The Voss Papers

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...

 I wrote Sense of Submission because I was pissed off. I watched someone treat submission like weakness, like it made someone disposable instead of something sacred and if I didn't take it out on a keyboard I was going to explode. That's why I started, anyway: in fact by the time I was a few thousand words in, I was writing Sense of Submission because I'd fallen in love with Grace, with Brinkmere, with Joe's desperate, aching misery and fear of failure.  But I started because I was pissed off, because I'd seen something that made me see absolute red. I absolutely won't name names but... the character of Miranda and her casual attitude of "This man is a submissive and so he doesn't matter" was absolutely the starting point for the book, just as Grace's response to her - all poise and calm and perfect retorts - is the half of the conversation that kept echoing through my head all the way back from the club.  Where I ended up - apart from with...

  So I may have gotten a little carried away imagining what kind of manual might come with the Mantamer chip. After all, if you’re a new owner of a male who’s just had one installed, it’s probably quite a lot to take in. The chip rewires arousal, speech, behaviour, and long-term sexual conditioning: so it’s not like a vibrator with a three-page leaflet and annoyingly sparse descriptions of the different wave settings. You’d want something more… robust. Something glossy. Clinical. Helpful. So here’s what I picture Vireon slipping into the welcome pack: a crisp, slightly patronising operator’s guide for the woman now in control of a very obedient man. It assumes a certain amount of authority already. And a certain level of curiosity about how far this technology can go. Which, if you’re here reading this… I suspect you have. If you haven't - pick up a copy of Mantamer first: I promise it will make the rest of the post more fun!   Mantamer-Enabled Male Owner's Companion S...

"You’re helping us build something extraordinary," she whispered. "Something that could... could fix relationships forever"  -- Dr Shirin Dastgir,  Mantamer   Mantamer is an interesting one for me - I started writing it half-way through writing of On Chestnut Tree Lane , because I was finding it tough to keep my head in a dystopian setting while also reading the news (Hey, it was late 2024...). I sat down with the intention of creating a fun corporate femdom setting - dominance dressed up as performance reviews, sales targets dressed up as chastity release-conditions, that sort of thing. (And actually, I still think that's a pretty good idea...). But without my meaning it to, Vireon became a biotech company - and really what's more deliciously sinister than a man like Harry, desperate to submit inside and yet trapped in the societal framework of having to play the strong executive, getting so rapidly out of his depth? It was inevitable that Vireon's cor...