The Voss Papers

At the risk of making an audacious literary effort somehow even more intertextual than it already is, I need to confess something about The Honourable Boytoy .   Whenever I'm trying to write something in another register - for example, when I'm creating Ruritanian Femdom as in  The Ruritanian Pretender , or when I'm channeling Noir as I did for my Chander piece in  Anna Voss Writes the Classics   - I spend a fair amount of time trying to immerse my mind in the cadences and texts of the original: I need to get a feel for the way each author holds and deploy language, and the way their characters talk. Sometimes, that gets away from me, and I end up writing elements I didn't intend to.  So it was with trying to write femdom espionage in the world of John le Carré.  It's a sign of how deeply I'd tried to immerse myself in his register that even admitting that I want to confess something already has my brain reaching across my writing desk for the box labelle...

A Rummage in my Inbox...  Every so often, I receive a particular kind of message - no, not that kind of message, although, actually I get those too, and always politely decline (you have to be quite explicit with that ‘no’, I've discovered; apparently saying “thanks but I honestly can't even keep track of my house keys without repeatedly losing them” puts off far fewer men than you'd think…) This is a different kind of message, and while I won't share any specific ones, they have a common pattern, and I suspect they say something extremely interesting about how many people think femdom - or at least femdom fiction - works.  So, these messages. They're usually (though not always) polite; they're often from readers who were extremely engaged, immersed in the story (which is wonderful!) - and they always sound slightly wounded, slightly bewildered, as if the reader had stumbled into a room they thought they knew, and found all the furniture had been moved around. ...

Thank you to everyone who's already bought copies of my latest novel The Honourable Boytoy , and a particular thank you to the couple of readers who reached out to me on Reddit to say thanks and ask questions!  One of those questions, I think, deserves a wider answer: How did I get the idea for ‘ The Honourable Boytoy ’?  And honestly?  It started as a joke.  I wrote one line in The Ruritanian Pretender where I was talking about how Ruritania made it through the 20th century. I made the country neutral in the Cold War, gave Klara a line that there were sometimes so many spies in Strakenz that some days felt like “the whole Circus had come to town”.  Which, sure, suggests that sudden influx of newcomers in strange attire, perhaps with their own concerns and traditions and language - but also of course The Circus is a key intelligence service in the works of John le Carré.  It was just a joke, a throwaway little remark. (And honestly I'm not sure anyone else...