The following words were sent by Tirny Francis author of Evolution’s a Bitch: a novel about amateur catfighting. You’ll find a couple of extractions from the book it self that I’m sure you’ll enjoy as I did.

My forthcoming book, ‘Evolution’s a Bitch’, is an attempt to write a realistic novel about amateur catfighting set in a specific time and place. It tells the story of a young couple who decide to explore the amateur catfighting scene in southern England in 1997, just as the Internet was beginning to go mainstream. Online video did not exist because broadband was in its infancy.

If you wanted to see a rules catfight, you had to purchase videotapes from vendors (like Crystal and DWW)… or organise one yourself. Some people chose the latter!

I hope that Evolution’s a Bitch is unique because:

• It’s a love story (of sorts) which centres on female apartment catfighting and
  even some male submission wrestling
• It doesn’t deal with fantasy fight clubs
• It is not about supermodels fighting in front of billionaires.
• It IS about ‘real’ people and the effects that amateur catfighting had on their
  lives and relationships.
  There is much interesting fiction about female catfighting and wrestling
  available for free on the Internet but, as far as I am aware, nothing which is as
  long-form (it’s over 48,000 words and 185 pages long in paperback) and
  realistic as this.

I have recently become aware of Rodolfo and Valentina, and Valentina’s scheduled match against Santana on 12 June. It’s so interesting for me to compare what they have experienced (which Rodolfo writes about in this blog) with the experiences of the two main characters in ‘Evolution’s a Bitch’. Even though they are separated by 24 years and 9,000 miles, I think Rachel and Valentina may have much in common.

I am so excited for Valentina’s fight on 12 June and have already sponsored it. Valentina looks in great shape and I am #teamsaxx all the way!

Evolution’s a Bitch is already available in paperback. The Kindle ebook version is on pre-order now for release on 3 June 2021.

eBook ISBN13: 978-1-9168970-0-7 / ASIN: B095M9181V
Paperback ISBN13: 978-1-9168970-1-4 / ASIN: 1916897010
Amazon.com link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/1916897010
Please follow me on Twitter (@TirnyF) or e-mail me at tirnyfrancis@yahoo.com if you would like to know more!

Extract 1:

I can’t remember how or where we both agreed to see if we could fix her up a match. There was a website called Excite (or maybe it was Yahoo!) which had ‘interest groups’ and we were able to identify a few potential opponents. Some of the profiles were obviously guys pretending to be girls, or were soon rumbled to be, but we did manage to locate a few genuine ‘possibles.’

It was the beginning of 1997 and I had recently discovered ‘Barb’s page’ on the Internet. At the time it was THE place for female-wrestling afficionados of both sexes. Not ‘professional wrestling,’ but real wrestling between real women. I could hardly believe that such a scene existed. The site identified a list of vendors who sold videos catering to this unusual taste, but also made clear that this was an activity that real women participated in for fun. While not exactly widespread, it was not a complete rarity either.

Barb’s site opened up an Aladdin’s cave of video-based excitement, and before long I was using the Internet to purchase videocassettes from all over the world which featured young women fighting each other. When international packages began arriving at my house bearing postmarks from Chicago or Vienna, my heartbeat rose, and I would look forward to spending entire evenings devoted to watching the matches. I had never found most pornography to be particularly stimulating, but there was something particularly arousing about the passion which the amateur competitors on video brought to their contests.

The matches were not high-school-style amateur wrestling, where the objective would have been to achieve pins against an opponent, but submission wrestling, where the aim was to extract submissions through the use of painful wrestling holds. Young women, usually between the ages of 18 and 30, would participate in non-scripted bouts against each other to see who could achieve the most submissions. The unbeaten Timea would take great delight in scissoring her victims, like the beautiful Lada, until they cried for mercy. The older Swede, Tina, had fun using her skills to reduce the voluptuous nineteen-year-old Hungarian, Andrea, to tears. I was besotted with all the fighters. In real life, they were dancers or policewomen or students or shopworkers. On tape, they were superwomen, and I envied all of their boyfriends.

Extract 2:

The doorhandle turned down and the door swung slowly open. Never was there a more expectant moment in my life. In she walked, barefoot in all-black leotard, smiling nervously as she glanced towards Kev. Like Rachel, Laura’s arms and legs were toned but not especially muscular. Her dark brunette hair – much darker than Rachel’s – fell to about the same length as my girl’s. Rachel wore no make-up, but Laura had applied crimson lipstick and her pale, puppy-fat complexion was flawless. She glanced at her boyfriend before looking over to us, and I noticed that as soon as he raised his eyebrows to her in response, her demeanour changed. She was tall, clearly fit, and I saw a steeliness in her eyes that I hoped Rachel had not noticed. The smile vanished and her face was serious when she looked at us.

‘Hi. I’m Laura,’ she said, lips closed, half-smiling, half-smirking.

Something in the way she carried herself, maybe the way she faced us full-on, conveyed calm self-assurance. You couldn’t notice the five-year age difference. Laura looked a little older than her years, Rachel a little younger. If you had not known, you would have said there was no more than a year between them. They could both have passed for twenty-three.

Both girls stared at each other from separate corners of the room for no more than a few seconds, sizing each other up, and we watched on, doing the same, but it felt like a whole minute of uncomfortable silence. Rachel looked across to me and gave me a nod of reassurance, as if to let me know that she was feeling comfortable and that there was nothing to worry about. I noticed that Laura looked at Kev and gave him an equally confident smile. They were both excited.

‘Come together, girls,’ said Kev, and I stood next to Rachel as he stood next to Laura when they met in the centre of the room.

That’s when the electricity started. Face to face, these girls knew they were about to fight each other. There was no backing out now. Although they glanced into each other’s eyes briefly, neither could hold the stare. The handshake between them was cursory. It was cute that they didn’t know where to look, obviously awkward in each other’s company, so they glanced at Kev as he went through the rules, stealing occasional quick glimpses towards me and to each other. Not quite the staredown which Kev and I had hoped for. The rules read, Kev asked if they were clear, reminding them about the £200 prize for the winner. They both nodded, staring intently at each other for the first time.

‘Is there anything you want to say, Rachel?’ Kev asked.

Rachel delivered her line:

‘May the best girl win.’

Man, that line encapsulated the ‘fun competition’ vibe we were looking for, but we really should have thought about it more carefully. Laura snorted mockingly, and Rachel was visibly deflated.

‘What do you want to say to Rachel, Laura?’ asked Kev, knowing that his girl had a zinger prepared.

Laura moved her face closer towards Rachel, locked eyes on hers for several seconds and said with a smirk,

‘Don’t look so scared. I’m not going to hurt you… much.’

Damn, that was good. It was a shock to the couple on the bed too, both of whom gave an audible gasp as she delivered it. Rachel looked surprised. Laura stepped slowly backwards to her corner, without breaking the stare; we turned and went back to ours.

‘It was just a line,’ I reassured Rachel. ‘Let’s do this.’

That weight of excited expectation one senses in the few seconds before the cup final kicks off, or in the instant before the stalls open in the Derby, was in the room but a thousand times heavier. Rachel’s face reddened as the realisation of the impending struggle hit home, and the geeky-looking guy and girl on the bed couldn’t contain themselves any longer. I had paid them no attention up to this point, but their apparent neutrality was now shattered as they both cheered loudly,

‘Come on Laura! Come on!’

Rachel and Laura locked eyes again. Kev and I took our places next to the couple on the bed, and the geek blew his whistle. It was on.

© Tirny Francis 2021