Sarnia de la Maré FRSA Author, Musician, Artist

Welcome to Mills & Swoon , my new series of droll, risqué romance shorts designed for modern readers who want quick escapism with plenty of spice.    Today’s releases include  The Velvet Listener  and Tara the Time Tourist , two standalone tales spanning contemporary seduction and futuristic time-slipping passion. Both stories are now live in Mills & Swoon Volume 1 , with podcast readings available on the Immersion Static channel. This marks the beginning of a playful new series that blends romance, humour, sensuality, and a touch of the unexpected. A Futuristic Mills & Swoon Short by Sarnia de la Maré In 2125, dating had become a clinically miserable experience involving algorithms, psych-screening, and compatibility contracts so invasive they made old-fashioned marriage vows look casual. Tara Summers was sick of it. So she booked the only holiday left that required zero algorithmic compatibility data harvesting, sort of. Look, they didn’t send you if ...

About the author SARNIA. DE LA MARE  https://share.google/Aw3KqzHkoM9CGcHLQ 💋 The Velvet Listener. A Contemporary Mills & Swoon Short by Sarnia de la Maré. Mara Lane had been the late-night voice of Heartline FM for three years, dispensing warm advice to strangers while living a private life that was anything but romantic. The truth was that Mara had become rather accomplished at helping other people fall in love precisely because she had stopped trying it herself. She had stopped dressing up and going out. She avoided dinner parties with friends who were forever trying to matchmake her with basically any man who happened to be single. The studio lights were low enough to be flattering in the way dim lamps flatter tired women. Her producer, Jay, waved through the glass: Caller on line four. “Heartline FM,” she purred. “You’re live with Mara.” She had perfected a sexy sultry voice that her fans loved. Little did they know, privately she had long given up any ideas of falling in...

 Artists are often told not to look back — that retrospection is stagnation, that archives are mausoleums, that forward motion is the only respectable posture. But for feminist artists, the archive is not a graveyard. It is a universe. A constellation. A machine of time. History has rarely given women the dignity of continuity. Our stories appear in fragments, footnotes, scandals, sidebars, moral warnings. Our work is often lost, misattributed, unrecorded, or buried beneath male narratives of genius. To build an archive as a woman — particularly as a feminist, punk-influenced, countercultural artist — is not nostalgia. It is infrastructure. It is immortality engineering. An archive is a rebellion against erasure. My own archive spans decades: punk squats, Brighton counterculture, moving-image experiments, performance personas, erotic writings, glitch art, AI aesthetics, feminist essays, and the vast interconnected world of Immersion . To watch these fragments accumulate is ...

 Every era has its creation myth. The 21st century has two: the myth of the machine, and the myth of the self. For feminist artists, these myths collide in the most intimate way, because women have always been framed — by religion, by medicine, by art history — as the origin of bodies but not the authors of meaning. We were the biological machinery, never the myth-makers. Yet contemporary feminist art reveals something radical: women are not just creators of bodies; we are architects of worlds. We generate systems, symbols, archives, identities, digital creatures, performance environments, alter-egos, and entire aesthetic universes. We are no longer simply mothers of children; we are mothers of machines — machines in the broadest, most poetic sense. When I speak of “mothering machines,” I do not mean nurturing robots or raising android offspring (though Immersion certainly plays with that imagery). I mean the feminist labour of creating new forms of existence in art: digital...

 Women are taught, very early, that desire is something that happens to us, not something we generate. We are expected to be the stage, not the actor; the landscape, not the storm. Art history prefers women as allegories of desire, never as its engineers. Yet the truth is far more interesting: women are machines of desire — intricate, volatile, recursive, sovereign. Not machines in the patriarchal sense (cold, efficient, programmable), but machines in the mythological sense: creations of circuitry and intuition, marked by pleasure, instinct, history, trauma, power, metamorphosis. Machines that rewrite themselves. For years I sensed this intuitively while writing, while constructing performance personas, while building erotic visual archives that slipped between seduction and subversion. But it was only later — through digital art, feminist theory, and the disobedient erotics of punk — that the idea matured into a framework: the erotic machine as feminist methodology. The ero...

 Memory, in the hands of a feminist artist, is never simply recollection. It is reclamation. Rewiring. A counter-history. A refusal to accept the official version of events — especially when the official version has no interest in us except as footnotes, victims, or background noise. But noise, as punk taught me early in life, is never just background. Noise is material. Noise is language. Noise is resistance. When we speak of punk memory , we are not talking about nostalgia for studs, spit and cheap beer. Punk memory is a methodology: a way of remembering that is unpolished, uncurated, contradictory, feral. A memory that does not behave. A memory uninterested in being respectable. Women in the punk scene learned early that our histories would not be recorded unless we recorded them ourselves. Gigs went undocumented. Friendships vanished into rumour. Survival stories disappeared beneath glamourised male narratives of chaos and genius. Women made the clothes, ran the houses, b...

 There is a strange and persistent myth that feminist art must be hard-edged, confrontational, armoured, invulnerable — that to survive patriarchy, one must become a fortress. But the fortress is only one architecture of resistance. There is another, equally powerful form: soft armour . Soft armour is the practice of making vulnerability visible without allowing it to be weaponised. It is the art of surviving by bringing the wound to light — not as spectacle, not as confession, but as feminist methodology. For women, trauma is not an academic topic. It is a cultural inheritance. A generational subtext. A political reality. And yet, art history has rarely allowed women to narrate their trauma on their own terms. The feminine wound has traditionally been eroticised, pathologised, poeticised for male consumption, or scrubbed out entirely. To speak the wound is already an act of rebellion. To aestheticise it on your own terms is a revolution. My own work has navigated the edges o...

 There is a particular archetype emerging in contemporary feminist art — a hybrid creature who moves between analogue and digital realms, dragging her history behind her like a comet tail of pink wires, broken code, erotic defiance and uncompromising critique. I call her the glitch-witch . She is not a technologist. She is not a programmer. She does not arrive with Silicon Valley swagger or the naïve libertarian optimism of early internet utopians. Instead, she appears like a system error in the machinery of digital order. She disrupts, distorts, corrupts and re-enchants the screen. The glitch-witch is not simply a feminist artist using technology. She is a feminist force haunting the technology that surveils her. In this sense, glitch feminism is not a style but a methodology — a way of rupturing the false stability of digital identity. Where the platform demands perfection, she inserts distortion. Where algorithms demand legibility, she offers misbehaviour. Where facial reco...

 Beauty, for women, has never been neutral. It is a currency, a weapon, a cage, a performance, a threat, a promise, a provocation, a negotiation, and occasionally — if we’re lucky — a pleasure. But in the history of art, beauty is most often a leash. The feminine body appears in Western art as an object of interpretation rather than a force of creation: gazed upon, worshipped, dissected, idealised, punished. Beauty became a disciplinary mechanism; even now, women are expected to participate in their own aesthetic containment. But what happens when the artist refuses to behave? This question has been at the core of my work for decades. In my early punk years, beauty was something to be rejected outright — a trap, a patriarchal choreography designed to minimise autonomy. I shaved things, ripped things, painted things that were not meant to be painted. My femininity was not something to be displayed; it was something to deconstruct. Later came a more interesting realisation: beaut...

 The contemporary artist lives under uninterrupted surveillance. Not merely state surveillance (though that cobweb is always humming in the rafters), but the softer, more insidious surveillance of algorithmic witnessing — data trails, metrics, likes, biometrics, aesthetic categorisation. Our identities, once private negotiations, have been turned outward, flattened, and fed into machines that decide what kind of human we are allowed to be. For women, this is not new. We have always been watched. What is new is the ability to weaponise the gaze rather than flee it — a tactic feminist artists have honed for decades, sometimes consciously, sometimes instinctively. For me, the development of personas such as Pasha du Valentine or the Countess of Brighton and Hackney was not a theatrical flourish. It was a calculated feminist intervention: a deliberate exaggeration of gender, class and erotic codes that refused passive consumption. A persona is not a mask. A persona is a mirror ...

 We speak often about “preserving women’s voices,” but rarely do we address the uncomfortable truth: archives are inherently violent. They exclude, they sanitise, they organise memory into palatable sequences. Women, queer people, neurodivergent bodies, sex workers, punks, migrants — we are usually documented only in moments of scandal, danger, or failure. This is why self-archiving became a feminist act. Brighton Arts Club, Goddamn Media, the digital diaries, the moving-image loops, the obsessive documentation of performance personas — these were never indulgences. They were counteractions. Survival tactics. Ways of refusing erasure. Mainstream archives prefer a certain legibility: dates, exhibitions, institutions, grant-funded projects. But counterculture thrives in the unrecorded, the ephemeral, the badly lit, the chaotic. Feminist art history is full of ghosts. Brilliant ghosts. Unseen performances. Lost zines. Deleted photographs. Women whose entire careers exist only in me...

 There is a particular electricity that crackles at the place where transgression meets reclamation. For many women artists, myself included, this is the exact point from which real creative agency begins — not the polite, domesticated kind of agency that fits comfortably into grant proposals, but a feral, sharpened-to-the-bone instinct. A refusal to be sculpted by the gaze, the market, the academy, or the politely curated feminism of institutional spaces. The feral feminine is not a marketing category. It is a survival instinct. A returning-to-the-body. A clawing back of selfhood. In the 1980s London punk co-operatives, feminine agency was not handed out in tidy envelopes. You had to forge it. Sometimes violently. Sometimes through laughter, paint, noise, or smashed aesthetics. The punk movement did not offer safety — but it did offer a new aesthetic language: distortion, rupture, interruption. These became our tools long before “intersectional feminism” appeared on universit...

#RomancePodcast #FictionPodcast #AudioRomance #NarratedFiction #ShortStoryPodcast #RomanticFiction #AudioDrama #LoveStories #PodcastRomance 💋 Mills & Swoon Daily #2 The Caged Bird and the Stable Boy Lady Isolde Ravenshaw entered the stables. She was a reluctant horsewoman but had made the effort because of him. Thomas the stable boy was not, strictly speaking, a boy.  At twenty-two he was marked with the attributes of maleness and beauty that were worthy of an Adonis. His muscular forearms and chiselled torso glowed in sun-browned competence.  Once she had seen him swimming on a hot summer afternoon having taken a wrong turn in the grounds of the estate. She had watched longingly, his naked body as it basked in sun and water in a simple celebration of movement, nakedness, and life itself. One did not normally encounter such thrilling attributes at London soirées. Isolde had had enough of pot-bellies and bad breath to last a life time. Thomas had flicked a switch and s...

  “Welcome to Mills & Swoon Daily — where your morning scandal is served warm, wicked, and just a little bit improper.” Today’s tale: The Duke and His Mother’s House Guest . By Sarnia de la Maré — Mills & Swoon Daily #1 Lady Elowen Hart was not accustomed to being mistaken for staff, but she had arrived at Hawthorne Hall in a travelling cloak and mud up to her silk-white stockings, so the error was, she supposed… understandable. Almost. The Duke strode into the foyer with the confidence of a man who had never once been contradicted in his life. Such entitled grandeur might have been repulsive if he hadn’t been so annoyingly well-formed. “You must be the new governess,” he announced, looking her up and down with far too much interest for a man hiring a tutor for his niece. Elowen raised a brow. “Must I?” He hesitated, thrown off-balance. “…You’re early.” “And you, sir, are mistaken,” she replied smoothly. “But I do admire a man who leads with certainty, ...