The Voss Papers

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 ...

It's Advent, I haven't bought things for any of the people I like to buy things for (still less, the people I'm expected  to buy things for), and I am already quietly resentful of hearing slow, dated  Christmas songs coming out of every single shop I pass... But I'm taking the "if you can't beat them, join them" path, and releasing a seasonal Christmas novella!  It's called  Anna Voss's Christmas Carol , and, er, yes. It's  that  Christmas Carol, except my villain is called Eleanora Cruse, not Ebeneezer Scrooge. And it's set on an off-Earth colony planet in the future.  Oh. And she's not a moneylender, she's a findomme.      The trouble with A Christmas Carol is that almost everyone thinks they know it. Ask them to summarise it, and most folk will give you the same outline: Grumpy rich man doesn't like Christmas, sees ghosts, buys turkey, small boy doesn't die. Some people will probably remember to quote “God bless us, Ever...