Life's greatest pleasure?

Yes but it's not conducive to enjoying a nice quiet retirement in a village. The cows make enough noise without all that lamentation.

My story uptake has thinned somewhat but on the occasions I get a new theme, start writing and think it's working, it's a great achievement.

Other great pleasures for me might be:

seeing my children and grandchildren achieve stuff, finding a rare bird all by myself, finding a stunningly good piece of rock music which had passed me by for years, a real ale pub at the end of a long hot walk, cooking a curry which turns out really well or having one cooked for me. Mostly simple stuff.

I thought we were writing about spanking stories not the Old Testament

I never knew Conan the Barbarian was in the Old Testament...!

Couldn't agree more with mobile carrot that seeing your children and grandchildren grow up happy and healthy is certainly one of life's greatest pleasures.
Others for me are equally simple, seeing your friends and in my case getting my garden to look beautiful and making a decent model railway are also there.
A nice refreshing gin and tonic also ranks very high!

I reckon he'd have fitted in there rather well...

"When thou comest nigh unto a city to fight against it, then proclaim peace unto it.... And if it will make no peace with thee, but will make war against thee, then thou shalt besiege it. And when the LORD thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male therein with the edge of the sword: But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, thou shalt take unto thyself." (Deuteronomy 20: 10-14)

Isn't religion wonderful?

I thought that SNM was quoting a Game of Thrones scene where the Dothraki leaders cunningly reference Monty Python's Spanish Inquisition sketch.

It's a quote originally attributed to Genghis Khan, and which was later used in the Conan movie adaptation.

I don't think Conan ever actually said it in the original Robert E. Howard stories though.

It is not really 'religion', it is legend and history. The writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans are little different to the Old Testament. The Romans ran a very brutal regime for centuries, conquering and brutalising in the name of their gods and emperors, who were de facto gods also.

Romani ite domum!

So Genghis Khan thought along the same lines as the bloke who Richard Dawkins described as:

"Arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully."

Guess who?

I find writing spanking stories to be an occasional compulsion, but definitely not one of life's greatest pleasures. It's a creative endeavor. It's work. And it's work often for very little return. It's something I obsess over in the moment, with rewrites and edits, only to have the momentary satisfaction that the end result might have actually lived up to the effort.

One of life's greatest pleasures is engaging in actual spanking, not writing about it. That has a much higher 'pleasure' return for the effort.

And of course there's fishing. Not much can compete with a good day out on the water.