The Voss Papers

I am not now, nor have I ever been, a research chemist. I did do  chemistry as part of Learning Science at school, but I suspect this may have been a faintly pointless exercise (not least because nearly all I have to show for my teacher's troubles is the dim recollection that F=MA, that mitochondria are important for something or other possibly to do with generating oxygen out of leaves, and that in spite of all the rumours, putting a pencil sharpener marked W GERMANY into a bunsen burner does not actually make it explode).  Nevertheless, I did end up trying to do some research on  research chemistry in order to write a moderately-convincing world in which Her Submissive Experiment could sit, and it only really occurred to me later that the job of an erotica author is perhaps faintly weird.  Because, obviously, I do not expect anyone reading any of my books to go "Aha! Anna Voss said RLS-18, the orgasm-inhibiting formulation of the serum, had impure salts!! It's all...

As I may have previously mentioned , I didn't have the smoothest start to the year, and it's been something of a bumpy return to writing (the pile of rejected drafts I've been working on now almost dwarfs the pile of grumpy letters I've been obliged to send to builders, although it is nothing to the pile of excuses I have had explaining why, for instance, they aren't coming this week). However - somewhere in between sweltering in an apparently endless succession of heatwaves and being told that such-and-such isn't actually covered by my policy - I have at least been trying to write. I'm finding that valuable even when I then throw the result away: sometimes, something just... clicks.  In this instance, it was the frankly daft idea that the duality built into Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde  had some genuinely excellent potential to be reset in the context of modern gothic erotica. Unfortunately, all of  the currently available evidence   makes it pretty clear that t...