Chapter One of the RCBG novelization, 'Estro Junkies', is now available!

Elephant in the room: The old name kind of sucked.

Estro Junkies is the novelization of the RCBG web serial, and I hope we can agree the name is much more fitting: more evocative, more communicative of the premise and stakes regarding transition under a transphobic regime, while also being a wink to a different, significantly messier queer text. The attached files include the prologue and the first chapter, about 7500 words in total, introducing all four main character POVs and establishing the character dynamics---and how they're poised to collide---at the outset!

Which brings us to our plans for the future of RCBG. Fundamentally, we discovered that the novelization process---while far from a 'serious' reimagining---is slowly but surely transforming into its own beast. Things that were introduced in Chapter 9 of the original serial are right here in the first chapter of Estro Junkies. It is going to give our POVs significantly more breathing room, exploring their interpersonal dynamics and internality much more deeply. It's still certainly an absurdist comedy-drama, but it's shaping into its own canon, a true adaptation of the source material rather than a retread.

At the same time, our attempts to focus on side content during the hiatus has mostly resulted in us... not wanting to do that. Much like the fandom, we are much more interested in answering, what happens next? Where does RCBG go after 'Quest Complete', and what do the personal revelations at the conclusion of the first part mean for our characters?

When RCBG resumes, it will be as you know it---a direction continuation of the web serial's continuity, focused more on biting satire and heightened parody, still with a focus on character drama but recognizably surrealist. In the final account, this means more content for our fans---Estro Junkies and its sequels comprising their own canon, parallel to and based on RCBG, but neither supplanting the other.

Once again, we thank you for your patience, and for showing our humble, ridiculous, online trans drama so much love. We're excited to bring you more, as much as we can!

On that note, we would like to leave you with the re-imagined blurb for Estro Junkies.

Nicky’s never getting on oestrogen. She’s too late—the waiting lists for public hospitals are years long, and all the private clinics are shutting down. She must resign herself to rotting in her apartment, shared with her childhood best friend Daniel, the insufferable twink Jeff, and Kyle with his helicopter parents and arranged marriage.

Until Daniel knocks on her door with news of an underground online competition awarding hormones and surgeries to anyone willing to grow the biggest breasts—so long as they assert to be a cis man, and are never proven to be otherwise. The prize for these men? A million dollars. For Nicky? Her salvation.

Except it’s not all as it seems. Daniel is in fact Katherine, a trans woman too afraid to come out to Nicky for fear of losing her oldest friend. Jeff, hopelessly in love with Kyle, has enrolled in the competition to become more attractive to the object of his affection. And for Kyle, a victory of a million dollars is the only thing that could free him from the shackles of being the eldest desi son.

Sisters of Dorley meets Stag Dance in this absurdist, satirical drama by two transfeminine authors examining the conditions, both external and self-imposed, that prevent so many queer people from self-actualising.