r/transbooks

Hi there! I finished my novel! It is called Sound Before Sight and I was wondering if there was anyone out there willing to exchange manuscripts and beta read for each other.

This is what my novel is about ::
Annika Leroux is a musicologist at a small liberal arts college in the Berkshire hills of Massachusetts who has spent seven years building an argument about a famous piece of music: Debussy’s 1910 piano prelude La Cathédrale Engloutie — The Sunken Cathedral. Her argument is that Debussy wasn’t imagining a cathedral rising from the sea. He was transcribing one. That under specific tidal and atmospheric conditions on the Breton coast of France, the acoustic phenomena the prelude describes are real, verifiable, and have been documented in fishermen’s accounts for two centuries.

She goes to Douarnenez to find out if she’s right.

She is.

The novel runs in three nine-year cycles — 2008, 2017, 2026 — each time Annika returns to the Breton coast when the conditions converge. In the first cycle she meets Anaïs, a Carmelite organist who has been logging the same acoustic events in her own notebook for six years, in her own notation system, without instruments. Anaïs has been on this headland since she was eighteen. She knows the coast the way Annika knows the prelude — at a depth notation can’t reach. And she is trans, her self-knowledge arriving not through a secular framework but through the contemplative tradition she inhabits — through Thérèse of Lisieux and John of the Cross, through the specific spiritual practice that structures her days. It is handled in the novel’s oblique register: the binder under the habit, the habit as relief rather than constraint, nothing announced and nothing explained.

Something else happens on the coast. The data confirms it. The methodology cannot account for it. The novel refuses to explain it.

The love story takes eighteen years.

I think (and hope!) the story comes across as authentically human, beautiful, messy, and complicated … like so many of our lives.
The mechanism at the center of Sound Before Sight remains unresolved because resolution would be dishonest. The love story takes eighteen years because anything faster would be untrue to who these two people are. The novel is fearless about withholding and I believe it is honest about what it withholds and why. I am also hoping that this resonates with LGBTQIA+ and trans voices and that they appreciate Anaïs — and the care with which she is rendered — and that I might find readers here who understand what the novel is doing with her.

I am so interested and willing to help
another writer as well!! If you’re interested please let me know!!! Thank you. 😊

I put a post out on here earlier about my books and everything. A few users attacked me and gave me a bunch of downvotes because I use AI art for the book covers. One person accused me of writing in ai. Here is the truth

I use AI for the book covers and to edit my books. I have been riding these books for over 20 years and just recently learned how to sell them. They are not full novels or anything dramatic, just small stories that I write. Most of them are under 100 pages.

The reason there are so many in my books is because I've been doing this for over 20 years. I'm a 48-year-old trans woman who has read these type of Stories on different websites for decades. I have written and come up with my own ideas over that time. Ideas that I could never publish until recently.

So here's the truth. If you don't like the fact that use AI for my book covers, you don't have to read it. Just don't attack somebody who does things differently than you do please. We are all human on here and trying to tell our stories

Hopefully this post doesn't get deleted. I am a trans author and I am trying to get my books out there. My current series is Crowns of Ash and Honor and it focuses on a Prince who was cursed and woke up as a Princess. Now she is fighting to get her body back. Along the way she starts to wonder if she really should or should she follow her heart. Available now on Amazon. I also have a website with all my books available. Each one is a link to where you can purchase them.

Ever since reading the book I have been obsessed and I saw a movie had got announced in 2024.

I have been looking around and havent found anything about a release date but does anyone have any guesses at least?