Janine Ashbless: Smut Manchester 2015

Well, what a day! The best Smut event to date, IMHO, even if the journey back from Rainy City was ... ahem ... somewhat eventful. Still, it's all grist to the writing mill...

No gain without pain, eh? Cara Sutra administers a good thrashing. And no, this was not faked for the camera!

Victoria and Kev Blisse were the perpetrators of the event, of course, and are to be applauded for creating a terrific lineup of stalls, kink, smut, art and networking (read: chat). Here's the Victoria-eye view of how it went, with rather better pictures (from DN Photography Manchester) than me :-)

The main event was held in the Bangkok Bar which was dark (particularly if you were trying to find the loos) and cosy and full of wonderful glittery things...

Nippleicious

... Including a full-on BDSM dungeon ... which as you can see from my pic above we smutters made good use of :-D

Speaking of hands-on experiences, there was also a stall by the very wonderful Kink Craft where many of us had a go at making out own mini-floggers.

Kink Craft do kits and online craft videos for the Martha Stewarts among us :-)

I was very pleased with mine :-)

There were smut-slam readings, of course. I read my poem On Erotic Vocabulary, forthcoming in Ashley Lister's collection Coming Together: in Verse:

Photo by D N Photography Manchester via Victoria Blisse

There were excellent writing workshops on Public Speaking and World Building - but I was particularly impressed by Kay Jaybee's ability to make us find the erotic potential in everyday objects. Supermarket shopping will never be the same again!

After the daytime events, impresario Jay Coates led us in a crocodile to Chapter One, the bookshop (good call that - we'd have never all got there on our own):

It's gorgeous. AND THEY SERVE TEA AND CAKES!

There we took part in an amazing Dr Sketchy session. Yes, an art-class! Two fabulous performers from Monster Cirque took it in turn to do their wonderful thing on the stage, then pose for five minutes while the audience sketched like crazy...