Disney comics and your ‘interactive media’ bollocks. We had proper comics in my day. With proper actual child cruelty. Not like your namby-pamby non-child-beating nonsense you get these days. It was absolutely brilliant.”

Audiosexual: Renee Rose's Westerfield Trilogy on audiobook

Renee Rose's wonderful Westerfield trilogy are now available on audiobook! Well they have been for a while now. In fact quite a sizeable chunk of her back catalogue are now available for your audible enjoyment. But it's the Westerfields I'm going to talk about because they're the ones I've listened to. Plus you all know how much I love them.

Available right here!

I was a little bit unsure about listening to my favourite spanking fiction being read by somebody else. It feels unnatural, somehow. Books are my absolute number one medium of choice for delivering erotica. Anything film-based, for example, and I tend to get a bit embarrassed by it all. There are other people involved then, you see. It's not just me and my brain anymore and that makes it all seem a little bit awkward and silly.

I appreciate that reading erotica is only made possible by someone else being involved. Someone else has to write the thing. (Of course, I occasionally write erotica myself but I only masturbate to it when it's still in the conceptual stage. Wanking over one's finished novella would be unforgivably vain.)

The thing is, reading is a funny old process and reading in one's head, in my experience, is nothing like reading out loud. I don't read at anything like the slow, tortoise-y speed I would do if I were reading something to someone else. Most of the time I am not conscious of reading the words at all. It's more like the words and phrases and atmosphere and stuff are being dropped directly into my brain in much the same way that Arnold Schwarzenegger had those memories implanted in Total Recall.

Or did he?

And if my reading matter is just turning up in my head, well then it's fine when it's stuffed to the gills with kinky sex and spanking because - let's face it - my head's chock-a-block with that sort of stuff anyway. But having someone else read it to me, well that's when it gets embarrassing.

I listened to all three of the Westerfield books, (The Westerfield Affair, The Reddington Scandal and The Darlington Incident) in order. They all share the same narrator - Elliot Daniels, a deep voiced Thespian type prone to dramatic over-enunciation.

And, yeah, it was kind of embarrassing listening to some of it. I found myself blushing when talk turned to "wet swollen folds" and "moist pleats". Because despite being unutterably filthy, I am also - it turns out - a bit of a prude.

You might not want to listen to these books during your daily commute. You know when there's someone on the train who's music is blaring out to the whole carriage? I often wonder if they realise or if maybe they have stuck the headphones in wrong and are completely oblivious that they're making everyone else in the vicinity listen to Union J. (I don't check with them of course because I would literally rather die than talk to a stranger on public transport). I would worry that the accidental blaring out noise person would be me. Only instead of sharing my taste in music, I would accidentally be sharing my taste in spanking-based erotica to a carriage full of strangers. (Although, I suppose if the right person overheard it, that could turn out quite swimmingly. That's a meet-cute waiting to be written right there.)

"Excuse me, I couldn't help noticing that you seem to be really really enjoying that book."

Elliot Daniels does a decent job as the narrator although he does rather ham it up. The odd thing is, that I found Daniels' narration style became less pronounced and overdone as I progressed through the trilogy. Odd because I am pretty sure that the audiobooks were recorded in the opposite order from which the original books were published, with the third in the series - The Darlington Incident - being recorded and released first as an audiobook.

So, Daniels clearly wasn't told to tone down his performance. Rather he was encouraged to roll those 'r's and exaggerate the drama as much as possible. "Go on, stick a few more vowel sounds into 'daaaahnced'" he was probably told. "Really go for it."

Daniels also seems to have decided to base Lord Westerfield's voice on Sam the Eagle from the Muppet Show. It's a brave decision but not one I feel that he totally manages to pull off.

"Take me to your room. You have a very long, hard spanking coming."

The very best thing about listening to the audiobooks was that it gave me the opportunity to revisit the Westerfield stories again. They really are bloody brilliant, you know. By far and away the best spanking romance out there (and there's some impressively stiff competition.) Even the Reddington Scandal which I always think of as the weakest of the three, was an absolute joy to listen to again.

I'm not sure if I'll listen to any other Renee Rose books as audiobooks. I am probably not the best audiobook customer to be honest. I hate wearing headphones and I get distracted when the narrator tries to do different voices for each of characters. Plus, apparently, the embarrassment factor of having a man I don't know saying "warm cock". Although, to be honest, I got over that one by about halfway through the first book.

I wonder who the main erotica audiobook customers are? I bet it's Grannies. Grannies love an audiobook, surely. Especially one of Renee's. Sexy spankings, Regency intrigue and a narrator who sounds like he's doing a Charles Dance impression ramped up to 300%. What more could one possibly want?

Oh god yes, that's it.

Happy Christmas!

What's that coming over the hill? Is it Christmas? You know I think it might be. It is almost here now, hurtling towards us like a big tinselly, carol-singing juggernaut.

I may not be totally ready yet - presents are still unwrapped, mince pies are still looking suspiciously like their separate constituent ingredients but, hey, it'll be fine. Whenever I start to worry about being disorganised about Christmas, I remind myself that Scrooge didn't get his shit together until Christmas morning and everyone thought he was great. Although clearly there, the trick is to lower everyone's expectations beforehand. I think the ship may have sailed on that one.

I bloody love Christmas, me. In fact everything I love about Christmas is summed up in Tim Minchin's awesome "White Wine In The Sun."


I may not live thousands of miles away from my family, there definitely won't be sunshine and there probably won't even be white wine. Yet this song sums up my Christmases perfectly.

I really like Christmas
It's sentimental, I know, but I just really like it
I am hardly religious
I'd rather break bread with Dawkins than Desmond Tutu, to be honest 

And yes, I have all of the usual objections
To consumerism, the commercialisation of an ancient religion
To the westernisation of a dead Palestinian
Press-ganged into selling Playstations and beer
But I still really like it

However you feel about Christmas, whether you are going to be celebrating it, tolerating it or just gritting your teeth and hanging in there until the whole damn thing is over, I hope this festive season is everything that you want and need it to be. See you on the other side.

Peace and Love.

Break-Up Songs

All songs are break-up songs really. Some are just better at hiding it than others.

Ylvis’s “What Does the Fox Say”? All about breakups. Let’s face it, nothing captures the feeling of being dumped like “fish go blub, and the seal goes OW OW OW”. Because songwriters – like all artists – love a bit of pain.

If you want proof of how artists are obsessed with the shittier side of love, try finding a reading for a wedding which isn’t about heartbreak. There’s a reason everyone always does Shakespeare’s sonnet 116 at weddings. You try reading any other love poem and you’re basically telling the happy couple that it will never last.

I give it six months. Tops.

There’s a scene in the excellent film The Tall Guy where Jeff Goldblum wallowing in post-break-up misery turns on the radio only to find the song all-too-horribly fits his situation. He flips to another station and then another only to find that he is continually taunted by post-breakup themed. Hey, we’ve all been there. The only problem with the scene is that all the songs chosen – Neil Sedaka’s Breaking up is Hard to do, Everley Brothers Crying In the Rain, Long John Baldry’s Let the Heartaches Begin and Elvis Presley’s Heartbreak Hotel are all sort of the same. 1960s croony numbers to a man. Whereas in real life, break up songs know no boundaries. Your ironic post-break-up radio listening might just as well see you taunted by Bob Dylan or some Swedish Pop Rock.

Jeff tries to find some less salt-into-wound-rubbing music 

I have a longstanding love of Billy Bragg. I spent my adolescence being roundly mocked for it so I always sort of assume that if anyone else ever says that they like his music then they’re being sarcastic. Bragg does a great line in break-up  songs. No-one explores the futility of attempting to successfully negotiate interpersonal relationships quite like him.

You can’t argue with a sentiment like “You're the kind of girl who wants to open up the bottle of pop
too early in the journey/Our love went flat just like that”. Bragg’s best break-up themed lyric comes from The Saturday Boy:

I never made the first team. I just made the first team laugh
And you never came to the phone. You were always in the bath.

Basically, you’re never going to cut it as a songwriter unless you’ve got a fair number of break-up songs under your belt. Even Disney manages to get in on the act. Well, OK, Hercules’ I won’t Say I’m In Love isn’t strictly speaking a break-up song, but you’ve got to love a Disney number which contains the lines “No man is worth the aggravation./ That’s ancient history. Been there, done that.”

Although the heroine Meg does kind of ruin it by living happily ever after with the hero afterwards.

If you want my personal recommendation of the best song to listen to post-breakup then I heartily recommend “There’s a fine, fine line” as sung by Kate Monster in Avenue Q.

There is something immensely satisfying in bellowing out the lines “I don’t have the time to waste on you any more / I don’t think that you even know what you’re looking for” at the top of your voice.

By way of a caveat, when I say ‘recommend’, I do mean for real-life situations rather than any fictional ones you might be writing. I am not sure that having one’s romantic heroine deal with the difficulties in her love life via a song sung by a pseudo-Muppet from the musical that gave us “The Internet is for Porn” is the right way to go.

Although, talking of “The Internet Is For Porn”, that’s a great song isn’t it? Let’s have a link to that one. Obviously, according to my theory, that’s also a break-up song. Because you know, everything is. “Grab your dick and double-click”? It’s all about the heartbreak.

Saturday Spankings - "Girls who complain don’t deserve to come"

Saturday Spankings!

Good morning Spankos and apologies to anyone who got here early and just got my placeholder post. I am being phenomenally crap about getting Saturday Spankings up in time these days.

It's only eight(ish) sentences! It really shouldn't be beyond me.

So, here you go, a bit of Corbin's Bend filthiness from Kirsty and Logan. Currently Kirsty is facedown on the bed, legs apart having her pussy spanked by Logan. A situation she is finding both arousing and frustrating.

“Oh god, Logan,” she screamed. “I thought you wanted to fuck me!”Logan stopped spanking and paused for a moment before replying. “Was that a complaint?” he asked. 

“No, no!” gasped Kirsty, she turned round to look at him, to try to gauge how serious that stern tone was. He didn’t look angry. He was unbuttoning his jeans and smiling slightly as he looked straight into her eyes. 

“Good. Because I’m not going to tolerate complaints. Girls who complain don’t deserve to come. If you’re going to tell me what to do, I might just come in your pretty mouth and not let you orgasm at all.” 

“No, please…” whimpered Kirsty, utterly turned on by the way he was speaking to her. It was so unlike how he spoke to her the rest of the time. I like dominant Logan, she thought.  He’s filthy.

More filthiness inside!

Check out the rest of the Saturday Spankings on the List below.

Saturday Spankings - “Begin the spanking”

Time for a spanking!

Happy Saturday, fellow spankos!

As I may have mentioned once or twice, my new book East End Girl came out this week. It's the fifth book in Corbin's Bend Season 2 and so far, people seem to be saying very nice things about it. Which is a relief. There's a lot of pressure in joining a successful series like this. You don't want to be responsible for the book that makes people say "I really enjoyed all the books in the series UNTIL THAT ONE."

This week's snippet takes place during Kirsty's public disciplinary session. Because if I was going to write a Corbin's Bend book, I definitely wanted to include a public paddling. It's one of the things that makes Corbin's Bend Corbin's Bend.

Buy it now. Yes, right now. Drop everything.

Charles’s voice boomed out “Begin the spanking” and Kirsty steeled herself for the worst minutes of her life. 

After only ten swats Kirsty felt like she couldn’t take any more. Her backside ached and throbbed from the hard spanks that Logan had administered. She had no idea how she was going to get through the next twenty. 

Logan brought the paddle down with slightly less force on the eleventh swat. Kirsty, staring straight ahead, saw Charles shake his head ‘no’, disallowing the blow.Kirsty wanted to scream at him. Wasn’t this enough for him? Was the pain and the humiliation she was already suffering not sufficient? He needed to add more?

Check out the rest of the Saturday Spankers on the list below. Have lovely weekends, all of you.

East End Girl is on sale! Buy It Now!

My latest book East End Girl is on sale now and I am very, very excited about it.

It may seem that given I have been ALL OVER social media for the last day or so urging everyone in sight to BUY MY BOOK that a blog post specifically written just to urge you to BUY MY BOOK may be a little redundant.

 But, quite frankly people, you bring it on yourselves. My best ever day in terms of book sales so far was the day I published a blog post entitled "Go and Buy My New Book Now! Go on!"

That tells me all I need to know about my readership. It's like you people just want to be dominated.

So, go on, buy East End Girl now. Otherwise, The Doctor here will administer a damn good thrashing.

Because everyone finds Doctor Who + cane, the biggest turn-on ever, right?

Or alternatively, The Doctor won't give you a damn good thrashing. Whichever is the greatest threat, really.

All your Christmas present buying needs sorted, right here.

East End Girl is available from:

Amazon.com

Amazon.co.uk

Blushing Books

Barnes and Noble

About this book

Kirsty Beale wants a fresh start. She’s quit her life in London and moved five thousand miles to start a new one in Corbin’s Bend, Colorado – the world’s only spanking-based community. As a lifelong spanko, Kirsty thinks Corbin’s Bend is the perfect place for her but the reality doesn’t match her dreams and she struggles to fit into her new suburban environment. Reluctant to get involved in community life she dismisses her new neighbors as ‘boring’. With one exception.

Fellow newcomer Logan Barrett is good looking, funny, and occasionally dominant in a way that Kirsty can’t decide if she finds sexy or annoying. Logan moved to Corbin’s Bend hoping to find a sweet, old-fashioned girl, willing to submit to domestic discipline. Kirsty who drinks heavily, smokes and swears like a sailor is pretty much the opposite of his idea of the perfect woman. Yet despite their differences, Logan and Kirsty can’t deny the attraction they have for one another.

Logan hopes to bring stability into Kirsty’s chaotic life but Kirsty’s increasingly out-of-control behavior might just jeopardize her whole future at Corbin’s Bend.

Book Reviews - Corbin's Bend Season 2 so far

Want to know more about the book review star rating system? Or find out what other books I've reviewed? Check out this page here.

Corbin's Bend 2: Electric Boogaloo

I reviewed the first Season 2 Corbin's Bend Book Chemistry of Attraction some weeks ago and while I have been diligently reading the rest of the season's offerings I haven't had the chance yet to stick down my hastily cobbled together thoughts on whether and how much I liked them.

And I know that hastily cobbled together thoughts are what you especially want from me. So with the release of my very own Corbin's Bend novel East End Girl ridiculously bloody imminent, now seems like a good time to catch up with books 2-4 of Corbin's Bend S2.

His Forever Summer

His Forever Summer - Tara Finnegan

Tara Finnegan's first Corbin's Bend Exile to Unity is one of my favourites of the series so far. It's an excellent read albeit one that had me sobbing in the bath. But you know, in a good way. It was cathartic. His Forever Summer introduces us to Jim-from-the-first-book's brother Kieran O'Brien who has invited himself to stay with his brother's family for a few months, blissfully unaware of the spankiness of the Colorado community. He meets Carla who has appeared in numerous previous books, less a femme fatale and more a femme kind-of-really-annoying. It's nice to see things from her perspective for a change.

By embarking on a relationship with Carla without knowing the full facts about Corbin's Bend unique spanking-based policies, Kieren is following in a fine and noble tradition. He's not the first passing visitor to discover a passion for spanking after hanging out in Corbin's Bend for a week. I like it. It supports my theory that everyone has an inner spanko just waiting to be released.

Kieren, is however the first guy who has been in that position and he is also the first would-be Head of Household. Cadence and Abby and Dina were introduced to the lifestyle as prospective spankees rather than spankers which has got to be a damn sight easier when you're not the one giving the orders.

Luckily, with a bit of brotherly advice from Jim, Kieren more than rises to the occasion when we persuades Carla to allow him to handle her punishment rather than a professional disciplinarian.

The romance is nicely handled. Although I have to say I was a little unsure about the idea of a 'punishment fuck'. Does that sound a bit, well, rapey to anyone else?

Punishment fucks aside though (and to be honest I was less weirded out by that than I was by the whole enema bit in Exile to Unity), this was an excellent story with brilliantly developed characters who have to work hard to make their happiness happen.

A Brush of Violet

A Brush of Violet - Corinne Alexander

The hero of this book is Charles Robinson, the head of the disciplinary committee who turns up in many of the other Corbin's Bend books (including mine, briefly, as it goes.) I had no idea he looked like that! Look at him, he's all young and sexy. I think I had a much more headmastery version of the man in my head.

He's lots of fun too, chaperoning new just-passing visitor, Violet, around the place as the two of them build up a nice rapport. By way of a change, Violet is fully aware of the spanky nature of Corbin's Bend and is something of an enthusiastic spanko herself. Which is nice.

I didn't engage with this book as much as I have to with some of the other books in the series. The characters were lovely and very nicely written but there felt like very little conflict that needed to be overcome for Charles and Violet reach their happy ever after. The main storyline focuses on Violet needing to make a decision whether she should return to her high powered - but ultimately unrewarding - career or pursue her dreams instead. I'll try not to spoil the ending for you on that score.

The One She Loves

The One She Loves - Constance Masters

Five Stars!

I loved this one. I love the odd couple-ness of Crystal and Carol who though seemingly having absolutely nothing in common apart from their daughter and their DD lifestyle, make an extremely cute and convincing couple. The spankings in this story are far more about Domestic Discipline than sexy shenanigans. You don't get the impression that Carol likes being spanked very much which is odd given that she does repeatedly seem to put herself in the sort of situations that are going to see her at the receiving end of some kind of hands-on punishment from Crystal.

Basically the whole gang from Constance Master's first Corbin's Bend book, the delightful Leading The Way are back. The four friends, Carol, Erin, Jen and Sienna seem to be a terrible influence on one another but they are great fun to read. Carol decides that she wants to have a baby (Carol and Crystal's daughter, Brianna, was carried by Crystal) and then goes about trying to make it happen in all the wrong ways.

While headstrong Carol provides most of the focus of this story, I really did enjoy reading things from Crystal's perspective. It was interesting to hear her doubts and insecurities about how to manage their Domestic Discipline relationship successfully. Heads of Household have the rather more demanding job in this situation.

I really, really hope that Constance Masters is planning to write books about all the girls in that friendship group. We've had Erin and Carol, I would love to see a book focusing on Sienna next. She and her husband's previously sexy-spanking-only marriage seems to be developing into something more Domestic Discipline-y. I would love to hear more about it.

And as I may have mentioned once or twice, the next book in the series will be my very own East End Girl in which you can meet sweet, old-fashioned outdoorsy-type, Logan and headstrong, English newcomer Kirsty and find out whether there's any sex, spanking or romance in their futures. (Just so we're clear: Yes. Yes there is.)

I probably won't be reviewing that one. My review would just consist of me saying "When I read it, it all seemed very familiar. I felt like I had read the exact same story dozens of times before."

Edited to note: These books are now all available in the box set Return to Corbin's Bend.