Carla Takes Her Clothes Off is my first novella. At 25,000 words, it is longer than my previous short stories but shorter than all three of my novels (and is priced accordingly). Most writing guilds and awards define a novella as between 17.5K and 40K words, so I’m calling it a novella rather than a short story and you can’t stop me :)
Carla... is the first but certainly won’t be the last. I’ve decided in 2019 to publish more shorter works (although I published two novels in 2018, they were written prior to that year and most of 2018 itself was spent working on Love Life of a Naked Girl, which was published in January 2019). The reason for this is not to make more money (really!) but because I know I have now a small but dedicated fan-base and I would like to reward them with more frequent content, rather than making them wait another year or more for me to finish my next novel.
Carla’s story itself is one I have had in my head for a while, without really the impetus to nail it down. I always wanted to write a story about someone who lives in an English country village who finds that the local residents are surprisingly tolerant of them walking around with nothing on in public. I don’t think for a second that something like this could really exist in real life (although I hear that as a bit of a hippy mecca, a lot of the residents of the English town of Glastonbury are quite blasé about people occasionally walking around naked), but this is fantasy after all; some suspension of disbelief is required.
I think we English have an attitude towards nudity that is somewhat puritanical but in certain situations is actually quite open-minded. We seem (for the most part) to view body-freedom as an eccentric oddity rather than a perversion and our rather reserved politeness means we are often happier to ignore the sight of a naked person than to open a discussion with them about just why they have no clothes on. Look at the case of Steve Gough, the “Naked Rambler” and his one-time partner, who were able to traverse much of the English countryside in the nude without many incidents (at least on their first journey; his subsequent jaunts, especially through Scotland and the Borders were a little more fraught and included much prison time, reflecting perhaps the more traditionally puritanical attitudes there).
Of course, Carla is in truth not an innocent English eccentric but a woman who enjoys being nude in public and with clothed people for erotic reasons – but the precedent for acceptance of her behaviour comes from a place of a certain type of open-mindedness that is quite peculiarly English.
But really, this isn't a story where real-life attitudes to nudity are examined; it's escapism and fantasy.
The other impetus for me to write Carla’s story was an interest in developing characters who are naked on a more-or-less (or entirely) permanent basis. I’ve gone close to this before; Amber in Brave Nude World becomes a “permanude” as an act of defiant protest, renouncing her clothes to go naked everywhere 24/7. But I’ve never made such a theme central in any of my works (Becky the Naked Girl, one imagines, would simply love permanent nudity, but unfortunately she inhabits a world where that would be impossible without living a very restricted life). Books like D H Jonathan’s The “Volunteer” and stories like the Tami Smithers series do concern themselves with the erotic implications of characters who are required to go everywhere naked all the time, but I don’t recall many works where a character consciously chooses to not wear clothes at all (for the simple reason, as I said, that making such a choice would severely limit your character’s ability to live in the normal world).
(My next work will involve a character who can’t, rather than won’t, wear clothes, but I won’t say more than that so as not to spoil the plot).
There are other firsts to Carla Takes Her Clothes Off, too. It’s the first time I’ve written about a slightly older woman (Carla, at twenty-eight, is still young by anyone’s standards, but given that most of the women in my stories are in their teens and early twenties, I liked writing someone who had a more mature confidence and comfort with herself). It’s also the first book where I’ve created my own cover rather than getting my brilliant illustrator Danielle to do it for me. The reason I went for my own cover was both to keep cost down on this much shorter work, and also to set my novella (and any future novellas) apart from my novels. It was also just a fun experiment to try.
(If you’re a fan of Danielle’s illustrations don’t worry, they will be still illustrating the covers of any future novels I write).
In the end, Carla Takes Her Clothes off was a way for me to explore the fun possibilities of the niche fetish genre I like to write in by stripping (pun intended) everything back to basics, and just have a story where a pretty lady indulges in erotic public nudity because she wants to.
Carla Takes Her Clothes Off is available on Amazon as an e-book here.
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