The Voss Papers

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 it - 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 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 things, but they haven't really made it past the first page, and the thing is, I like to have an idea that catches: I like ideas that instantly flow, and which get me, ...

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...

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 ...