The following few thoughts about my most recent novel Phoebe’s Punishment do contain some spoilers. If you are interested in reading the novel without knowing in advance what happens towards the end, I recommend you do so before reading this blog.
I hit ‘publish’ on Phoebe’s Punishment about six months ago, and I’m very pleased with how it has been received by readers.
It’s always a risk when you’re the type of author I am that when you do something new, your regular readers won’t follow you on that journey. Over the past few years I’ve dipped my toe into both supernatural and superhero stories with my novellas Sophie and The Tribulations of Omega Girl. I’ve loved writing these books and I hope people have enjoyed reading them – but I definitely acknowledge that they were different from my more grounded and potentially more relatable works.
So when I set out to write Phoebe’s story, it was definitely a conscious attempt to go “back to basics” – to set a story in our own world in which a young woman goes naked a lot in front of other people, without any magic or super-science popping up to account for why they are naked all the time.
If you’ve read my previous blog about ‘nude in school’ scenarios, that gives a pretty good account of why I ended up with the story I did. Phoebe’s Punishment is a continuation of some of the ideas I began to explore in Carla Takes Her Clothes Off, before taking them up a notch with Sophie and …Omega Girl; the idea of a character who is naked for long periods of the story, including while interacting with other characters who are clothed. In order to give a reason in the narrative for Phoebe’s prolonged nudity, I decided to use the school setting and the idea of her nakedness being enforced as a disciplinary measure, because I think that provided probably the least convoluted explanation for what was happening with the character, and meant I could get on with describing her experiences and encounters.
But I did make some choices which I think differentiate Phoebe’s story from other ‘nude in school’ tales.
The first of these was my decision to locate the action in an all-girls’ boarding school. The boarding school part was a no-brainer: if I wanted Phoebe to go naked 24/7, she couldn’t be going home at the end of the day. A story about a girl who has to strip every day on arrival in school would still work, of course – but it was a different story to the one I wanted to tell. I also wanted to isolate Phoebe from people who might help bring her punishment to an end before the story had gone to all the places I wanted it to, so the boarding setting helped there too.
But why did I choose to set Phoebe’s Punishment in an all-girls’ school? After all, one of the fun things about nude in school stories is the idea that the naked girl will encounter or be seen by clothed members of the opposite sex – that’s one of the factors that contribute to either the embarrassment, or the thrill (depending on whether the protagonist is a reluctant nudie or an exhibitionist). A girl being naked in front of other, clothed girls in school is unusual, sure: but given that most schools have girls changing rooms/locker rooms, nudity among pupils of the same sex would surely be nowhere near as daunting for the main character as being naked in front of boys.
Well, that was kind of the point.
I chose an all-girls’ school setting because I wanted Phoebe’s punishment to be located somewhere in the realm of possibility – even if it were only on the outskirts of possibility. The idea that a responsible education head like Ms. Cavendish would force an eighteen-year-old girl to go naked in a mixed-sex environment: to leave her open to sexual harassment, or worse – that would have to me taken the whole thing into the realms of real cruelty, and that was not where I wanted the story to go. Instead, I wanted Ms. Cavendish to have a certain way of justifying to herself the punishment she chose for Phoebe – she had to be able to think, well, you aren’t being asked to show your classmates anything they don’t have themselves.
This was important because I knew I wanted Phoebe to be made to be naked for a long time, and so Ms. Cavendish needed to be able to plausibly take the view that if her student was in distress, she should just stop being so silly and feeling embarrassed that she was being made to be naked in front of other girls. I didn’t want Phoebe being thrown by the headmistress to a pack of horny boys like meat to the lions – I couldn’t imagine any responsible school teacher being either cruel or naïve enough to think that would be okay.
That’s not to say that I ever intended for Phoebe’s embarrassment at having to attend school naked to be just a fuss over nothing. For the quiet, shy Phoebe, used to being able to blend into the background, being made to stand out from literally every other girl in the school – and being forced to reveal her breasts, private parts and everything, not allowed to cover herself – is genuinely horrible at first. It is, as the title says, a punishment: not something that she is supposed to be happy about.
Nudity as punishment is not something I have chosen to explore in my work before. I tend to move towards the idea that nudity for entertainment in my stories should be positive, or at least consensual. Even in stories where the protagonist has to go naked for reasons other than their own enjoyment of that state (Sophie and Omega Girl), it isn’t presented in the narrative as a punishment. Sophie has to be naked all the time, sure – but she’s constructed a life for herself where she isn’t exposed to humiliation or embarrassment, and is only seen naked by people she has consented to allow her to see her that way. As for Omega Girl – well, having to run about naked kind of sucks for her, but I tried to present it as still something she does out of a choice and for the greater good, rather than a pointless exercise in embarrassing her.
But Phoebe is being punished, no question about it. She accepts punishment because she weighs up her options and figures out that going naked is better than the alternative (like a lot of nude in school/college protagonists, she agrees to nudity because she values her future prospects and doesn’t want to jeopardise them), so she has consented to being punished (she isn’t forcibly stripped), but she has to go through something she is hating, purely for the entertainment of the reader.
As that does slightly go against how I like to depict nudity in my writing (I define my ‘naked fiction’ as being “positive about nudity”, which sort of follows to suggest that using nakedness to erotically punish a character is not what ‘naked fiction’ is about), it was important to me that Phoebe goes on a journey as a result of her nudity. I wanted her path to start with humiliation and embarrassment, but then, as time went on, to move towards something more banal, even boring; to represent her “getting used” to constant nudity. Of course, for the reader, to keep it interesting, I still had to drop in further instances of taking Phoebe out of her comfort zone by changing location; but the general day-to-day act of attending school naked was intended to become almost normal for her. Then, we could have the final stage of her journey; where Phoebe starts to experience some positive effects of being naked around others; little at first (the sun on her skin; familiarity with her body leading to greater comfort exploring her female sexuality; feeling loved by her friends and accepted by her peers), but culminating in the ultimate display of Phoebe feeling positive about nudity with her choosing to go to the Leavers’ Ball naked rather than wear her dress.
Not only did I feel like that made the story I wanted to tell, but it was also a conscious consideration to not alienate readers I have gained over the years who like the idea of going nude being presented as a positive experience for my female characters. I might enjoy reading the Tami Smithers stories because they are fun, naughty and well-written, but the cavalcade of sexual punishments that Tami’s body goes through probably isn’t what my long-term readers expect to encounter in my books and I’ve no personal desire as a writer to ambush them with harder fetish content. I might like to dip my toe into that occasionally as a reader/viewer, but it isn’t where my brain goes as a writer, and while it would be completely logical to take a story like Phoebe’s Punishment in that direction, I was much happier going the other way.
There were some other considerations and choices I made when plotting and writing Phoebe’s Punishment in order to tell the story I wanted in the way that worked best.
One of these was my decision to have the action take place in 1989. I had a simple reason for this: I wanted the story to occur in a time before mobile phones, cameras, and easy access to the internet. This was out of two considerations: the first was the aforementioned need to keep St. Mathilda’s a closed-off environment where pupils has only managed access to the outside world, in order to keep Phoebe’s punishment separated from people who might cause it to come to a premature end. And the second – which is a reason I may write further stories set in the recent past – was that I believe that the ubiquity of phones with cameras and direct access to the internet has fundamentally changed the public nudity story.
When I first began reading stories about people going naked in public, around the year 2000-2001, there were no smart phones, and camera phones were so new that it would be many more years before they became commonplace. Characters in the stories I was reading might be exploring exhibitionism or trying to go naked in public without being caught, but they never had to consider the possibility that they might be filmed and their actions uploaded forever to the internet. It was easier, I think, for a female character to be brave about stripping off and going streaking if she didn’t have to worry about anyone catching the act on camera; and a character who had bitten off more than she could chew and was now stranded away from her clothes was at risk of at worse an awkward conversation with someone discovering her, rather than them whipping out their phone and immortalising her humiliation.
That’s not to say that our modern world has ruined public nudity stories (or other creative content – both fictionalised and real – that shows public nudity). The fact that everyone has a computer with a high-quality camera attached in their pocket at all times can enhance exhibitionist tales and create a real sense of jeopardy in a ENF story – not to mention that a real-life exhibitionist can proceed with her going naked in public being understood and not misconstrued if she is holding a phone on a selfie stick and clearly filming herself making adult content.
But I don’t think anyone can say that the presence of camera phones has not changed what an author writing a public nudity story would need to consider – or, to put it another way, that a story set before camera phones became common place would be free from having to make such considerations. Setting Phoebe’s Punishment in 1989 meant that while she was forced to go naked in front of her classmates, she was not being forced to let them add to that humiliation by having them film her naked and send it viral. Again, it came back to Ms. Cavendish wanting to tread the fine line between punishing Phoebe and doing her lasting harm: and, also, the idea that Phoebe the naked student going viral would doubtless draw attention to her punishment that would bring it to an abrupt end.
Once I’d made the decision to set the story in a specific time period that was emphatically not the present day, the framing device of the older Phoebe telling the story to Natalie grew naturally around it. Fundamentally, it happened because I couldn’t find a way to explain that the story was taking place in 1989 without it sounding clunky in the narrative if I only had the stuff with past Phoebe in there; but once I’d adopted that conceit I realised it would give me the option to have the present-day Phoebe explicitly address some of the things the reader might be thinking or asking about the narrative. I do find myself, as a writer, imagining how something sounds to the reader and almost pre-empting what they might wonder (or at least, what I might wonder if I was reading rather than writing the story) and I think it’s become part of my style to think that way, so the framing device definitely helped with that.
Overall, I was extremely happy with Phoebe’s Punishment when I’d completed it. I didn’t have the nervousness about hitting publish that I had with Sophie or The Tribulations of Omega Girl – while I was happy with and proud of those books, I worried that the readers I had earned through the likes of Best Friends With a Naked Girl, Brave Nude World, and Carla Takes Her Clothes Off wouldn’t want to follow me on the journey into less realism-based genres. I think many did, but I can completely understand why, if your preference for erotic material is more in line with my earlier work, you might have chosen to skip those two works. But I felt as confident about Phoebe’s Punishment as I had about Carla… in terms of thinking (of my readers), I think they are going to like this one.
So, did you? If you’ve read Phoebe’s Punishment, did you enjoy it? Please let me know in the comments, by posting a review on Amazon, or any other way you would like to get in touch.
Perhaps you are just wondering what I’m going to come up with next – am I sticking with the more grounded and realistic stuff, or am I going to go back to the more fantastical stories?
The answer is, of course, a bit of both.
While my writing has definitely slowed in this post-Covid world (Phoebe’s Punishment was my first published work for approaching 3 years), I’ve no intention to stop writing entirely.
I currently have a few projects in the pipeline.
I’m likely to put out a couple of short stories next, as I haven’t used that form for a while. Beyond that, I am continuing to tinker with a ‘realistic’ novel, set in the 1990s (that need to avoid the camera phone era again) about a group of young women experimenting with exhibitionist nudity. But I also have an idea for a bawdy comedic fantasy novel that I’d like to flesh out one day, and I’ve recently begun plotting something more in-between; a story with a realistic setting but some more out-there, even silly, plot points that enable the main characters’ nudity.
And of course there will be more blog posts in future (if there’s anything you’d like me to write about, feel free to make a suggestion here or on X).
Thanks for reading, and I’ll see you soon.