Join my list to receive a free copy of  Transgressive Writing Essentials A Starter Guide, plus exclusive updates and more.

Author Shannon Waite talks about her bold debut Raising Women, a choose-your-own-adventure-style novel that redefines women’s fiction. In this interview, she shares the inspiration behind her interactive format, how she writes emotionally raw and transgressive stories, and what’s next in her follow-up collection The Women. A sharp, thoughtful conversation about storytelling, girlhood, and breaking all the rules.

Inspired by a YouTube discussion on the history and evolution of dark romance, especially its connection to women writers, I began reflecting on why this emotionally intense, often taboo-laden genre resonates so deeply with a broad readership. Building on an earlier marketing-focused article I wrote, this piece explores dark romance through a deeper lens—examining its literary roots, psychological depth, and gendered cultural significance.

Feminist speculative fiction isn’t about escape—it’s about disruption. From Lust in Paris to Us, Women, stories that center morally complex women dare to imagine worlds beyond sanitized feminism. These narratives reject redemption arcs and performative empowerment, embracing rage, desire, and contradiction. What if a woman didn’t heal, didn’t obey, didn’t explain? In feminist hands, speculative fiction becomes rebellion—alive, messy, and unapologetic.

Intersectionality in fiction isn’t about adding token characters—it’s about reflecting the real, messy collision of race, class, gender, sexuality, and power. Feminist storytelling that only centers white, cis, middle-class women isn’t liberation—it’s exclusion. In Lust in Paris, Lili exists in those fractures: too brown to belong, too complex to simplify. Write stories that hold all of us. Because if your feminism isn’t intersectional, your fiction is just a prettier form of

The female antihero isn't here to be liked—she lies, cheats, rages, and walks away without apology. From Medea to Gone Girl’s Amy Dunne, these complex women reject sanitized feminism and its market-friendly girlboss tropes. They're messy, contradictory, and deeply human. In Lust in Paris, meet Lili—a woman spiraling through pain, sex, and power with no redemption arc in sight. Let her be bad. She never needed your permission.

Transgressive feminism in literature defies norms with complex, morally grey women who reject redemption arcs and polite storytelling. From My Year of Rest and Relaxation to Lust in Paris, these protagonists aren't here to inspire—they're here to unsettle. Forget sanitized feminism for clicks; this is raw, messy, and real. Explore how female antiheroes rewrite the boundaries of womanhood through rage, desire, and unapologetic rebellion.