The Voss Papers

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...

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...