Inside Her Head – Announcing 'Her Ascendant Intern'

For various reasons - none of them, sadly, being hordes of desperate producers fighting for the exclusive right to turn The Honourable Boytoy into a prestige miniseries starring Andrew Scott as Jimmy Easterly (I will take no further questions; he would knock the 'tragic desperation to believe in his duty' side of Jimmy clean out of the park Prater) - this last month has been rather busier than I would have liked. 

However - hell and/or high water notwithstanding, I like to keep my promises, and I am pleased to say that my latest novel, Her Ascendant Intern is out now: the story of Hannah Wilson - a high-achiever desperate for recognition - who joins a mysterious and exclusive internal promotion scheme run by her company, Velvet Helix. All it takes is agreeing to test an experimental behaviour-modification chip... and demonstrating just how well she can take orders from the CEO's secretary, Beverley Sinclair - a woman whose authority and approval prove to be equally addictive.

Eagle-eyed readers may notice a slight variation in the cover design: this one has a cream cover, rather than black. That's on purpose, to allow a subtle visual distinction of focus.

Intern, as I have perhaps hinted, follows the logical throughline of Anna Voss's Christmas Carol, except that - rather than discovering, mid-draft, that Eleanora Cruse could only be redeemed by a woman - I have instead built this novel as sapphic from the ground up. Furthermore, I've taken my (mild - I swear it's mild; I can quit any time I want) obsession with female interiority to its logical extreme and kept the focus for this work almost entirely inside Hannah's head.

The result is - well. 

It's a sizzling piece of literary erotica, of course: that's what it means when I put my name to something. But it's also deeply intimate: we stay almost entirely inside Hannah's head, interpreting her hopes and arousal and fears as she experiences them. 

This isn't anything particularly new as a literary device, but I think it adds a certain frisson to erotica, because it locks the reader's experience to Hannah's. That's particularly important in what is, ultimately, both a novel about desire and hunger - as all my works are - but also one about permission. In some ways, it's the mirror image of Mantamer: where that book asked "what is the femdom dystopian consequence of a mind-control implant?", Her Ascendant Intern asks - where do the desires conjured by a behaviour modification implant end? And - more importantly - where do they even begin?

I won't, of course, spoil the ending - but I will say this: I’ve never written anything quite like it. Not because it is unapologetically sapphic - although it is - but because the message, while still locked inside a framework of desire and denial - is perhaps the most intimate, even hopeful, thing I've ever written. And erotica or not, I believe it's a book that deepens on reflection.

I hope you'll agree. 

Her Ascendant Intern is available now.