A Rotten Girl
A downloadable book
What would you sacrifice for success?
Pearl is a trans woman writer on the cusp of literary greatness... or so she thought until her agent informs her that her first book has sunken like a stone for its failure to "connect with normal people". Normal people. Heterosexual people. Cisgender people.
Jaded from the knowledge that this industry rarely lets in people like her, Pearl comes up with a plan: write a commercial male/male romance. Except the market's all about authenticity these days, isn't it? The plan gets complicated, drawing her into a web of escalating deceptions where she poses as a cisgender gay man and comes ever closer to destroying all her relationships, and her own life.
A Rotten Girl is a satirical drama that explores gender, public personas, the commodification of queerness—and the reality of what it is like to be a trans woman in a hostile world.
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Slightly NSFW, but not erotica.
Circa 37+k words.
Available on other book stores here.
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Development log
- Maybe fix for cover?82 days ago
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A satirical, but very honest look at the publishing industry and the various ways people betray themselves and others in an attempt to thrive in it. Pearl, a lesbian trans woman writer, creates a gay cisgender man alter ego, Paul, to sell an “authentic” gay male romance to the straight female masses. Of course, things soon spiral out of control.
Pearl is not necessarily a very likeable character (taking her butch trans girlfriend as inspiration for the masculine partner in the gay novel without acknowledging why being compared to a man might be doubly hard for a butch trans woman? Yikes!), but she is certainly fun and sarcastic and she just doesn’t stop digging once she gets going, all traits I like in my fail-woman characters. She is incredibly interesting and intruiging and I do have a soft spot for messy women, so I had a great time. If you enjoy books where you can see your darkest impulses reflected and enjoy a trainwreck you can see coming a mile away: This absolutely fits the bill!
But Pearl isn’t the only character in this story. There’s also Barbs (the butch trans woman, my favorite side character, just because she is such a quintessential butch with a big heart and bigger hurt) and Pippin (Pearl’s trans roommate, whose picture Pearl uses for her cis-sona. I love him. He finds out she took his picture without asking and only cares that the fictional guy in question is cis. So he passes :)), as well as a variety of people in fandom and publishing.
This story not only examines the cis-gaze in publishing (Pearl is pressured to remove a trans side character from her story in order not to “offend” or “confuse” the audience, *cough* cowards *cough*), but also the way cis people are just always so eager to degender a trans woman at the slightest opportunity (Beatrice is a prime example of that. 10/10 would fight!) and finally the online fujoshi community on twitter and their never-ending quarrels as well as some of the most off-putting straight fujo comments I have ever encountered. Yuck!
If you are in speculative trans lesbian lit circles however you will also get a few lovely nods and hints towards the stories Pearl would actually like to write (“Yuri futures are up!” – and a guy ends up forcefemmed!), which I found a really nice change of pace to the otherwise deeply, tragically messy reality of getting published as a marginalized author presented here.
If you are a trans writer, in online trans writing spaces, ever interacted with fujo-spaces only to find they don't fit, like transfem MCs who make mistakes or just want to read a story that critiques publishing in a very enjoyable to read way: check this book out. 5 stars. I loved it.
TW: Misgendering, prejudice against butch trans women, lots of book discourse, wrong accusations of “bad behavior” (implications of aggression and sexual assault), discussion of suicide (no attempts, but it is considered and discarded)
I forgot to comment, but this is already my book of the year. It feels like a dark comedy where it's funny, sad, too real, and fucked up.
Loved it.
really good!!! I love the online sections