So I finally finished that huge Christmas story I was working on - and before Christmas! It would have been embarrassing to miss that deadline for two years in a row...
Anyway, because most people said they preferred large stories in chunks it has been posted in 16 chapters as opposed to a single fifty two thousand word story.
Christmas Across the County Line takes place the future, roughly 60 years after "the collapse" - which isn't talked about in detail and is basically an excuse to have the world running differently than it does now. Following the collapse the US pulled itself together, rewriting the constitution along the way and ending up more a commonwealth of regions than a unified nation.
This means that different areas have different laws. Some times the areas are separated by state lines and other times by county lines. In some areas tobacco is banned while weed is legal and in other areas weed is banned while tobacco is legal. In some areas you can walk into a store and legally buy any sort of drug you can afford and in other places every intoxicant (including alcohol) is banned. Those differences, while interesting exercises in world building, are completely off topic here, so the story focuses on an on-topic difference: In some places spanking is banned, in others it's frown upon, or greeted with 'meh', or looked favourably on, and at least one place (Hazard County) is spank happy. As in public spankings are a way of life there.
The story begins in neighbouring Wellington County, a place where spanking (if it happens) happens only behind closed doors. Clare Marsh, a freshman university student, doesn't know a single person who has been spanked (or she doesn't think she does), at least not spanked in Wellington County. She's heard horror stories of what happens when kids cross the line into Hazard County. Growing up she's heard countless adults saying things like 'if you cross that line then we're crossing the line', 'there's a line you better not cross', 'if we were in Hazard, well, you figure it out', and not always in jest. 'Crossing the line' basically means a visit to Hazard County where someone's going to get a sore bum, or at the very least is very likely to get a sore bum. And if there happens to be other kids in the car then it might not just be one sore bum.
Hazard County also means another to Clare - she had family there. An aunt, uncle, and cousins who visit Clare's family in Wellington County from time to time but she's never visited their home in Hazard County.
In the first part of the story Clare is home for Thanksgiving, talking to one of her visiting cousins, and she comes up with what she considers to be a great idea to get her youngest brother spanked. It involves Clare spending her Christmas vacation in Hazard County and inviting him to spend the day there to get some presents that are waiting for him under her cousins' tree. Clare figures that if she can get him across the line that someone else will almost certainly spank him and she can claim to be faultless in the matter.
Unfortunately for her, Clare forgot to research some important facts about Hazard County. Well, she didn't actually forget - she purposely didn't look into things so that she could more plausibly claim that she hadn't known that her youngest brother would be spanked there. How great of a mistake did she make? Hmmm, without giving away the ending, the majority of the story is F/f and no, Clare isn't going around spanking girls at random.
Anyway, here's hoping that people enjoy reading it even half as much as I enjoyed writing it.
Goodgulf | 
