The Voss Papers

In the year 4626, if Man is still alive (if eBooks can survive), they will find... ...What, exactly? Heck, even if my hard-copy paperbacks survive , I suspect that they won't be in mint condition (because, of course, they'll be incredibly well-read!). Assuming my books make it at all, either in paperback or in an eReader format that hasn't evolved into something too incomprehensible, I can't imagine they will be complete. Short of an incredibly dedicated reader deciding they're going to translate all of my works through the principles of Nuclear Semiotics -  " This is not a book of orgasm . Something by Anna Voss is here. It was hot to us. It is still hot to you now,"  perhaps? - then the most probable way my work will make it over 2,600 years into the future is in... well, fragments.  Oh, I trust the British Library will do their best, and I'm grateful to the 1911 Copyright Act for establishing my right to legal deposit - but for practical conservat...

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...

I like to tell myself it isn't really procrastinating - which is more than I can say for blogging about it! - but I’ve never been able to work on just one story at a time. This might be partly because I started out writing (pretty awful!) shorts on fanfiction.net and then AO3, or perhaps because for a while early in my career, I'd often 'multitask' at work by writing inside Outlook compose windows, where smut looked the same as all the actual work I was meant to be doing: that stopped in a hurry after one horrifyingly scary moment when I'd written a proper work email and then pasted the recipient address into the wrong window - I was an appallingly narrow moment from clicking 'send' on something absolutely not safe for work before I noticed!  But even so when I'm writing I usually have at least two stories trying to come together - sometimes even three or four, though those usually mothball themselves until I'm willing to listen.  It's not a typ...