Logline: A popular "mean girl" has to protect the naïve new girl from her controlling, manipulative bad boy ex—and also her own lack of confidence.
Quote: "So sorry I'm not the good little follower you fell in love with. I know I can do better than you now, so that's what I'm doing. Must really hurt your ego, huh?"
The main protagonist, Pearl, starts out the story shy and naïve with little confidence, but she still has her own strength—she's kind, but also cautious and can be downright cunning. The story also deconstructs misogynistic YA romance tropes and tackles topics like confidence, self-worth, body image, and finding strength in "feminine" things like fashion and makeup that are usually dismissed as frivolous. Not to mention the importance of girls supporting girls!
For me, being a woman creator has never been unusual or a big deal. I have a background in fanfiction and platforms like Tumblr and Wattpad, which are all very female-dominated, so I never felt out of the norm. However, it's also always been important to me to have characters in my stories whose identities are underrepresented in fiction—or often poorly represented, as is the case with women and girls. I try to make a conscious decision to stay away from harmful tropes and worn-out archetypes or at least subvert or deconstruct them. Not even in an on-the-nose girl-power-smash-the-patriarchy way, but by treating strong women and capable girls as a completely natural thing, because in a truly equal world, such things should be normal and natural. I stand for equality, and those values always make their way into my writing, even if I don't usually call attention to it.
