The Lure of State-Mandated Chastity - Writing More of the NVLA

On Chestnut Tree Lane was the first book I completed and if I am brutally honest, I sort of wish it wasn't. 


Not because it's bad - I stand by it, and I am genuinely proud of it, because as far as I know, nobody else has ever managed “Orwellian Dystopia, but with Femdom”. I think I deserve to be proud of it. 


But I do wish it hadn't been my first book, because I feel I could write it so much better now. There are some beautiful moments for the dommes who live at Whitmore House, but I think I undersold their pleasure.


That's partly a function of the frame - it's tough making Orwell's register femdom even to begin with, it's extremely challenging to do so and give female leads interiority as well - but also I was a little less confident, a little less willing to take the kind of risks I took when it came to Anna Voss Writes The Classics. 


Okay, I had a lot of fun slipping in sly references, but I regret now that I wasn't just being a little bolder with the world itself. 


And perhaps that's why I drifted back to the world of Chestnut Tree Lane in my latest collection. I didn't mean to write more about life inside an alternate England run by the National Virtue and Living Authority, but I was surprised how hard it was to stay away. 


Because, if I'm honest, it's a fairly grim world. Parts of it I do love - a society with male denial baked in and the prospect of terrible, almost impossible “precome quotas” that are assigned as proof that a guilty man is being subjected to appropriate levels of edging therapy… 


…oh there's a dark part of my imagination which loves that - purely as a fantasy, of course. If I stood for world leader I absolutely promise I wouldn't impose that kind of thing unless it was absolutely necessary or it happened to make my heart race to think about it. 


But really… I don't like the NVLA. It's an awful regime. Populist, repressive, hypocritical, and willing to crush anyone who opposes or endangers its leaders or its image. 


No, I wouldn't want to live there. 


But it is fascinating to write.


Generally I write stories where the men want - or at the very least learn to want denial. (And that seems to be what happens, to be honest; if you can get a man caged even once, even as a test or as foreplay… I swear it's like a lightbulb goes off in their libido!). 


But in the world of Chestnut Tree Lane… That all happens at the State level, and that's honestly fascinating. 


That's why I ended up writing a couple of short propaganda pieces in my latest collection, The Birthday Present and Other Stories. One, an unbearably cruel wife who is addicted to the power the regime gives her to make her husband suffer; one a man learning to thrive in the only way he's allowed. 


They're both short pieces but it was delightful to slip in a couple of visits back to the NVLA regime in among the new little stories; I really hope it's not just me who's fascinated by the idea of such a merciless dystopia! 


(Although, maybe it's just the merciless women I like writing, not the broken politics: The Ruritanian Pretender isn't set in a dystopia at all; Flavia is a genuinely wonderful ruler of a thriving constitutional democracy - but she's also utterly uncompromising when it comes to allowing Rudy to orgasm…)


The Birthday Present and Other Stories is available now. 


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