The Voss Papers

I've hinted in some of my more recent posts that I've been working on another full-length novel, and I'm excited to announce that it's now available!  It's called The Honourable Boytoy - a title which is one of a number of almost unavoidable nods to John le Carré (in this instance taking his Honourable Schoolboy title and, as it were, Voss-ifying it!) - and it's set in 1964, in Vienna, London, and a handful of other places mired in the intrigue and tension that arises when the intelligence services of two opposing ideologies face off in the twilight.  Well - I say opposing. Inevitably, my take on the Cold War requires that both sides are almost fanatical in their belief that the way to command - or break - the loyalty of a male agent is through tease and denial, through chastity, and through oral service. That's just unavoidable, when you think about it (and believe me, I think about it slightly more than I should...).  Essentially I've written what may...

Today, something strange happened: I woke this morning with a nagging feeling that something important was happening, and I couldn’t remember what it was. To be honest, this was a little worrying. It wasn’t that I’d forgotten to post the latest instalment of the little free novella I’m giving away as a Locktober present to the Reddit chastity community, because I woke to a stack of enthusiastic messages. Was it someone’s birthday? It didn’t seem likely, because the date felt a little too sad. I even tentatively combed old diaries trying to make sure it wasn’t the date a friend had been bereaved last year, but it wasn’t. It wasn’t until I was boiling the kettle and staring at a calendar that hangs in my kitchen that it clicked. Today is the 19 th of October. Today, in the world of The Ruritanian Pretender , is the anniversary of the raid on Romwald. And I woke up, with part of my brain somehow aware of that, and it made me sad without even knowing why. I find ...

My latest collection of short stories,  The Birthday Present and Other Stories ,  opens with a bit of a ghost story - very appropriate as a Locktober tale, coming as it does right before Hallowe'en!  But it's also a ghost story in another way: like one or two other tales in  The Birthday Present and Other Stories , it began as a very different story.  This happens to me a lot. I've talked before about how I like to write multiple stories at once to keep my imagination firing - but sometimes that doesn't work.  Sometimes I abandon a story, or I finish it (even share it!) - only to denounce it, so that it never reaches a wider audience.  ...And sometimes those stories refuse to die.  Instead, they niggle at me, snag at my attention when I should be doing something else, idly broadcast ‘ I'm still here and you didn't let me finish, look how patient I'm being! I'll wait as long as you want, fuck, please,  please  let me finish, I promise I'm...

On Chestnut Tree Lane was the first book I completed and if I am brutally honest, I sort of wish it wasn't.  Not because it's bad - I stand by it, and I am genuinely proud of it, because as far as I know, nobody else has ever managed “Orwellian Dystopia, but with Femdom”. I think I deserve to be proud of it.  But I do wish it hadn't been my first book, because I feel I could write it so much better now. There are some beautiful moments for the dommes who live at Whitmore House, but I think I undersold their pleasure. That's partly a function of the frame - it's tough making Orwell's register femdom even to begin with, it's extremely challenging to do so and give female leads interiority as well - but also I was a little less confident, a little less willing to take the kind of risks I took when it came to Anna Voss Writes The Classics .  Okay, I had a lot of fun slipping in sly references , but I regret now that I wasn't just being a little bolder with...

Hopefully if you're reading the Voss Papers you already know I'm a writer of intelligent femdom with strong characters and brutal orgasm denial. Hopefully you also know I just published my most audacious book yet, a collection of short stories called Anna Voss Writes The Classics .  It's a fantastic exploration of femdom in a range of different authors’ literary styles through history from the Canterbury Tales to 1940s Noir… But there's no Beowulf: it was just too hard!  The Thesis  Of course I've played with other author’s styles before: The Ruritanian Pretender is pure Ruritanian Romance in the (dommed-up!) tradition of Anthony Hope; On Chestnut Tree Lane is dystopian femdom by way of George Orwell, and (spoilers!) one of the novels I’m working on right now is… well.  Let’s just say I hope everyone likes Femdom Cold War Espionage...  But Anna Voss Writes The Classics is different because of its key argument: femdom isn’t new. It's not new today, and it wasn...

I wrote the first story in my new collection - Anna Voss Writes the Classics - on a typewriter. Not my usual slightly rubbish old laptop (portable, forgiving, endlessly deletable, and also a little harder to justify not writing on, if you can avoid procrastinating), but an actual typewriter. A 1960s Adler, German steel, found in a charity shop and bought half as a joke, half because of a future project set in the cold war.  She’s heavy, her ribbon smears everywhere, and the keys need way more effort than you could imagine: I'm a pretty slick typist in real life (or at least on a computer); the Adler is a real bitch - she cuts my speed in half at least! And she has no delete function, just a backspace which does nothing but show you the mistake you just made. Once she's shown you, she lets you choose if you're going to live with it, retype that whole line using the Red Ribbon Of Shame, or just start the entire page again.  If I write, in future, a mercilessly strict Domme c...

I like to tell myself it isn't really procrastinating - which is more than I can say for blogging about it! - but I’ve never been able to work on just one story at a time. This might be partly because I started out writing (pretty awful!) shorts on fanfiction.net, or perhaps because for a while early in my career, I'd often 'multitask' at work by writing inside Outlook compose windows, where smut looked the same as all the actual work I was meant to be doing: that stopped in a hurry after one horrifyingly scary moment when I'd written a proper work email and then pasted the recipient address into the wrong window - I was an appallingly narrow moment from clicking 'send' on something absolutely not safe for work before I noticed!  But even so when I'm writing I usually have at least two stories trying to come together - sometimes even three or four, though those usually mothball themselves until I'm willing to listen.  It's not a typical recommen...

Hope broke her heart. I wanted to give her back her country.  My latest book,  The Ruritanian Pretender ,  is out! If you haven't bought a copy, go buy a copy. Because I'm really pleased with this one - which I think is saying something; it's a little gauche to admit it, but I often find while in the moment everything I write feels  achingly  good, the moment I commit to sharing it with the world I tend to panic that maybe it isn't achingly good  enough , that one sentence here or there could have elevated things from the merely orgasmically well-written into levels of 'linger-in-your-mind-and-shiver-your-thighs-the-next-morning' pleasure...  It’s a terrifying thing to build your characters and send them into the world, hoping they’ll make people’s knees weak the way you told them to. (I think every author feels that post-publication panic, although I'm not so sure that applies to Thomas Hardy, who I've always suspected of just grabbing the most depre...

I think there have probably been two reactions when people have seen the title of my newest work, The Ruritanian Pretender .  (Well, actually, I hope everyone;s first reaction was, I hope "Oh wow! Anna's written a new book and  god  I bet it's hot!" - in which case, congratulations: it  absolutely  is!) But in general I think people will have seen the title and done one of two things.    Either, they said "Oh, cool. Where the hell is Ruritania? I can't find it on the map." Or they'll have said "Oh! This one's going to be a swashbuckler and the submissive male lead is going to be a dead ringer for a prince and there will be castles and peril and political intrigue in the mountains of central Europe!" You, in the second class of reader, are my people.  So are the people in the first class, of course; you just might need a little more... training. I think we can both work with that!   Ruritania isn't real, it's never been real: but...