SpanishRed

My Kink isn't a Lifestyle

In 1952, John Cage and a collection of musicians performed a piece for a live audience called 4'33". The musicians picked up their instruments, then didn’t play for four long minutes. Cage was dr...

I Know Less About BDSM With Every Passing Year

I ended my first D/s relationship in 2014. Back then I thought someone with six years of kink experience would be pretty adept at navigating BDSM, but I'm still a beginner. I still make yuuuge mist...

Poetry Week Day Three: What is Poetry For?

If you’re going to write poetry, you must learn what it is and what it hopes to achieve. We’ve covered the first category in quite a lot of depth, so today we’re asking, “What is poetry for...

Poetry Week Day Two: Sound Matters

If you do poetry readings, you’ll hear Lewis Carroll’s Jabberwocky a thousand times. Poets love it, and it goes like this:

’Twas brillig, and the slithy toves
Did gyre and gimble in ...

BlackHippyChick Day: How to Polish Your Work

There are several steps to achieving a worthwhile piece of work. Many of those stages are fun. Writing first drafts is fun. Getting feedback is fun. Imagining the prospect of publication is fun. Pr...

It's Poetry Week. Death to Didaciticm

The apartheid era lasted half a century by silencing any voice that dared expose it. When the government’s gag orders on writers didn’t work, it simply censored the media. One news magazine kep...

Finding Your Voice Week Day Four: Stop Posing

The text I’m about to show you has no actual meaning. It was generated by a computer program specifically designed to use big words without substance. Ready? Let’s go.

2024-11-29 06:42:52 +0000 UTC View Post

Rage, Rage Until the Dying of the Light

  There are three types of people on my block list:

* Those who hate feminists.

* Those who hate men.

* Those who hate everyone.

Scratch ...

Finding Your Voice Week Day Two: Developing the Capacity for Original Thought

If you want to develop an original voice, you must develop the capacity for original thought. The latter might seem well-nigh impossible, but it’s not something one conjures out of nothingness. Y...

We Are the Product

During my first year at Fetlife, an internet stranger told me he wanted to cut my throat, hang me upside down over a bath, and watch me bleed out. In the years since, I’ve lost count of the men w...

This Week We're Working on Finding Your Voice

Zen Buddhists say the primary goal of meditation is to find enlightenment, but if you have a goal to find enlightenment, it will never happen. If you achieve enlightenment, merely thi...

Writing Community Week Day Four: In Which I Nag a Whole Lot

This week we spoke about the writing community, and this is what we learned:

• You want to work on your writing.

• You want to learn the basics, even style guides.

...
2024-11-23 09:21:06 +0000 UTC View Post

I Fell into the 4B Movement By Accident While I Was Shopping for Groceries

The Korean 4B movement has been swearing off heterosexual marriage, dating, and children since 2010. If society won’t promise them safety or reproductive rights, the 4Bs will simply remove themse...

Writing Community Week Day Three: Spoken Word Events

Spoken word poetry is one of the most hated and beloved forms of poetry today. It’s written to please an audience in a live performance, so its writers tend to be lazy about structure. These poem...

BlackHippyChick Day: Apostrophes

How do you comfort the grammar police?
They’re, their, there.

I didn’t write that joke, but I wish I had, and that’s enough. Today we’re doing apostrophes. (Yay)

Apostrophes ...

Sometimes Hurt People Hurt People

As a shelter volunteer, I’m on The Cuddle Crew. As the name suggests, our job is to cuddle. We earn the trust of traumatised dogs so they can find their forever homes. It’s our job to teach the...

Cheat Code Week Day Five: Thesauruses

South Africa has several official languages, so we have higher expectations of our vocabularies than most. We know there's no way to replicate the musicality of Xhosa in Zulu and no worthy English ...

Cheat Code Week: Mythology and Religion

Not too long ago we spoke about the symbolic value of colour. We said red could symbolise love and green, nature. But colour’s symbolism is relatively limited when you compare it to the symbolic ...

Writing Cheat Codes Week: Homages

I’ve been writing the same book since <checks files> 2011. I’ve been trying to achieve the impossible feat of writing the last two poems in my collection before I delete another two. A wr...

Why My Limits are an Autocracy

“You should never have to make a case for your limits and submit them to another party for approval.” 2024-11-14 04:42:14 +0000 UTC View Post

Black Hippy Chick Day: Choosing Your Words Carefully

Abstractions are one of the most common criticisms you’ll see in this workshop. Abstract language deals in ideas rather than objects, and generalisations rather than details. Which of the followi...

Cheat Code Week: Grammar-Checking Apps

In days of yore, the only way to check your writing syntax and style was through editors. Yay, progress! There are now free tools to do all that work on your behalf. I use two: Grammarly and the He...

It's Cheat Code Week. Today We're Speaking About Research

I have a cognitive disability. My short and long-term memory has been crushed beneath the wreckage of decades of seizures. I don’t process ideas well. I’ve forgotten most of the knowledge I’v...

The Kink Scene is Like Cops and Robbers

When I was in nursery school my best friend, Nicola, and I used to play cops and robbers. We'd stand on opposite sides of the field, run towards each other, then scream bloody murder. Then we’d r...

Writing Psychology Week Day Five: Discipline

Today is Red the Asshole Day, because today we’re going to talk about discipline. I’m sure this will be super fun. </sarcasm>

I spend a great deal of time telling you to create the ...

Writing Psychology Day Four: Feel the Fear and Do it Anyway

Writers are usually introverts. We don’t take well to thoughts of grandeur, but our vocation requires us to believe, even just a little bit, that we are worthy of being read. We must find self-co...

Request for feedback

Morning! I have a couple of users who are requesting that I add ALL my daily Fet posts to Patreon so that they can access them away from Fetlife. Based on engagement, I've been picking up that when...

How to Avoid Writing Burnout and Writer's Block

Creativity isn’t an infinite resource. You only get so much of it on any given day. f you push yourself too hard, you will run out of creative energy. You will burn out, and then you’ll lose th...

BlackHippyChick Day: Tenses

Since a few of you are struggling with your tenses, I thought it’d be a good idea to cover them for BlackHippyChick Day. Let’s start with the most basic of basics: There are 12 tenses. Yes, 12....

If We Spoke About Real Life the Way We Speak About Kink

I heard that you cooked a crap pasta for your boyfriend the other night. If you don’t start preparing better food, the entire restaurant industry will collapse under the weight of canned tuna and...