Paul Enock's Blog

So, after a year I have finally published a new book, Poppy Summers Special Agent, and I hope everyone enjoys it. I like to make each book as different as I can from what went before, although my more preceptive readers will have realized that there are familiar themes. This one is my first spy novel and my beautiful special agent has much to endure from a curious training regime to a hostile interrogation.

I haven’t been quite as lazy as a single annual book might suggest and have actually been working on three books concurrently (don’t ask why and yes, my head is now all muddled up). The next two are loosely related and consider the trials of a brilliant female scientist reaching maturity in a reimagined 1930’s England where women are the property of their husbands and subjugated to the extent that they all need to be collared and shackled in public – nothing woke here… Both books have now reached the editing stage, so hopefully before Christmas…

At last I have a new book out… It’s called ‘The Sultan’s Dancer’ and it’s taken me a year to write. Ok, it’s not the only thing I've been doing, it’s not even been the only book, but it’s done now and I hope you like it.
It’s set in the early twentieth century and tells the tale everyday of American folk… No, actually, it’s the story of a rich American girl suddenly finding herself the owned chattel of an Arabian sheikh. Her father and elder brother are really to blame for her circumstance and the more her father tries to bully his way to her freedom, the worse her situation becomes.
The story is a succession of increasing humiliating, fantasy predicaments for the girl, but I like to think that there’s a serious side to the story too; read it and judge for yourself.

Just having a little moan… Streamer Girl has now been on sale for a couple of weeks and I've had about 80 books sold or read, but I've only had one rating and that’s a one star! I think it’s a good book, although I'm quite prepared to admit I'm a bit biased, but one star… It’s, umm, disappointing. Have I upset someone?

Another story, this one contemporary. It’s called Streamer Girl, as in streaming video. I started it last summer when the weather was warmer and now it’s January, I’m thinking my eponymous heroine might be feeling the cold.
I try to make each story unique without deviating too much from a formula that sees the female protagonist severely inconvenienced in ways well beyond her control. This time, she’s encouraged to participate in a website that streams a videocast of her days in order to attract paying subscribers and, thereby, pay off a casino debt she accidentally incurred. It wasn’t supposed to be anything more than a video diary, but then her boyfriend thought a little eroticism might attract more site members. That’s when the inconveniences begin. See what you think…

I have just published another Victorian novel, The Mad Mistress of Barnbury Hall. This one has been a long time coming. I actually wrote it a couple of years ago, but then it needed a cover and several rewrites, and, of course, there were other things to do…
I find the Victorian era interesting from an erotic viewpoint because it appeared to leave Victorian women particularly vulnerable to the whims of their menfolk. One of the most important aspects of Victorian life was the premise that a woman was inferior in many ways to a man and should defer to his will in all things to such an extent that the woman was actually considered to be the legal property of her husband and owned nothing in her own right. If he thought his interests could be best served by, for instance, keeping her chained to the kitchen sink, she had no legal redress to question his judgement and to do so was only one of a multitude of symptoms of the mental disorder described as hysteria.
Hysteria was diagnosed with a spectacular assortment of symptoms including lassitude, irritability, forgetfulness, writing cramps, and, of course, rebelliousness, excessive sexual thoughts, and masturbation. It was thought to be caused by a concentration of feminine seminal fluids in the pelvic area and was usually cured by a husband’s marital attentions. This is why the disease mostly affected young, unmarried girls and, in such cases, the seminal fluids had to be dispersed by a doctor or nurse manually inducing a paroxysm, known today as an orgasm. Such treatments were considered non-sexual because, unlike men, women of the age were not thought to possess any sexual responses nor feel any sexual desire, showing Queen Victoria’s advice to ‘Lie back and think of England’ in a whole new light.
So, a young girl disobeying her father or guardian could find herself certified insane and, for her own good, incarcerated in an asylum for years where she could be kept naked and restrained (to keep her submissive and compliant), exhibited to the public (to encourage monetary donations), and repeatedly forced to orgasm.
This was essentially the premise of my first Victorian novel, ‘A Victorian Cure for the Disease of Love’. This new second novel is a little different and is based on a nefarious character tricking an heiress into marriage in order to possess her estate. Thereafter, the unfortunate woman becomes nothing more than a legally owned play-thing for the new lord and his mistress.

Each time I finish a book I think to myself that's it; I've now exhausted all the interesting scenarios. It would be pointless to start repeating myself and frustrating from my readers point of view. Then a new line of thought develops...

This latest book is a little different from all the others. I try to make my books scientifically believable, I am an Engineer after all. This latest book is actually based on a true episode from history and the extraordinary attitudes and practices of the day: the astonishing way Victorian men controlled and manipulated their womenfolk.

Throughout history, men have failed to understand their women and this phenomenon seems to have reached a peak in the latter half of the nineteenth century when the prudish Victorians couldn't bring themselves to accept the fact that their delicate and sensitive females could experience anything like lust or an orgasm. They were also tempted to attribute any abnormal behaviour or dissent by their women, such as disagreeing with men, as a symptom of some sort of 'curable' disease peculiar to their sex. The name of this disease was 'hysteria', a condition that could easily land the unfortunate lady in an asylum, and the common way of relieving it was for the doctor to induce an orgasm, or a paroxysm as they would describe it. Such a nervous spasm was not in their minds a sexual response, women didn't have sexual responses. It was merely an involuntary reaction to the release of female 'semen' and had the benefit of relieving the accumulation of fluids in the woman's pelvic area that was contaminating the blood and causing the problems.

The usual way of inducing a paroxysm was manually, a time consuming and exhausting job for the physician, but other methods were developed using water and steam driven devices. There were alternative cures too; dark, horrific cures.

This book, A Victorian Cure for the Disease of Love, explores a young woman's experiences when she has the misfortune to fall in love with someone who is inconvenient from her guardian's point of view. After the story, the book includes a short treatise on Victorian hysteria and the related ailment, masturbation, for those readers who disbelieve the 'facts'.