The Voss Papers

At the risk of making an audacious literary effort somehow even more intertextual than it already is, I need to confess something about The Honourable Boytoy .   Whenever I'm trying to write something in another register - for example, when I'm creating Ruritanian Femdom as in  The Ruritanian Pretender , or when I'm channeling Noir as I did for my Chander piece in  Anna Voss Writes the Classics   - I spend a fair amount of time trying to immerse my mind in the cadences and texts of the original: I need to get a feel for the way each author holds and deploy language, and the way their characters talk. Sometimes, that gets away from me, and I end up writing elements I didn't intend to.  So it was with trying to write femdom espionage in the world of John le Carré.  It's a sign of how deeply I'd tried to immerse myself in his register that even admitting that I want to confess something already has my brain reaching across my writing desk for the box labelle...

Thank you to everyone who's already bought copies of my latest novel The Honourable Boytoy , and a particular thank you to the couple of readers who reached out to me on Reddit to say thanks and ask questions!  One of those questions, I think, deserves a wider answer: How did I get the idea for ‘ The Honourable Boytoy ’?  And honestly?  It started as a joke.  I wrote one line in The Ruritanian Pretender where I was talking about how Ruritania made it through the 20th century. I made the country neutral in the Cold War, gave Klara a line that there were sometimes so many spies in Strakenz that some days felt like “the whole Circus had come to town”.  Which, sure, suggests that sudden influx of newcomers in strange attire, perhaps with their own concerns and traditions and language - but also of course The Circus is a key intelligence service in the works of John le Carré.  It was just a joke, a throwaway little remark. (And honestly I'm not sure anyone else...

I've hinted in some of my more recent posts that I've been working on another full-length novel, and I'm excited to announce that it's now available!  It's called The Honourable Boytoy - a title which is one of a number of almost unavoidable nods to John le Carré (in this instance taking his Honourable Schoolboy title and, as it were, Voss-ifying it!) - and it's set in 1964, in Vienna, London, and a handful of other places mired in the intrigue and tension that arises when the intelligence services of two opposing ideologies face off in the twilight.  Well - I say opposing. Inevitably, my take on the Cold War requires that both sides are almost fanatical in their belief that the way to command - or break - the loyalty of a male agent is through tease and denial, through chastity, and through oral service. That's just unavoidable, when you think about it (and believe me, I think about it slightly more than I should...).  Essentially I've written what may...

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...