From today, you can buy my latest novella Sophie on Amazon Kindle (it's available to borrow on Kindle Unlimited also).
I've stuck to my plan for this year, which was to write and publish more numerous (lower-priced) shorter works, rather than making my fans wait until I'd written another full-length novel (don't worry, there will be another one of those eventually too!) However unlike my previous work Carla Takes Her Clothes Off, Sophie turned out in the end to be almost long enough to be a full novel, coming in at around 43,000 words.
That's not the only difference between Sophie and Carla... The latter story is very much in line with themes I've explored before; erotic public nudity and female exhibitionism in a variety of CFNF/CMNF/only-one-naked scenarios. Sophie, however, is my first venture into writing a story with strong fantastical or supernatural elements, which was much more of a challenge to me - and I must admit, I'm a little nervous as to how it will be received.
I never had this pressure in the early days, of course, but now I've been putting out these books for a few years, I have built up a small but loyal fanbase (especially on Twitter). I'm aware that these fans like certain things about my writing very much, and I'm also aware that Sophie is a departure from some of those themes (in particular, there is no exhibitionist content to speak of).
If you're a reader of my work and you're unsure about Sophie, I will say that it does include some of my trademarks, including copious female nudity (with ENF and CFNF scenarios), humour-laced dialogue, female leads and girl/girl romance.
But behind them all is a story very different to any that I've told before.
I won't give away any spoilers, but to summarise, the plot concerns the lead character, Laura, moving into a new apartment building and discovering that she has a quite unusual neighbour. This neighbour is Sophie, a young woman who never leaves her apartment and never lets anyone in, who posts a note under Laura's door asking if she would mind continuing a service the previous resident of the apartment provided for her, namely taking in deliveries at the building's main door and bringing them up to the door of her apartment. Sympathetically Laura readily agrees, but she finds Sophie's evasiveness as to why this arrangement is needed intriguing, and tries to connect with her new neighbour. While Sophie is initially shy, the two women bond through texts and phone calls, until Laura's curiosity gets the better of her and she insists on visiting Sophie in person. She discovers her neighbour lives permanently naked, and it is in Sophie's explaining this that Laura learns the incredible truth of Sophie's life, and finds herself on a voyage into the supernatural, but also into romance and love.
Meanwhile, a mysterious naked woman has been appearing in public places across the country - and few who encounter her survive to tell about it...
So why did I write this story? Well, for one, when I read fiction, it tends to be fantasy, sci-fi or horror. Although I write erotica which tends to be quite mundane and without any fantastical trappings, I don't really read 'real world' fiction. I much prefer magic, monsters, superheroes, demons, aliens, myths and legends, and I felt it was time to try to reflect these interests in my own writing.
I also wanted to return to an earlier concept, one I explored more with Carla... namely the idea of a character who is always naked in every scenario in the book. With Carla... I went as close to the edge as possible in terms of having a character 'permanude' and still able to exist in the real world (i.e. without changing the 'rules' of our world the way I did in Brave Nude World). With Sophie my desire was to go even further, to have a character who was never ever clothed - and not necessarily of their own choosing. In trying to find reasons why this might be the case, a supernatural or magical explanation presented that possibility.
With the central premise (Sophie doesn't ever wear clothes - why not?) the rest of the story grew organically around it. I did take influence and inspiration from a variety of sources and perhaps I will go into this in more detail in a later blog (one that will contain spoilers).
The biggest challenges I found with this book were writing things I have never done before; scenes of action and, in some cases, violence. There hasn't been much call for these things in my previous writing, but in Sophie I wanted to mix the supernatural romance up with a more action-oriented, horror-influenced plot. I hope that I've handled these scenes well and they don't feel out of place, but this is very much a first attempt at such content and if I return to it in future, I think this will have been a valuable learning opportunity for me as a writer to grow beyond what is expected of me and give my fans something new.