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The Big Idea: Cindy Cohn

Posted on March 12, 2026    Posted by John Scalzi      6 Comments

When you’re trying to get folks excited about their own digital rights, a lot will depend on the examples you give them to understand the fight. As the Executive Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Cindy Cohn certainly has examples. But which ones to choose? In this Big Idea for Privacy’s Defender, Cohn offers up her choices and explains why they matter.

CINDY COHN:

Do we have the right to have a private conversation online? 

In this age of constant, pervasive surveillance, both government and corporate, how do you get people to believe that they can and should have that right? 

And how do you show that safeguarding privacy is part of safeguarding a free, open and democratic society? 

In Privacy’s Defender, my Big Idea is that by telling some rollicking stories about my three big fights for digital privacy over the past 30 years, I might inspire people not only to understand why privacy matters, but to actually start fighting for it themselves. 

The challenge was different for each of the three stories I told. The first one, about cryptography, was in many ways the easiest, since it had a pretty straightforward narrative.  Before the beginning of the broad public internet, in the early 1990s, I led a ragtag bunch of hackers and lawyers who sued to fight a federal law that treated encryption – specifically “software with the capability of maintaining secrecy” – as a weapon. We argued that code is speech and put together a case based on the First Amendment. By pulling in help from academics, scientists, companies and others, and by the grace of several women judges who were willing to listen to us in spite of the government’s national security claims on the other side, we won.

Many other stories from the early public internet are about men and the products they built. This one is different: It tells how some scruffy underdogs beat the national security infrastructure and brought all of us the promise of a more secure internet. But it’s otherwise kind of a hero’s tale with a dramatic ending when I was called to DC to negotiate the government’s surrender. 

The second and third stories don’t end in such clean wins, which perhaps makes them more typical of how actual change happens when you are up against the government.

The second set of stories are about the cases we brought against the National Security Agency’s mass spying,  starting after the New York Times revealed in late 2005 that the government was spying on Americans on our home soil. The fight was  pushed forward by a whistleblower named Mark Klein who literally knocked on our front door at the Electronic Frontier Foundation in early 2006 with details of how the NSA was tapping into the internet’s backbone at key junctures, including in a secret room in an AT&T building  in downtown San Francisco.  This is the most cloak-and-dagger of the stories, made possible both by Mark’s courage and that of Edward Snowden, who revealed even more about the NSA spying in 2013 because he was angry at watching the government lie repeatedly to the American people, including before Congress.

As a result, Congress  rushed in to protect… the phone companies, killing our first lawsuit. Later, after Snowden’s revelations, lawmakers passed some reforms to some of the programs we had sought to stop, but not nearly enough. In the end, the Supreme Court supported the government’s argument that – even though the whole world knew about the NSA spying and that it relied on access to information collected and handled by  major telephone companies – identifying which company participated would violate the state secrets privilege. But we had dramatically shifted how the government did mass spying: ending two of the three programs we had sued over, scaling back the third, and providing far more public information  about what the government was doing. In writing my book, I wanted to tell the truth about the progress we made without sugarcoating that we had not succeeded at nearly the scale that we did in the cryptography fights.

The third set of cases had a similar trajectory – an early win in the courts and some reform in Congress but ultimately not enough. These were the “Alphabet Cases” – so named because we couldn’t even name our clients publicly, assigning the cases letters instead – that we brought from 2011 through 2022 to scale back a kind of governmental subpoena called National Security Letters (NSLs), which let the FBI require companies to provide metadata about their customers but gagged them from ever telling anyone what had happened.

Though an appellate court ultimately sided with the government, we did succeed in helping our clients participate in the public debate and use their own experiences as evidence to counter the government’s misleading assertions. We had increased the procedural protections for those receiving NSLs, including clearing the way to challenge them with standards that were not quite as stacked against them. And we had helped create a path for corporate transparency reports that at least gave some information to the public about how often these controversial tools were being used. 

I wanted this book to bring readers with me into the actual work, the bumpy ride, the incremental progress of protecting privacy, especially in the courts, in hope that people will think about how they too can join the fight. What we worried about in the 1990s, and fought to prevent in the 2000s and 2010s, seems closer than ever: that surveillance becomes the handmaiden of authoritarianism. But even in our troubled times, I’m confident that we are not powerless and we can prevail if we are patient, smart, thoughtful and work together.  The Big Idea is that privacy is not just a  coat of anonymity that you throw on before doing something embarrassing –  it’s a check against unbridled government power. And as it turns out,  the actual work of protecting that privacy can make for a fun, exciting and surprising life.

Privacy’s Defender: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author socials: Website

The Big Idea: Randee Dawn

Posted on March 5, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      4 Comments

If everyone only wrote what they knew, how many books would we be deprived of? Author Randee Dawn has some concerns about the age-old advice, and suggests writers should get out of their comfort zone in the Big Idea for her newest novel, We Interrupt This Program.

RANDEE DAWN:

There are many phrases writers long to hear: Your book is a best-seller! Your book changed my life! Your book is getting a Netflix adaptation! Your book props open my screen door!

Maybe not that last one.

But if there’s one phrase writers are a little tired of hearing is this: Write what you know.

What does that even mean? For years, I thought it was reductionist and stupid. I write speculative fiction. Spec fic is about dragons or distant planets or zombies or dragons and zombies on distant planets. I have yet to encounter any of those things. But isn’t that what imagination is for? Make stuff up!

Write what you know is a rhetorical piece of advice that sends young writers off on the wrong path, and often confuses older ones. It explains why twenty-two year olds write memoirs. They don’t know anything but their own lives!

But it can have value. My first useful encounter with understanding write what you know came when I plumbed my entertainment journalism past – including time at a soap opera magazine – to write a goofy first novel, Tune in Tomorrow (helpfully given its own discussion in The Big Idea in 2022). I knew what backstage on TV and film sets looked like. I’d spoken to thousands of actors, producers, and directors. It wasn’t so far a leap to imagine how things might be different if magical creatures were running things. 

Then it came time to write the next story in the Tune-iverse. I’d used up a lot of Stuff I Knew. So what could come next to keep things interesting? 

That was when I discovered that the advice isn’t stupid. It’s just not the only advice that matters. Writing what you know can – pick your metaphor – give you a frame, a recipe, or a direction to follow.

But writing what hurts gives you substance. Writing what hurts gets you into the subcutaneous zone. 

With We Interrupt this Program (the next, also standalone, novel in my Tune-iverse), I tried to picture what the rest of the fae entertainment universe – run by the Seelie Court Network, of course – would look like. I imagined whole villages run by fae, populated by humans full-time, whose lives fit into neat little tropey stories. What if all the Hallmark movies were shot in the cutest, sweetest, village ever? What if there was a whole burg populated with humans who’d pissed the fae off and were being punished? What if a seaside town existed where a gray-haired older lady author solved cozy mysteries? 

The latter one gave me Winnie, an older woman whose cozy mysteries about her TROPE Town neighbors were turned into movies for SCN. But Seaview Haven is in trouble when we meet Winnie, and she discovers she’ll have to write a really good story to fix matters. So she writes about a love affair with the town’s Seelie Showrunner/Mayor/Director.

But those who vet it say it isn’t good enough. It’s nice. She wrote what she knew. Then she’s told to write what’s hard.

The novel took me by surprise here. I hadn’t planned to make her write two important stories. The love story should be enough. But it was only good. It wasn’t great. Despite being supernatural, it felt mundane. Tropey.

In going deeper to find Winnie a hard story, I discovered I already had one based on events in my real life. I gave them to her. Sure, it’s about love. But it’s also about betrayal and writerly jealousy, the kind delivered with a stiletto and not a butcher knife. Frankly, I’m a little embarrassed it’s in there. It’s not an epic awfulness. I didn’t commit a crime. 

Probably. 

And in giving it to Winnie, the story worked for me. When she unveils her personal, painful moment, it folds into the story as if I’d planned it. We Interrupt remains slapsticky, punny, and full of lunatic moments. Hopefully, though, that’s why this moment – the hurtful story – hits the hardest.

Readers can sense when we’ve gone deep, and when we skate the surface. A writer always has to find a way to squint at their latest creation and ask if they’ve gone deep enough to make it hurt, no matter what the genre is. That’s what – if I’ve done it right – it means to stick the landing.

So let’s look at that old hoary advice once more. Yes, write what you know. 

But don’t stop there. 

After you figure out what you know, figure out what’s hard. What hurts. Pull out the stiletto, not the butcher knife … and get cutting. 

We Interrupt This Program: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Facebook

The Big Idea: Lauren C. Teffeau

Posted on March 4, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      3 Comments

Futuristic fiction doesn’t always have to be dystopian, and in fact author Lauren C. Teffau wanted to show readers a more hopeful narrative where people work together for the betterment of the planet and a goal of reaching a brighter future. Follow along in her Big Idea for Accelerated Growth Environment and see what a more optimistic future could look like.

LAUREN C. TEFFEAU:

We are living at the intersection of competing futures. Ones we thought were inevitable and others being forced down our throats by billionaires, technocrats, and foreign interests that are counter to our own. This fight over our collective future is happening while the climate crisis rages on, institutions are tested, and the informationsphere weaponized. It’s no longer a question of how to avoid the worst outcomes, but how bad those outcomes will be. 

But I firmly believe optimistic stories about the future are our way out of the doomloop. Not because they’ll accurately predict what is to come, but because they give us something to work toward, together. To that end, I wanted to explore what an international response to the climate crisis would look like in my latest book, the eco-thriller Accelerated Growth Environment, and introduce a generation of readers to one possible future full of cooperation, resilience, and competency porn. 

Such a goal is not completely out there. Once upon a time, the world came together to reduce ozone emissions in response to the discovery chlorofluorocarbons were punching a hole in the atmosphere. The effort was so successful, the ozone layer is on track to completely regenerate, according to Wikipedia, by 2045. That’s amazing, even moreso considering that level of international coordination seems impossible today. But maybe, just maybe, it’s something we can work toward in the years to come. 

So imagine things change, and the political will is finally ascendant to tackle the climate crisis. Enter the Climasphere, a groundbreaking megastructure that can support nearly every biome on Earth and grow plants essential to rewilding efforts across the world, signifying a new era of climate cooperation. It’s also the high-tech setting for Accelerated Growth Environment. Principal Scientist Dr. Jorna Beckham just wants to focus on her research while her horticulture techs are on break following the grueling inaugural harvest.

She manages the habitat with the help of her trusty robot sidekick Savvy while Commander Kaysar sees to everything else. But when an explosion rocks the Climasphere, Jorna is the commander’s number one suspect. Her family belongs to a technology-adverse religion that believes the Climasphere’s genetically-altered plants are a rejection of God’s gifts to humanity. Jorna must clear her name if she wants to keep her dream job and any possibility of a future with the commander.

I’m honored Accelerated Growth Environment is the first acquisition and release from Shiraki Press, a new publisher specializing in hopepunk stories for a brighter future. Keep an eye out for more titles from them in the months to come. 

And never forget we are capable of great things—we need to be. No matter all that has happened this year as we grapple with betrayals of the past and the predatory power grabs of the present, we must remember all the amazing things we can do in preparation of the future we will build together.

Accelerated Growth Environment: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Shiraki Press 

Author Socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky|Linktree  

The Big Idea: Kirsten Kaschock

Posted on March 3, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      4 Comments

Does a mad scientist do what they do out of sheer love of the game, or because they can’t just up and quit doing the whole mad science thing? Do they love their work, or is it just unhealthy obsession? Author Kirsten Kaschock looks at some of fiction’s most well-known inventors in the Big Idea for her newest novel, An Impossibility of Crows, drawing parallels between herself, her main character, and all the truly mad creators of the past.

KIRSTEN KASCHOCK:

A crow the size of a horse.

The dream terrified me but not the way you’d think. I was drawn in. A little hypnotized. Even in the dream I wanted to understand how the thing came into being. And, in the dream, the crow wasn’t threatening me—just doing crow things.

The crow kept coming back, not at night, but in my wandering mind or whenever I saw an actual crow. I’d look at one walking in the snow or huddled in a tree and think to myself, “What if?” That’s when I started sketching the crow’s maker: Agnes Krahn. 

I needed to know who would decide to build (I often call it building rather than breeding for reasons I can’t quite explain) a crow of such size and why? To figure that out, I started writing as if I were Agnes—a scientist, of course—commenting on her world in real time. The book had to be a diary. But because she was a scientist, an ex-chemist to be exact, Agnes also included her research in these pages. And then, other odds and ends kept arriving, including letters from Agnes’s long dead mother. It wasn’t until that moment that I realized that the book would be so closely linked to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein—which is also epistolary and multivocal. But there was already a marked difference. Agnes, unlike Victor Frankenstein, is a woman.

How many other unhinged women scientists have found their way into literature? Fewer, I’d wager than their male counterparts. I imagined Agnes’s reasons for building Solo (the crow’s name is Solo) to be different than most of the mad scientists’ I have read, and more like Mary Shelley’s own backstory: never knowing her own mother, her loss of a child, a need to prove herself to the poets among which she found herself. 

I knew Agnes wasn’t driven by ego or ambition, exactly. She isn’t selfless either. God no. But her obsession with increasing the size of the bird has a reason other than narcissism: she wants to provide her daughter with wings.

This is where Agnes and the character of Victor F. part ways. When I realized why Agnes was building Solo, she started to resemble other creators from other stories. 

Agnes wants to give her daughter this crow, but what her daughter thinks or feels about this is irrelevant. Agnes is trying to provide an escape route for someone who—I learned while writing her—does not feel particularly trapped. But Agnes is oblivious to how her daughter perceives herself. In this way, Agnes is as monstrous as most mothers. 

The model I used for their relationship is actually that of a father and son—Daedalus and Icarus. I’ve long loved this Greek myth, although it was taught to me as a tragedy of disobedience: warned about the dangers of flight, Icarus cannot help but fly too close to the sun. But what if the fault lies with Daedalus, who should have known his child better? In my novel, Agnes does not know her daughter at all. This is both their tragedy and another mystery I had to solve: Why doesn’t she? Writing a Gothic Horror novel turned into a bit of a rabbit hole… a Russian doll. The book kept asking me why things are the way they are. Why people do the things they do. And at the bottom of every version of Agnes I found another woman, another layer of hurt.

To be honest, this is why I write in the first place. To get to the under-questions, the ones below the surfaces of thought.

Solo, the crow, is in some ways a cipher: a darkness onto which I was reading human nature. But Solo is also very real. He is an immense crow, with all the intelligence of a crow (maybe more), and thus he is horrifying in his own right. That’s how we read each other, too. We know people as what they are to us, and only if we are incredibly lucky and attentive do we ever learn who they are beyond our needs, fears, and desires of them.

Agnes is the only one in the book who doesn’t see Solo as an existential threat, or not until it is too late. She may not admit it to herself, but as she builds him—he grows into a replacement for her daughter rather than a gift to her. She is Mary Shelley. She is Victor Frankenstein. She is Daedalus. And she is Gepetto. As she gets more and more drawn into her experiment, her attention to her family wanes and her devotion to the crow increases. I, myself, am married to a scientist. I am an artist. We have both done this with our work. We do this. Agnes is also him. And she is me.

Her madness I am familiar with: Agnes wants to create a life larger than her own. Somehow, she believes that Solo can free her from her guilt and grief. 

The big idea in An Impossibility of Crows is this: when you bury your feelings they don’t stay dead—and when they rise up, they may find a form beyond any you can hope to control. I began writing with a single frightening image. I moved quickly from there to considering the crow’s creator. Then, in seeking to understand Agnes, I progressed through a series of models towards my own reasons for making. 

I had a teacher once who said that writers only write about three things: sex, death, and writing. And then there’s this old joke: if it’s not one thing, it’s your mother. I think many things can be true at once. Nothing is ever Solo. And everything is. 

—-

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The Big Idea: Bernie Jean Schiebeling

Posted on February 26, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      2 Comments

Like blue eyes, height, or left-handedness, how much of our temper and ill manners can we contribute to our genetics? Author Bernie Jean Schiebeling explores the breakage of inherited anger, and what it’s like to fall victim to the temperament our parents passed unto us in the Big Idea for their newest novel, House, Body, Bird.

BERNIE JEAN SCHIEBELING:

My great-grandfather was not a good man.

Without getting into too many details, he was angry and abusive, so much so that my great-grandmother was able to divorce him in the late 1920s without too much trouble. After the divorce, my great-grandfather left—possibly fled—and then committed a string of burglaries across Kentucky and Tennessee while working as a door-to-door salesman. Many years later, my father met one of his ex-colleagues, who said the man had been incredible at sales. Less so at stealing, since he kept getting caught. “And,” he said, pointing at my dad’s breakfast plate, “I can tell you that you take your scrambled eggs the same way. So much pepper.”

Dad never met my great-grandfather (even Grandpa hardly knew him, since he was just a toddler during the divorce). But they both liked peppery eggs, and so do I.

Other echoes persisted too. Anger sometimes exploded from my grandfather, though less than the previous generation. My dad is calmer than his father, and I am calmer than him. Still, rage sometimes rises in me with the inevitable force of a king tide. I hear the ocean rushing in my ears—

—And I breathe through the impulse. I don’t have to do this. I don’t have to continue this tradition that—I hope—none of us wanted. 

Inheritance is never clean. We gather too much over the course of a life, too many objects imbued with too many memories, to ever pass on an uncomplicated story to our descendants. In most cases, this is a gift, the last we give to our loved ones. Sometimes, however, it is a weapon, sharp-edged and dangerous to hold, and we have to figure out how to carry it anyway, or how to put it down in a way that hurts no one else. This is the big idea of House, Body, Bird. 

The idea was larger than I expected. I didn’t mean for this to be a novella; I thought it would be a short story too long to sell to most markets, like most of the work I have in my drafts folder. I was about 15,000 words deep by the time I realized I was writing a book. 

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have been that surprised. Stories find their ideal length through their subject matter, and the more I thought about House, Body, Bird’s family and their home-slash-haunted-dollhouse-museum, the more I realized that the sheer amount of stuff in main character Birdie Goodbain’s inheritance—both dollhouses and the history behind those dollhouses—needed to show up on the page. I started including imagery wherever I could: descriptions of dolls, of difficult memories, of how haunted the body becomes from those memories. In the story’s earlier scenes, I wanted to crowd Birdie, make her tuck her elbows in as she navigated the rambling, watchful house.

Of course, this is only the first half of the difficult-inheritance-problem, the “Someone has willed me a weapon” half. I still had to find a good way to explore the second half of “Thanks, I hate it.” Birdie couldn’t stay scared. Thankfully, I had a solution; I just needed to reorganize some clutter.

When I first started writing the would-be short story, I had alternated between two point-of-views for Birdie, third-person limited and first-person. This created emotional whiplash as Birdie went from a meek third-person POV ruminating on the house’s creepiness to a furious first-person POV bashing through the walls with a meat tenderizer. By grouping all the third-person scenes together and following them with the first-person ones, Birdie had much cleaner character development. It’s relevant that the switch in perspective happens once Birdie commits to escaping and seizing her freedom. In that moment, she moves from third-person, where an unseen narrator observes and objectifies her (like a doll!), to first-person, where she narrates her experiences. While imagery had pushed up against the margins in the third-person section, Birdie’s opinions, observations, and memories pepper her own telling of the story. She gets space to breathe. 

In keeping with the novella’s spirit of excess, Birdie’s sections are interspersed with ones from the haunted house’s point of view. Originally, this was useful because it allowed me to reference the previous Goodbain generations with a level of detail that wouldn’t have been possible for Birdie, but the house eventually became the story’s second emotional heart. Although I worried about overwriting throughout the drafting process, a maximalist approach to storytelling was what I needed for House, Body, Bird. 

It’s funny—early on in the story, Birdie’s messed-up dad tells her, “We build, and build, and build.” The Goodbain family built and built and built their house as a way to create a family narrative worth passing on, as an attempt to build livelihoods and lives and love, and I did the same thing. I built and built and built the story to understand how Birdie’s family history loomed over her, and how she could create a new, more loving life in response to it. 

House, Body, Bird: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Books-A-Million

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky

The Big Idea: Jeff Somers

Posted on February 25, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      5 Comments

Five funerals may seem like a lot, but this number is actually cut down considerably from author Jeff Somers’ original idea of 26 deaths. Put on your best black tie and follow along the Big Idea for his newest choose-your-own-adventure, Five Funerals.

JEFF SOMERS:

WHEN I was 14 years old—chubby, prone to wearing tie-dye t-shirts for no known reason, and gifted with inexplicable levels of confidence—I wrote a novel in just under three months. Nothing’s impossible when you have no job and live on a diet of Cookie Crisp cereal and RC Cola, and the whole writing thing is so fresh and new, you haven’t yet developed a nose for your own bad writing. Writing novels sure is easy, I thought, and for a long time I actually believed that.

35 years later, I was staring up at a poster of Edward Gorey’s The Gashlycrumb Tinies that I’ve had since college. If you’re unfamiliar with The Gashlycrumb Tinies, it’s a parody of old-fashioned alphabet books depicting how 26 blank-faced, Dickensian children die via gorgeous, intricate drawings and a series of simple rhymed couplets. I’ve been fascinated by it for most of my adult life, and I wondered what those doomed little urchins were like, how the full story of their freakish deaths would actually play out.

In other words, I wanted to write a novel about them. As with most of my thoughts, this seemed pretty brilliant to me (the inexplicable levels of confidence have only inexplicably increased with age), and somewhere in the background there was 14-year-old Jeff whispering yeah, and writing novels is easy!

Five years later, I’d filled a hard drive with trash.

It was a problem of structure: If you do the math, in this story, 26 people have to die in horrible, hilarious, darkly whimsical ways. Is 26 deaths in a single novel a lot? It is! Especially when each death needs to have unique elements and a lot of focus and page-time.

I tried structuring it like a detective novel, with one of the characters trying to figure out why all their old classmates were dying. But this quickly became repetitive—there’s a reason detective characters usually don’t investigate dozens of separate murders. You either wind up with a 1,000,000-word novel or you have to cut some corners.

I tried a draft where the deaths happened in chronological order. But this approach got tedious, because I was introducing characters just to kill them. While this was a lot of fun, it didn’t feel like a novel, like a complete story. The collapse of this draft did give me an idea, however: Short stories.

Anyone who has ever talked writing shop with me, or attended one of my Writer’s Digest workshops, knows that I am an enthusiastic short story writer (and reader), and that I regard short stories as the general cure for all writing woes. Any time I run into any sort of writing challenge, from writer’s block to Oh No I’ve Created an Insurmountable Plot Paradox (Again), my immediate solution is to stop trying to write a novel and start writing short stories about the universe and characters. This almost always works and, even when it doesn’t, I usually end up with some good short stories out of the deal. (As all working writers know, short stories are worth tens of dollars in today’s economy.)

So, I started writing stories about each character’s death, as an exercise. I didn’t worry about narrative cohesion, or pacing, or tying the story into the main novel at all. I just had fun writing 26 stories about people dying in variously hilarious, tragic, and sad ways extrapolated from Gorey’s work.

As I did this, I realized what the problem had been all along: Five Funerals isn’t a story about a bunch of kids who die and maybe deserve it. Well, it is that, but it’s also a story about loss. And memory. And how we hold people we’ve lost touch with in a kind of amber in our memories, unchanging and eternal. It was a story about that moment when you hear that someone you used to know—someone you maybe used to love—has died.

In those moments, we experience something strange: That person who’s been preserved in our head suddenly (and violently) transforms. After years or decades of being young and alive in your memory, they’re abruptly aged up—and gone. It’s a sobering, disorienting experience, and I realized that’s what I wanted Five Funerals to be—a funny, dark, hilarious story that mimicked that sense of the past rushing forward to catch up with the present. 

The short stories I’d been writing evolved into a choose-your-own-story engine, disrupting the reader’s groove and forcing them to reckon with the sudden, unwanted knowledge that this character had died. And since no one experiences time or loss the same way, readers can choose how they experience it here: When a name is flagged with a footnote in the novel, you can choose to flip to the story it’s pointing to—or not. If you do, you might find out how that character died, or discover a bit of funny or heartbreaking backstory.

You can keep following the chain of deaths, or you can return to the story where you left off. Or you can ignore all the footnotes and just read the book straight through, or randomly, or in sections. Just like we all grieve in our own way, you can read Five Funerals in your own way.

The end result, I think, is a book that explores how time slowly strips those yellowing old memories away, replacing them with the harsher truth of death and loss. Even if those losses are sometimes so weird and unexpected that you have to laugh.

Five Funerals: Amazon|Barnes & Noble|Bookshop|Apple Books|Kobo|Ruadán Books

Author socials: Website|Instagram|Bluesky|Threads

Additional links: Animated cover on Instagram and on Bluesky.

The Big Idea: Danielle Girard

Posted on February 24, 2026    Posted by Athena Scalzi      3 Comments

Motherhood is a term that has many meanings, and looks a little different for everyone. It is also something that comes with a lot of questions, and though she may not have all the answers, author Danielle Girard explores these ideas in the Big Idea for her newest novel, Pinky Swear.

DANIELLE GIRARD:

Most of my novels have begun with a dramatic, explosive scene—gunfire, explosives, or at the very least, a murder. But the premise that caught me by the throat for my latest novel, Pinky Swear, was quieter and in so many ways, much more terrifying.

Pinky Swear is a story about a woman whose best friend agrees to be her surrogate and then, four days before the baby is due, disappears. It was the emotional immediacy of that hook that made it so compelling to write. Not only is the protagonist confronting her fear of losing a child (and one she’s never met) but also the abandonment of her best friend, and the persistent doubts about whether their decades-long friendship was a fraud.

What I didn’t expect initially was how the story opened up issues of motherhood itself. The most obvious ones are the grief of infertility and the question of what motherhood really means when biology refuses to cooperate. But beneath those is the larger theme of what makes a woman a mother? Is it biology? Pregnancy? Blood? Or is it intention, sacrifice, love, and the willingness to show up no matter the cost?

My father was an OB/GYN and, when I was growing up, babies and pregnancies were everyday dinner conversations—the joys and also the heartaches. Today, we seem to live in a culture that often defines womanhood and motherhood by a body’s ability to conceive, carry, and give birth. Infertility can feel like the unspoken failure at every baby shower, in every passing comment and well-meaning reassurance that doesn’t quite land.

In Pinky Swear, the protagonist has already endured that loss. Her inability to carry a child isn’t just a medical fact; it’s an emotional wound that reshapes how she sees herself and her place in the world. Turning to surrogacy is an act of hope, but also an act of profound vulnerability. She must trust another woman not only with her future child, but with her deepest wish.

In this dynamic, the story, rather unexpectedly to this author, became a conversation between devotion and betrayal, selflessness and selfishness. The pregnancy, like motherhood itself, carries an undeniable power, binding the two women together in ways that are both intimate and irreversible. The surrogate’s disappearance forces both the protagonist and the reader to confront uncomfortable truths: that love can coexist with resentment, that good intentions can sour, and that even lifelong promises—such as pinky swears made in childhood—can break under the weight of adult realities.

Writing this book meant sitting with uncomfortable questions. If you can’t carry your own child, are you somehow less entitled to motherhood? If another woman brings your baby into the world, where does ownership of that child’s love begin and end? And if a child is taken from you at the last possible moment, can you still call yourself a mother?

Pinky Swear asks readers to sit with the ache of unmet expectations and the messy, often painful reality of female relationships. It asks us to reconsider the stories we tell about motherhood, and to expand them beyond biology into something more human, more forgiving, and truer — that being a mother isn’t about carrying a child inside your body, but about the deep, resilient power of love, no matter the cost.

As I hope readers will do when they read Pinky Swear, I found myself asking not just what I hope I would do in such circumstances, but who I would be. Bitter or resilient. Closed off or open-hearted. Defined by loss or transformed by it. When the story ends, I believe the protagonist finds herself exactly where she was meant to be, and I hope readers will agree.

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