The Voss Papers

I first realised erotic literature was a thing on a school trip. I realise that's the kind of statement that can carry potentially catastrophic connotations, so let me quickly clarify: I was in my mid teens, it was summer term, and I discovered it on my own. I'd been on a school trip to France.  On the way back, the ferry ran late, disembarking took forever, and so somewhere, around 2am, we pulled off the motorway into a services, presumably so the by then grumpy staff running the whole thing could call someone's landline to explain we were still en route. Everyone was exhausted, it was weirdly, viciously cold for the time of year, and everything in the services turned out to be shut except for the toilets and the shop. (In my memory, it was a WH Smiths, but I honestly don't know if that's what it was, or a projection based on the fact every motorway services these days has a WH Smiths.) Regardless of what the shop actually was, it sold books, and magazines, and sn...

After a rather long gestation period , Edge Close is out. It isn’t set in the Ruritanian Royal court , or buried in the files of a fading espionage institution . While in some ways it's the other side of the coin to my Sense of Submission , it isn't even set in a grand country house.  It's ordinary. Domestic. The most intimate scenes happen in the bedroom of an ordinary house, on an ordinary cul-de-sac, with the orange glow of the streetlamp outside filtering through the curtains, playing across quivering skin and tear-stained cheeks.  Often, my work aims to interrogate power through institutions or external forces; political dystopia or cyber-futures . But  Edge Close interrogates it through love. Through female desire rediscovered without the need for apology or witnesses . Through submission not as spectacle, but as devotion. So yes, it's different - it’s domestic, intimate, and deliberately grounded in ordinary rooms and ordinary days: it follows the cycle of lif...

One of the quiet assumptions that clings to most erotic writing - and, I suspect, to most sexual relationships - is that desire only counts when it is seen , as if carnal lust was a particularly tempting quantum particle. People tend to assume that the man can be (even will be) desperately horny, but that his desperation means nothing unless it is witnessed - which is completely untrue; his desperation can still mean you’re personally aching even if you know it’s happening in the next room. Or, worse, they assume that unless a woman is seen to be aroused, then she isn’t. (This is also completely untrue; it is, for example, entirely possible for a woman to be extremely aroused while a man is whimpering helplessly in the next room. Trust me.) But as a writer of erotic literature, this presents something of a problem, because it means I occasionally feel compelled to lean on tropes that I might not always believe are necessary. Sometimes even I find myself writing about a woman’s visibly...

I never meant to have a pattern to my book chapters. But it made logical sense for the first chapter of my first book, On Chestnut Tree Lane to begin with 'Chapter 1: Arrival,' since it deals with Scott's arrival at Whitmore House. And - as  Anna Voss Writes The Classics might suggest - I do like to give myself the odd formal constraint or challenge when I write, so it took no time at all to decide I should see if I could start every chapter with a word beginning with A.  And, obviously, I could; it wasn't, by itself, a very interesting challenge. But if I took it further...  Well. Who doesn't enjoy a few extra restraints?  So it was that when I started writing Sense of Submission , I started it with 'Chapter 1: Beginning',  and gave it 'B' for its chapter headings. Then, because I was learning that I often like to write two drafts at once, I started  Mantamer using chapters starting with a C. Which was all lovely and tidy, right up until it wasn...