The Voss Papers

I first realised erotic literature was a thing on a school trip. I realise that's the kind of statement that can carry potentially catastrophic connotations, so let me quickly clarify: I was in my mid teens, it was summer term, and I discovered it on my own. I'd been on a school trip to France.  On the way back, the ferry ran late, disembarking took forever, and so somewhere, around 2am, we pulled off the motorway into a services, presumably so the by then grumpy staff running the whole thing could call someone's landline to explain we were still en route. Everyone was exhausted, it was weirdly, viciously cold for the time of year, and everything in the services turned out to be shut except for the toilets and the shop. (In my memory, it was a WH Smiths, but I honestly don't know if that's what it was, or a projection based on the fact every motorway services these days has a WH Smiths.) Regardless of what the shop actually was, it sold books, and magazines, and sn...

After a rather long gestation period , Edge Close is out. It isn’t set in the Ruritanian Royal court , or buried in the files of a fading espionage institution . While in some ways it's the other side of the coin to my Sense of Submission , it isn't even set in a grand country house.  It's ordinary. Domestic. The most intimate scenes happen in the bedroom of an ordinary house, on an ordinary cul-de-sac, with the orange glow of the streetlamp outside filtering through the curtains, playing across quivering skin and tear-stained cheeks.  Often, my work aims to interrogate power through institutions or external forces; political dystopia or cyber-futures . But  Edge Close interrogates it through love. Through female desire rediscovered without the need for apology or witnesses . Through submission not as spectacle, but as devotion. So yes, it's different - it’s domestic, intimate, and deliberately grounded in ordinary rooms and ordinary days: it follows the cycle of lif...

One of the quiet assumptions that clings to most erotic writing - and, I suspect, to most sexual relationships - is that desire only counts when it is seen , as if carnal lust was a particularly tempting quantum particle. People tend to assume that the man can be (even will be) desperately horny, but that his desperation means nothing unless it is witnessed - which is completely untrue; his desperation can still mean you’re personally aching even if you know it’s happening in the next room. Or, worse, they assume that unless a woman is seen to be aroused, then she isn’t. (This is also completely untrue; it is, for example, entirely possible for a woman to be extremely aroused while a man is whimpering helplessly in the next room. Trust me.) But as a writer of erotic literature, this presents something of a problem, because it means I occasionally feel compelled to lean on tropes that I might not always believe are necessary. Sometimes even I find myself writing about a woman’s visibly...

I never meant to have a pattern to my book chapters. But it made logical sense for the first chapter of my first book, On Chestnut Tree Lane to begin with 'Chapter 1: Arrival,' since it deals with Scott's arrival at Whitmore House. And - as  Anna Voss Writes The Classics might suggest - I do like to give myself the odd formal constraint or challenge when I write, so it took no time at all to decide I should see if I could start every chapter with a word beginning with A.  And, obviously, I could; it wasn't, by itself, a very interesting challenge. But if I took it further...  Well. Who doesn't enjoy a few extra restraints?  So it was that when I started writing Sense of Submission , I started it with 'Chapter 1: Beginning',  and gave it 'B' for its chapter headings. Then, because I was learning that I often like to write two drafts at once, I started  Mantamer using chapters starting with a C. Which was all lovely and tidy, right up until it wasn...

In resetting Dickens’ A Christmas Carol into the future off-world colony of blockchain transactions and high-tech ‘cybercages,’ that forms  Anna Voss's Christmas Carol , I ran into a few problems early. As I've said, most of them were to do with converting the core narrative drive of Dickens’ work and re-working it to suit the gearing of my own particular genre .  But others were a touch more practical – such as how can I best convey the way in which Eleanora Cruse is monstrous?  In Dickens, we learn, quite early, how horrible Scrooge is, because his mere presence scares guide dogs within the first 700 words of the book, he advocates for inhumane Workhouses or death to the poor before 2,000, and he snatches up a ruler to attack a small boy for singing carols at 2,700 words.  I realise "we learn quite early" does not feel the same as "within 3,000 words", especially if what we're learning is “once upon a time, there was a mean old man,” - but this is  Di...

Currently, I'm offering some of my titles at various discounts on Smashwords , in support of their big end of year sale - and I've included On Chestnut Tree Lane as a free giveaway.  Which has resulted in a number of readers very kindly looking me up or messaging me through my Reddit profile  to say thank you (and even to make quite adorable whimpering noises where my books have been particularly effective!).  As part of those conversations, a couple of people have asked me how I got the idea for the NVLA and how - in universe - something like the world of   the NVLA came to exist. I completely understand this curiosity , because as awful as the NVLA is, it's also oddly seductive in some ways. To be honest, the question of how I got the idea at all isn't very interesting (as I've said before, it was at least partly to annoy Mrs Whitehouse !) - but the history of that world is. And, in fact, I briefly toyed with including an "Afterword" to On Chestnut Tr...

 I've talked once before about how sometimes I try to write things and it just... fails .  (Mostly I don't talk about this stuff, because it's... Well, mildly embarrassing. I could talk for days about exactly how I balanced the political and military tension alongside the brutal edging interrogation in  The Ruritanian Pretender ,  but saying 'yes, there's a book I hinted I was working on months ago , and I'm still not quite happy with it' takes a bit more courage!). But I  have  just released  Anna Voss's Christmas Carol   in December, which probably looks extremely commercially hard-nosed, so perhaps I should explain that I first tried to write it in August. I was knee deep in the creation of  Anna Voss Writes the Classics , it seemed absurd to be trying to write Femdom as if major authors had written it and not at least try to write Dickens.  For the space of 20 minutes or so, I quietly flirted with the idea of Abel Magwitch finding ...

It's Advent, I haven't bought things for any of the people I like to buy things for (still less, the people I'm expected  to buy things for), and I am already quietly resentful of hearing slow, dated  Christmas songs coming out of every single shop I pass... But I'm taking the "if you can't beat them, join them" path, and releasing a seasonal Christmas novella!  It's called  Anna Voss's Christmas Carol , and, er, yes. It's  that  Christmas Carol, except my villain is called Eleanora Cruse, not Ebeneezer Scrooge. And it's set on an off-Earth colony planet in the future.  Oh. And she's not a moneylender, she's a findomme.      The trouble with A Christmas Carol is that almost everyone thinks they know it. Ask them to summarise it, and most folk will give you the same outline: Grumpy rich man doesn't like Christmas, sees ghosts, buys turkey, small boy doesn't die. Some people will probably remember to quote “God bless us, Ever...

At the risk of making an audacious literary effort somehow even more intertextual than it already is, I need to confess something about The Honourable Boytoy .   Whenever I'm trying to write something in another register - for example, when I'm creating Ruritanian Femdom as in  The Ruritanian Pretender , or when I'm channeling Noir as I did for my Chander piece in  Anna Voss Writes the Classics   - I spend a fair amount of time trying to immerse my mind in the cadences and texts of the original: I need to get a feel for the way each author holds and deploy language, and the way their characters talk. Sometimes, that gets away from me, and I end up writing elements I didn't intend to.  So it was with trying to write femdom espionage in the world of John le Carré.  It's a sign of how deeply I'd tried to immerse myself in his register that even admitting that I want to confess something already has my brain reaching across my writing desk for the box labelle...