A toe in the water...

OK, here's the lowdown on this new blog. As one of them there "poor and struggling" fetish artists, I have long wished I could have a place on the Net where I could upload all my stuff and people could take a look and grab what they liked. The problem is, the "stuff" in questions consists mostly of longish stories told in text and images (the latter being 3D art created in Poser - no actual humans involved, much less harmed, in the making of). For my own viewing pleasure, I put them together as Powerpoint presentations, so they can be clicked through full-screen. Any Powerpoint can easily be exported to a PDF (also fullscreenable and click-throughable), and one or two of the stories have made their way to private correspondents in this form. However, to make them available to the wider masturbatory public either as PPTs or PDFs I would have to have my own site, and here's the rub: I can't afford the web hosting.

A few years ago, I tried a couple of solutions. The first was to find a "free" web host that was easy with adult and fetish stuff and let you do your own HTML. That lasted, I forget, a few months, maybe a year, and generated a trickle of traffic, nothing to speak of. As you'd expect, the "free" host defaced my carefully crafted HTML with ads. Later, I created a new site and uploaded it to a paid host, intending to pay for the hosting with a membership scheme. I ended up with a handful of paying members, but the scheme turned out not to be viable and I had to let it go. (Both these sites had the name "Lines and Curves" and had a rather ingenious design, if I say so myself.)

More recently, I've been uploading sequences of images to Renderotica (you can find me there under the handle NevilleM: note that you can limit yourself to F/M or M/F content by clicking on the subgalleries on the left). Renderotica allows a maximum of 5 image uploads per day. With my stories averaging out at around 100 frames, you can imagine how laborious it is to split them up like that, but with some I've persevered, selecting the best images from each story and uploading them to the free gallery, though without the accompanying text (which, depending on the story, is contained in overlaid narrative boxes or speech balloons), to save time. Those pictures of mine that turned out best are therefore quite likely to be found there - that is, unless they contain anything the hosts deem to be a potential copyright breach (I got in trouble once for representing a character from Star Trek - me, I was flattered that they considered the crude imitation recognisable at all), or anything deemed to depict characters who are underage (school uniforms and the like tend to be a no-no). 

Well, that's certainly better than nothing. However, recently I was browsing through one or two online sites and blogs that offered lists of fetish artists dealing specifically with femdom, and was a little crestfallen to find my stuff not included anywhere. OK, it's not the greatest, but there's plenty worse quality stuff out there - and dutifully incorporated in the aforementioned lists of artists - so I strongly suspect that the reason my stuff isn't in there is not because it failed quality control, but simply because hardly anyone has seen it. Well, that's what this blog is here to remedy. 

Obviously (?) I am not going to attempt to upload entire stories here. At least, not until I've tested the water. I have read Blogger's Terms and Conditions, though not recently, and I know there are limits to what you can post here even behind a warning page. For the moment, I plan to use this space simply to advertise what's available to anyone who feels like dropping me a request via email, and perhaps to post the odd text-only story or essay or random musing on topics germane to the theme. Which, now I think about it, I haven't yet actually stated. Well, OK, here goes.

If there's a single theme running through all my work, it's humiliation. Mostly, this comes in the form of spankings, delivered by male hands to female bottoms or vice versa (of late, I've tended more towards vice versa, but that could change). In a typical story of mine, a protagonist (occasionally, a group of protagonists) is shown to have done something that provides the antagonist with at least a flimsy pretext to spank her or him, which he or she accordingly does, and shortly after this the story comes to a somewhat abrupt end with an awkward flourish.

You'd be right not to expect Dickens or Tolstoy, and I am quite sympathetic to the objection that such a plot line hardly merits the word "story" at all. Be assured that when I use words like "story" and "art", I am not being presumptuous or pretentious, simply bowing to what appears to be established custom in this particular field. That said, there may be a deeper plot than the surface one I've just described - and that would be a kind of hero's journey with the artist as hero, fighting the dragons of cringe and pokethrough at every crossing, struggling towards the Holy Grail of the utterly perfect erotic image. To achieve this aim you have to know something about composition, and lighting (my Achilles' heel, as you'll soon see), and quite a lot about what turns you on. Which, perhaps surprisingly at my advanced age, is something that's still at least faintly mysterious to me.

I have a reasonable idea what doesn't turn me on: dungeons and elaborate torture machines and people in over-the-top fetish clothing and gimp masks. I respect other people's taste in these things, but this sort of stuff doesn't do it for me. Likewise, I have a little difficulty with sub-literate dialogue and extremely fanciful SF scenarios. I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is, in any fetish scenario, an inevitable tension between the outlandishness of the fetish and the need (at least in my case) for some degree of minimal plausibility. In fact it's the requirement of plausibility which accounts for the fact that in many of my purported "spanking stories", the actual depiction of spanking is somewhat overshadowed by the long and elaborate build-up: that's just me trying to make you believe that what's going to happen could actually happen in something resembling the real world.

 I've mentioned spanking, but among the very few people who have seen my stuff, that might well not be the fetish they associate with me. It's true that over the past couple of years I've branched out, first  into F/M stories in which spanking still played a part, and thence towards stories or scenarios in which women threaten men with castration - and in some cases, make good on their threat. This might be seen as the classic tendency for the erotomaniac to seek ever more extreme stimuli, but there's actually a bit more to it than that, as I intend to explain in a future post on this specific subject. For now, suffice to say that if you're looking for a common thread, once again, humiliation is the key concept. By this I mean that a character or characters find fulfilment or release in asserting power over another character who is understood, in the context of the story, to be initially dominant in some sense (the same dynamic runs through my M/F spanking stories: in most, the women initially believe themselves to have the upper hand, if nothing else, through the sexual power they exert). That's the dynamic that works for me in a way nothing else does. Reasons to follow in a separate post, one of these days or years.

I'm hoping that keeping this blog running won't take significant time away from my main hobby of creating erotic images and scenarios, and I also suspect that one of its effects will be to encourage me to ditch the long, needlessly elaborate "story" format and concentrate more on one-off pictures or short sequences beginning in media res. And there, I hope it will eventually become clear both to me and the visitor that less can sometimes be more - not only in terms of story length, but also in terms of explicitness and, for want of a better word, extremeness. Having visited the outer limits of what my imagination is capable of suggesting to me as erotic, it's quite possible I will eventually content myself with the merest, most delicate hints - evident in perhaps a clothing item, a posture, a facial expression - of the dynamic of power-play outlined above, and I'll end up with a toe in the water of the softest of soft porn, but with a knowingness about it. For what is intended to be "known" thereby, see subsequent posts.