The Voss Papers

If prostitution is the oldest profession (and I bet you it is not, when you consider that for 'bartering-for-sex' to exist as a viable career someone somewhere has probably already developed farming, animal husbandry, or Knowing Which Berries Will Kill You Culinary Consultancy Limited and thus got things to barter with) - if prostitution is one of the oldest professions, then, perhaps one of the oldest jokes is "men who can't have sex get really desperate and it's hilarious". This is, basically, the core conceit behind Aristophanes' ancient Greek comedy  Lysistrata : the women of the various ancient city Greek states are fed up with all the men pissing about with the Peloponnesian War and decide they're going to go on sex strike until everyone makes peace, even the Spartans¹.  They refuse to fuck anybody, whatsoever, and abjure all sexual positions including something called The Lioness on the Cheesegrater  ( scholarly opinion genuinely exists on this ...

 Last year, as some of my readers may recall, I amused myself by publishing a short story in serial form, over on Reddit. It was called Penny Keeps the Keys  and it was tremendous fun. I'd written the whole thing in advance - at least partly as insurance against my tendency to abandon one draft the second a newer inspiration strikes me - and that allowed me to have the fairly unusual experience of interacting with the lovely readers of r/chastitystories  and enjoying their speculation and suggestions as they read through the story. Mostly of course, people read my work in private and I don't get much opportunity to even hear its impact, let alone discover where readers think a plot is going!  But with the serial, I was privileged to see what people were enjoying, and even had some delightful correspondence with various readers, several of whom were kind enough to say the experience made their Locktober, as it were, harder.  Later, of course, I presented a final,...

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a research chemist. I did do  chemistry as part of Learning Science at school, but I suspect this may have been a faintly pointless exercise (not least because nearly all I have to show for my teacher's troubles is the dim recollection that F=MA, that mitochondria are important for something or other possibly to do with generating oxygen out of leaves, and that in spite of all the rumours, putting a pencil sharpener marked W GERMANY into a bunsen burner does not actually make it explode).  Nevertheless, I did end up trying to do some research on  research chemistry in order to write a moderately-convincing world in which Her Submissive Experiment could sit, and it only really occurred to me later that the job of an erotica author is perhaps faintly weird.  Because, obviously, I do not expect anyone reading any of my books to go "Aha! Anna Voss said RLS-18, the orgasm-inhibiting formulation of the serum, had impure salts!! It's all...

As I may have previously mentioned , I didn't have the smoothest start to the year, and it's been something of a bumpy return to writing (the pile of rejected drafts I've been working on now almost dwarfs the pile of grumpy letters I've been obliged to send to builders, although it is nothing to the pile of excuses I have had explaining why, for instance, they aren't coming this week). However - somewhere in between sweltering in an apparently endless succession of heatwaves and being told that such-and-such isn't actually covered by my policy - I have at least been trying to write. I'm finding that valuable even when I then throw the result away: sometimes, something just... clicks.  In this instance, it was the frankly daft idea that the duality built into Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde  had some genuinely excellent potential to be reset in the context of modern gothic erotica. Unfortunately, all of  the currently available evidence   makes it pretty clear that t...

As a writer, there are some bits of advice you get so often you can sort of stop listening before the sentence is over. Well - no. You get advice so often you can't help stopping listening. "Write what you know" is a good one, which I've long suspected is the battle cry of the Anti Science Fiction Battalion. "Just write every day" is another, and I used to be a huge believer in it until I found my whole life upended and discovered that it's the kind of rule that's great while it works - but instantly makes me feel rotten when I fail to meet it.  And even though part of my brain seems wired to treat writing femdom and denial as a kind of delightful self-care, I've never managed to write every day, particularly not in recent months!  But not all advice to writers is bad, and honestly I think a lot of advice to writers - like books themselves - can be fantastic at the right time, and for the right audience. ("Write what you know," for in...

Something close to two months since The Flood , I am still beset by insurance company people, many of whom are being nice. The trouble is, they are being (mostly) nice because it is their job to do so . So they knock off at 5pm and don't come back until 9, at least according to the footer in their emails; the actual window in which they respond to things appears to be somewhere between 10:30 and 10:46, after which you go back on the queue until tomorrow. I get why. Dealing with insurance claims is joyless and they like to keep it to a minimum. I am, right now, dealing with a claim and the aftermath of flooding 24/7 and I wouldn't wish it on anyone all that many people except possibly loss adjusters. But it is a bit of an ongoing background nightmare, and the thing is, I don't get to switch off and stop thinking about it after hours. And a side effect of that is that I am struggling, a little bit, to write.  That isn't completely true - I have started three or four thin...

About a fortnight after I confidently blogged about how literature fragments because the materials and language used break down over thousands of years , my home flooded. I mention this mainly to warn other authors of literary erotica that the universe takes an unreasonably dim view of parodic self-aggrandisement.  But also, I mention it because a lot of my work operates around a nexus of  control . Almost entirely, I write about women who revel (or at least, learn to revel) in control - often of a man's orgasm, of course, but even in my purely sapphic work like  Her Ascendant Intern , control remains the locus of my fascination - merely seen through another lens as Hannah strives to make sense of how easily Beverley seems to be able to control her.  In a flood, it turns out, control is not really a thing that you get to have.  At the point when a neighbour rang me and told me to come home I had no idea what I would find, and faintly assumed I'd have an amusing ...

For various reasons - none of them, sadly, being hordes of desperate producers fighting for the exclusive right to turn  The Honourable Boytoy   into a prestige miniseries starring Andrew Scott as Jimmy Easterly (I will take no further questions; he would knock the 'tragic desperation to believe in his duty' side of Jimmy clean out of the  park  Prater) - this last month has been rather busier than I would have liked.  However - hell and/or high water notwithstanding, I like to keep my promises, and I am pleased to say that my latest novel,  Her Ascendant Intern  is out now: the story of Hannah Wilson - a high-achiever desperate for recognition - who joins a mysterious and exclusive internal promotion scheme run by her company, Velvet Helix. All it takes is agreeing to test an experimental behaviour-modification chip... and demonstrating just how well she can take orders from the CEO's secretary, Beverley Sinclair - a woman whose authority and approval...

In the year 4626, if Man is still alive (if eBooks can survive), they will find... ...What, exactly? Heck, even if my hard-copy paperbacks survive , I suspect that they won't be in mint condition (because, of course, they'll be incredibly well-read!). Assuming my books make it at all, either in paperback or in an eReader format that hasn't evolved into something too incomprehensible, I can't imagine they will be complete. Short of an incredibly dedicated reader deciding they're going to translate all of my works through the principles of Nuclear Semiotics -  " This is not a book of orgasm . Something by Anna Voss is here. It was hot to us. It is still hot to you now,"  perhaps? - then the most probable way my work will make it over 2,600 years into the future is in... well, fragments.  Oh, I trust the British Library will do their best, and I'm grateful to the 1911 Copyright Act for establishing my right to legal deposit - but for practical conservat...