Although the girls here at petticoated.com do work very hard, the site's growing popularity has meant that my workload is getting out of hand, especially with answering correspondence. I have not been mobile because of an ankle injury, and may have to get mail directed to another box so that a friend can send it to me directly. The main burden is the editing of the letters, which is very time consuming. Once the letters were essentially all I had to deal with, but now the magazine is much bigger, and each printed out copy is 40 to 50 pages.

For this reason, I am asking if readers could do some editing work for me. Certainly readers have offered in the past, but I did not want to burden readers with work: rather, I wanted them to just enjoy and learn from the site. However, if I had about 20 or 30 readers who could each prepare one letter a month - basically just getting the lines the right length, changing "double quotes" to 'single', which I think give a cleaner look to the page, and running the letter through a Word spelling check, then that would be a great help. It would not take up much time for an individual reader, and would give me the time that I desparately need to catch up on my correspondence.

Needless to say, the part-time editing staff would just receive the letter, without any details such as the writer's e-mail address. In the 18 months that I have been publishing 'Petticoat Discipline Monthly' no reader's privacy has been compromised, and readers can be assured that this careful policy will continue in the future.

Some readers have missed the lesser number of dummy discipline letters which have been in recent issues, but here I need to find the time to retype old letters from out-of-print magazines. Most of the new letters I receive tend to be about housemaid duties or corset and girdle control, so that is why there have not been quite as many babying letters. I do receive some, but they tend to be about insensitive and inebriated husbands being trapped in nappies, and I prefer to hear about the softer, more maternal application of nappy discipline.

So if you would like to join the staff on a casual basis, then I will inform Marcia and Julie Anne, and get some tea vouchers printed that you can give to Miss Gribble when you feel like a break from editing correspondence. Biscuits for morning coffee are your responsibility.

This month we have two more petticoating posters from Janet, and the third part of Peter Farrer's contribution regarding petticoat punishment in Victorian erotic literature. And you can read how a very special guest came to visit the works at petticoated.com...
Susan MacDonald