The Ghost of First Drafts Past - How Bec Padget Saved My Christmas Carol

 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 Mrs Gargery and begging for a file to remove a completely different sort of punishment device from his person, but I had to give it up.

(If anyone else wants to take on Great Edge-spectations, though, Miss Havisham is halfway to an unethical domme already (just add a latex wedding gown; it can creak gothically in tense moments), Estella in her 20s is dangerous, and swap the wedding cake for a pile of rusty chastity cages abandoned after Compeyson refused to sign the 24/7 slavery agreement at the last minute, that's my advice.) 

Anyway - it seemed like the obvious Dickensian target for me was A Christmas Carol, so I sat down to address it. 

And I just couldn't make it work. I tried a couple of times; the first draft only just filled one page before I realised it was broken. 

The second draft made it through three pages, but it wasn't behaving either: I just couldn't find the soul of the story. I had the idea: Scrooge, but domme, a keyholder not a moneylender, a bunch of ghosts to teach her what she was doing wrong - but somehow, nothing worked. 

So, instead I gave up, and moved on to tackle simpler challenges, which is why Writes the Classics skips any kind of Dickensian Femdom and instead focuses on Chandler, Saki, Gilman, Austen, and Chaucer: it was much, much easier to write Austen Does Corporal Punishment than it was to write Dickens Does Femdom - largely because much of Austen is already "female lead gains better understanding of male lead," which (I'm sure any disciplinary author would tell you) is 90% of delivering effective spanking anyway.

Eventually, of course, I had a bit of an epiphany and everything suddenly flowed beautifully: the finished product is - trust me - fantastic. I humbly submit that it will not just teach you the meaning of Christmas, but the meaning of domination, denial, and Dickens all at once. You're very welcome.

But, as it is nearly Christmas, let's summon a few ghosts of our own - within reason; I refuse to allow any jokes about me turning into knockers, thank you very much - and we'll examine exactly where it all went wrong in those early versions, and pin down why my first drafts could not be happy in the tone I'd chosen... 

Stave Draft One

Because, I was having a minor clearout and I found some of the original drafts. As you may recall, August was my Noir on a Typewriter era, and I didn't just try drafting Chandler on a typewriter - I tried the Dickens as well. 

And my first attempt - yes, this really is the actual, awful first draft - looked like this:

 

 

(Please don't feel you need to squint to read that; it bears almost no relation to the actual published book, and it is absolutely cringeworthy - first drafts always are, which is why I'd never normally show them to anyone! But there is something genuinely interesting here (two, if you also count the fact I wrote Martine - my 'Jacob Marley' equivalent - as 'Martine Jacobs' in this draft, and then never bothered to give her a surname at all in the finished version: this shows how heavily I was leaning on Dickens' framing rather than his message at this stage!).

 

The more interesting thing though, is that having written Martine out - she does have to be dead to begin with, after all - I then left Cruse alone.  

 

And, to be honest, I think I immediately knew something was wrong. That snippet above, that "With Martine now gone, she set about transforming her Keyholding Service into t(h)e coldest and cruellest domination service even she could imagine... and was still not satisfied" is as far as I got before I ripped the page out of the roller and started again. 

 

Cruse had nobody - she didn't even have the Temple (and the Temple subs form a vital part of the engine of the finished book - Calvin and Nathaniel in particular, but even the old echoes of earlier forms of the Temple itself like AliBaba and Robinson!). Without that community her first draft version was doomed (which, in retrospect, I should have known; Isolation Is Bad is, after all, a key narrative point!) 

  

Still, I am amused to see that the last thing I wrote before I abandoned this draft entirely was the observation that Cruse was not satisfied - because nor was I. I think my own disgust bled through onto the page, even then.

And - now I've finished the book properly - I understand why. In this first draft, Cruse stood entirely alone, a ruthless, sadistic findomme without witnesses - or much context. She was just... a parody of Scrooge. Cold, powerful, and unreadable... and, of course, it absolutely didn’t work.

At the risk of upsetting Bill Murray, Scrooge alone is not a story; he’s a diagnosis. Dickens built his moral machine to run on relationships, on the emotional cost of cruelty. Without someone for Cruse to neglect, exploit, or overlook, my opening felt like an empty set. Cruse was a monolith, not a character. The ghosts could have no leverage, her choices could not impact her, her redemption could have no weight.

It was Carol without a heartbeat.

So I tried again.

 

Stave Draft Two

Looking back, on some level I must have understood at least something of where I was going wrong, because in my second draft, I managed to get through three pages before I gave up. Among those pages (and the realisation that just as Scrooge never changed the name of Scrooge and Marley, so it made sense Cruse would retain the name of Cruse and Martine), I gave Cruse a clerk, a - slightly clumsy! - Bob Cratchit analogue, a painfully earnest young submissive called Bob Patchet. 

Also, apparently I decided "clerk" didn't convey "office drone in a findomme establishment well enough," because I've called him "her poor Simp" as if it were a job title, and I do sort of like that. Second drafts are often a little better, even when they still don't work:

It is still terrible. But a (slightly) different kind of terrible, although it's leaning far too hard on Dickens' cadence.

Also, based on the struck-through B that appears on that draft, I suspect I was about to give him the name Bob Bashet which... I'm glad I didn't. He was going to get subjected to ballbusting when Cruse lost her temper, and "Bash-It" definitely has that kind of Dickensian too-on-the-nose style of name, but I don't think it would have suited my style!) I rather enjoy the archness of 'as kind and thoughtful a young man as ever trembled to hold a camera', mind. 

 

His narrow escape with his name aside, Bob Patchet should have worked - at least on paper. He was downtrodden, loyal, hardworking, emotionally bruised, trapped in Cruse’s orbit, a moral upstanding person: two pages into this draft, Cruse convinces her subs to buy a custom that turns out to be 30 seconds of her teasing and then literally just herself stripping as the video is censored by a list of her biggest donations that month: Bob nobly argues with her and protests that "the Oxygen tax has gone up again!" - so very faithful to most visions of Bob Cratchit...

...But almost as soon as he hit the page, the story collapsed again.

Bob Patchet was a victim, not a foil. He existed only to absorb mistreatment, which made him dramatically useless and, worse, incompatible with the way I write men: of course they suffer - often deliciously - but there has to be something more to it than just suffering. 

In the original, I'd argue Dickens gets away with this because Bob Cratchit isn't just a victim; he's a man trapped in a terrible job, yet surrounded by a loving wife and adoring children, one of whom is desperately ill and almost aggressively pure-of-heart: Tiny Tim elevates Bob Cratchit from Victim-full-stop to Victim-of-circumstance, which reads very differently - but that's impossible for me.

I write adult dynamics, I write power play, I write searingly good femdom. I can recalibrate Dickens' moral engine to run on crypto, yes - but his thematic application of pure idyllic innocence cannot work in my texts: even the character Cruse leans out of the window to shout at on Christmas morning is a robot (a model of robot known as 'Walker,' in fact, as a little gift for those who treasure 1840s street slang).

Which meant I could write a Bob Cratchit stand-in, but I couldn't write him with the kind of emotional ballast his backstory needs for him to have any impact inside the story. 

So Bob Patchet didn't work, and creating him still left me wrestling with the wrong sort of narrative engine - I wasn't retooling Dickens, I was just repeating him with a chorus line of cock cages. 

(I wish I hadn't just phrased it like that, because creating that sentence has cursed myself; I now have visions of a wildly charismatic, gender-inverted Fagin, dancing through an attic in a corset and coat, singing "You've got to pick a padlock or two!" as she instructs a gang of bratty 20-something dommes on delivering guerilla edges to the wealthy chaste gentlemen of an alternative London. As I said, not all of my ideas are winners!)

Anyway - after those two drafts, I gave up, threw them aside, and - as it turns out - proceeded to lose them underneath a little heap of other notes and drafts and the birthday card I faithfully promised someone I'd definitely put into the post. 

 

Stave Draft Three 

It wasn't until October that I worked it out, when I was buried in edits of The Honourable Boytoy and thinking exactly how best to get Jimmy to accept his role in The Association's plan. He needed to accept it, but to do that I had to have the characters push him in the right way, with the right tools. 

And then, when I was supposed to be doing something completely different, it hit me. I knew why I'd failed. 

Yes, of course, Cruse can't change in isolation, but she couldn't change for Bob Patchet either. For a very simple reason:

Cruse could not change for a man.
 
Not in my world, or my style, or the psychological architecture I tend to write in.

She could mistreat him, but she could never change for him unless he was changing for her - and Bob, locked into his status as a Dickens-model-Good-Christian, couldn't change without destabilising the story. 

So - rather than carrying on with the editing and proofreading I was meant to be doing, I pulled up a fresh document and tried again. Not with Cruse alone, not with Cruse and a loyal Simp in place of Bob Cratchit. Cruse assisted by a woman. 

And everything started to work. 

If Cruse was being assisted by a woman, then there had to be a reason - she couldn't purely be there to hold a ringlight, like Bob Patchet, because a man would be cheaper... so clearly she had to be working to support Cruse in ruling her little empire of subs. 

But if Bec was doing that, it would be cheaper not to have her - unless Cruse no longer cared. 

Out went all the early draft stuff about Cruse only caring for money, or having a genuine hatred for male pleasure. Instead, she became indifferent, so utterly indifferent she'd rather pay another woman to pretend to be her than interact with her own subs. 

Instantly, Cruse began to remove herself from society. She was falling away from humanity just as Scrooge does. And if she was doing that she must have holograms as well - virtual scripts, AI slop, pregenerated content that maximised her return on investment and left her ever more isolated. 

Bec would be the glue holding everything together - so Bec would... Bec would be the source of Cruse's redemption. I'm not exaggerating when I say that this realisation threw me utterly, not least because it committed me to writing my first fully sapphic scene, which itself required not only a bunch of quiet research but also a lot of worry that I was about to genuinely disappoint a few readers who I happen to know are WLW: happily, early indications are that I have not!

And it was worth it - it was so worth it that I am even willing to show these early drafts and explain how wrong I nearly was. I started out trying to write Dickens with a cock cage. Once I found Bec, I found myself writing a novella with an actual emotional spine - and that engine of rage Dickens always intended suddenly roared into life, fired not by Bec's function as "the shivering person in Cruse's office," but as her emotional counterpoint: a source of calm, perfectly ethical domination. 

And yes, I could have realised this sooner if I’d stopped trying to graft a femdom morality tale onto a lone findomme titan or a poor overworked Simp named Bob Bashet. But writing is chaos, and occasionally you have to sift through typewritten debris to spot the shape of the book hiding beneath - and in this case, it was worth the wait.

As a short story, crammed into Anna Voss Writes the Classics, Eleanora Cruse might have been interesting - but I don't think she'd have been lovable, because it wasn't her cruelty that was ever going to make the story work. It was Bec's compassion.

Dickens gave Scrooge a world to lose - and showed him what it looked like.

I gave Cruse a woman who saw her - and she showed Eleanora how to top and still be liked. 

That's worth a few rough drafts.

If you'd like to see who Cruse becomes, and how Bec helps (and trust me, you definitely want to see how she helps redeem Cruse...) - then Anna Voss's Christmas Carol is available now.