Goodbye to 2020, Hello to 2021...

It's almost the end of what has undeniably been a pretty bad year for most people. I won't start some sort of diatribe against Covid.19 or how Brexit has affected us Brits - that's been done to death by everyone else - but I thought it would be fun to have a quick look back on 2020 as far as my books went and a quick update on what's new from Paul Garland coming in 2021.

My first book of 2020, published in February, was Katie's Casting Call, the fifth and penultimate (for now) book in the No Angels main series. With this last story, I tried to do something different (as I like to do) and wrote a book about a young man getting cuckolded before his relationship was even properly established.

This was probably the first erotica I've written which opened my mind to trying some new stories and perhaps moving away from the more commonly written tropes. It was also a first proper spin-off story, being connected to the events of The Photo Shoot, one of the earlier No Angels novels, and the two books would later appear in No Angels: The First Collection, a bundle of three of my older No Angels books in November 2020.

Despite it being quite different to anything else I'd written so far, Katie's story was well-received and went down as my popular book since the early part of 2019.

Shortly after Katie's went live, we were plunged into lockdown and I found myself furloughed from my day job, meaning I had many more hours during the day to be able to write. And so, I threw myself into writing through the myriad of ideas I'd had in my head for the much busier years before and although I didn't know it, I would finish all of them before the end of 2020, putting out more books than I'd ever written before in such a short space of time.

The first idea I sketched out and then made into fruition was Size Matters, the first book of a new series that I'd been wanting to write for a while: The Cuckold Collection. I wanted these books to be more focused on the actual cuckolding of a man/husband and less like the typical hotwife-type novels I'd written before.

The first aspect of cuckoldry that I wanted to explore was the issue of penis size. It's certainly true that a lot of men enjoy small penis humiliation and while the book didn't shine too bright a lamp on that particular fetish, it explored it some while also studying the alpha/beta dynamic that comes with it and the cuckolding scene in general. Size Matters was enormous fun to write and when I published it in May, it became my second most successful book ever and continued to be popular even now at the end of the year.

The follow-up and second book in The Cuckold Collection set was Ex Appeal which I published in July. Because I'd enjoyed the way Katie's utilised characters from a previous book, I'd decided to do the same with the first three Cuckold Collection books, and so the main characters from Size Matters ended up making a cameo appearance in Ex Appeal and vice-versa and they would also appear in the third book in the series too. Setting up characters in one book, knowing how they were going to feature in a forthcoming book gave me new design spaces and ideas for the future and while Ex Appeal didn't sell quite as well as Size Matters did, it was the vehicle for a host of new projects, some of which I started on straight away and some of which I'm currently writing and developing now.

Ex Appeal explored the concept of a woman having a past and how she would confront a future of moving on from it. Again, this was a book where the couple wasn't married, much like Katie's but this time it was the very commitment that marriage brings that sparked out characters into exploring a new side to themselves, and cuckolding being a part of that.

The combining of characters and stories together into a standalone and yet connected series intrigued me and I enjoyed it that much I committed to writing my first proper series in this way and to be labelled as such. I'd been asked to write more in the No Angels series of books and was writing my last No Angels book at the time and so I saw an opportunity to further develop that series by making my first connected series a true spin-off from one of my favourite No Angels' books, The Bad Crowd.

The Bad Crowd has always been one of my personal favourites to write as it had a totally different environment and setup to my previous No Angels books, so I decided to base my short stories around the infamous venue mentioned in that book: the strip club called The Black Cats Club.

All of my recent books had been long books (40,000 words or longer) and I'd finished my series of shorter books (The Cerulean Erotica Presents set) which I decided to put out as a bundle in the middle of the year. So, I decided to make this new connected spin-off series shorter stories to cater for those who like their erotica a bit more punchy and quicker to read through.

I published one book each in October, November and December and while they weren't quite as successful as my longer books, they were well-received and together, I think they made a fun story and writing this kind of standalone and yet episodic erotic fiction taught me a lot and helped me crystalline my ideas and plans for 2021.

The Tales of the Black Cats Club were three separate stories, starting with The Cat That Got The Cream, which I published in early October. I really wanted to explore the environment I'd created in Bad Crowd and it was really enjoyable to go back to a book I wrote years before and re-read it, before delving into its recent past.

I set Cat Got Your Tongue? before the first book, making it a prequel of sorts - making a conscious decision before I started writing the series to explore a slightly different chronology to what I'd written before - and it also gave me the opportunity to write in some extra twists and turns to the story as I went along.

I love a good twist and the final book in the series: Cat and Mouse was a standalone story just like the first two but the cast of shared characters between the three books all came together in this final tale and the last few secrets were exposed and all the loose ends were tied up in a way which I felt was a really satisfactory conclusion thing to write.

My last (for now) full-length No Angels novel was Sara's Shocking Secret, published in the middle of October and it went on to be my second most successful book of the year. I hadn't expected Sara's to do as well as it did, because again I tried to do something different - this time namely to connect all of the previous No Angels books into one final story.

I was a little worried that the resulting main story of Pete and Rachel - a story I'd had in my mind to write for some time: of how curiosity can lead you down a dark and sticky path - might get drowned out or confused in my attempts to fuse in cameos and larger appearances from the other No Angels characters, but from my readers' reactions and sales, it seems like I managed to do a good job with it.

In between writing Sara's and my last longer book of 2020, I found time to write two seasonally-themed stories. Tracy's Trick or Treat was the first, which I released in time for Hallowe'en, at the end of October.

I followed the first Sexy Season Story up with A Cuckold Christmas Carol in December. Both of these books were my absolute favourites to write - being much more light-hearted and fun in their tone and content and much less serious and angsty than your typical cuckold or hotwife books. While they weren't incredibly successful, they were universally well-received which pleased me because they were so enjoyable to put together from an author's point-of-view.

My last large book of the year was published just before my Christmas story and has been a huge success in the month or so it's been available. The third book in the Cuckold Collection set, Dark Curiosity took me the longest of all the books this year to write.

Dark Curiosity explored another sub-genre of the cuckolding scene; possibly the most common fantasy of all - interracial cuckolding. I wanted to write a holiday-setting novel again, so I combined the concept of interracial sex with the allure of the Caribbean and drafted in some of the characters I'd set up for the task in Ex Appeal, the previous book in the set and let my mind drift to the most deviant and delicious place it had all year; namely a young white woman being gangbanged by a bunch of huge black men.

My first book in 2021 will be the next in The Cuckold Collection, called Locked Up and is coming in mid-January. The previous three books have a few shared characters but I'm leaving them alone and Locked Up will instead start another faux-trilogy of shared characters while being standalone books like all my stories are. Locked Up explores another facet of the cuckolding scene: the male chastity device or penis cage as it's commonly known. It also explores the 'bully' concept somewhat. I'm excited for you to read it and as soon as I have a release date, I'll let you know.

I enjoyed writing The Tales of the Black Cats Club so much, I decided to write another 3-part spin-off series - another set of No Angels stories - but these will be based around my best-selling and most popular book of all time: The Photo Shoot. The first of these, entitled The Camera Doesn't Lie will also be making an appearance towards the end of January and its subsequent sequels, provisionally entitled Camera Shy/Double Exposure and Lights, Camera, Action will follow in February and March respectively.

Also coming in February is my next seasonal fun story - tentatively called My Hotwife Valentine - and the fifth Cuckold Collection book: Access Denied.

Finally, coming in January is the first book in another series, this time a brand new set of books totally unconnected to my other stories which will take the hotwife book genre to a new place that I've never explored before, that of the wilful and determined wannabee-cuckold. The working title for the concept is A Hotel for Hotwifery and I'll have some more information on this totally new set soon.

Anyway, I hope you've enjoyed the stories I've put out in 2020 and that you'll join my mailing list if you haven't already so that I can keep you informed of new releases and dates. You'll find the link to it on my main page here: All My Links which also has details of my social media pages and more, where again I do my best to keep you updated on what's coming next.

Finally, I'd like to wish you a happy and healthy 2021 and to thank you for supporting me during what's been an intensely difficult year. Erotica isn't the most lucrative of writing genres and losing my day job due to covid.19 has been very testing financially for me and my young family but with your help and support we managed to get through it, so thank you very, very much from the bottom of my heart to anyone who's bought a book or read a story of mine on Kindle Unlimited or supported me in any other way.

Thank you - and Happy New Year!