Welcome to Ruritania - (Welcome to where?)

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 it is a Place, a proper fictional Place as well-established as Treasure Island, older and more grounded (well, just about more grounded) than Middle Earth, more fictionally exciting than Neverland. 

It's where, in 1894, Anthony Hope set his swashbuckling novel The Prisoner of Zenda, which is a perfectly fun little romp (albeit with a little too much stuffy Victorian prose, and not quite enough sensual dominant women). 

But I figured - if I'm going to take George Orwell as a source for a Femdom dystopia in On Chestnut Tree Lane, I simply have to see what else I can do when I'm taking classic literature and drawing it into my world. 

Besides, the ending of Zenda tended to make me feel sad for the female lead, Princess Flavia: it's all very well for Victorian Adventure Heroes to go off feeling Nobly Heartbroken, but I think a vital rule of fiction - and not only fiction - is this:

The lady should get what she wants. 

This time, I'm happy to say... 

Well... no. I don't want to spoil it. 

But The Ruritanian Pretender is due to get published next week, it's much more of a romance than Mantamer, closer in spirit to Sense of Submission, and yes, you should already be able to preorder it now!

And I honestly really recommend you do, because I think you'll agree: even if you didn't know where Ruritania was at the start of this post...

By the end of the book?

You'll ache to go back.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Reading Between the Thighs" - Secrets of the Inner Party within 'On Chestnut Tree Lane'

Image
    “ If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever. ” Gosh. What a ghastly way to imagine the future. Surely... surely you should imagine a woman grinding on a human face forever ?  When I set out to write ' On Chestnut Tree Lane, ' it was mostly by mistake. Orwell is an absolute giant, and I love him, but 1984 has always depressed me so utterly, not because of what happens to Winston (though that is monstrous) but because of the vision of NewSpeak, the idea of language weaponised and designed to make disobedience linguistically impossible. It is, more than anything else, the most miserable moment in fiction I can think of when Syme disappears. The Death of Little Nell has nothing on that moment when you realise that Syme, a man who truly believed in Ingsoc, has been vanished  by  Ingsoc because he understood far too well what they were doing.   So, like Syme, I chose to see how the language coul...
Read more

Laying Down My Arms - On Failing to Write Femdom Beowulf

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...
Read more

Welcome to the Voss Papers

There are stories I can’t tell in fiction. Not because they’re too explicit. But because they’re too quiet . Too precise. Too prone to lingering and pulling the mind away from where it should be (hopefully, right in the action, and thrumming with excitement...). Take my first book  On Chestnut Tree Lane   - it started out more or less as the question "What if 1984 had been a femdom dystopia instead of a totalitarian one?", and once I had that thought it just wouldn't go away.  But - although writing the femdom scenes was delightful - I kept finding myself slipping in tiny references to Orwell. Some of them are obvious (Mrs Whitmore's establishment is on Chestnut Tree Lane because of the Chestnut Tree Cafe in 1984, for example), but others aren't.  And I can't, in the middle of a delicious scene where poor Scott is being tormented by Katie Whitmore or Mary Mason, suddenly break off from his helpless pleading to say "Of course, you've probably spotted ...
Read more